Return on Engagement: Tracking the Impact of Content Lead Marketing

As brands are increasingly focusing on ‘publishing’ content on the web, and building communities of people who engage with and share that content, the question remains, exactly what impact does that earned engagement have on brand equity and product purchase?

Introduction 

As brands are increasingly focusing on ‘publishing’ content on the web, and building communities of people who engage with and share that content, the question remains, exactly what impact does that earned engagement have on brand equity and product purchase?

How can we track engagement and help to diagnose what types of content and levels of engagement actually shift the needle in the way we want it to? What are brands really looking to achieve when they act this way?

 

Return on Engagement 

The idea is simple: connecting real time ‘implicit’ behavioural data around our content and campaigns online with ‘explicit’ survey data captured around a specific group of people who are engaging with our content.

By tracking a group of real users over time in terms of equity scores and claimed consumption we can see how engagement with different types of content does or doesn’t impact on the things we really want to measure – consumption.

To gain even more perspective we can add a 3rd layer of data which is that same groups’ general social media behavior: brands they like, content they view and share, to give us a more complete picture of the competitive set for our own brand and how that impacts on their likelihood to consider and buy us more often.

In short, it’s a synthesis of 3 different data sources, aimed at understanding how engagement with content actually impacts on perceptions and behavior:

• Database of actual behavior around our content 
• Survey data amongst a specific cohort 
• Social media data around all online content experienced

 

How It Works 

To do this a brand has to be able to obtain specific data in terms of a group of users who are engaging with its content online (usually through a registration process which leads to a database which can be linked to analytics – actual behavior.)

We can then initiate a multi-stage, multi-level tracking process 

1. Pull a specific sample of engaged people or ‘users’ into a short survey capturing brand equity scores and claimed consumption. 
2. Conduct same survey with a control group of ‘non-users’ 
3. Tap into social media data attached to ‘users’ 
4. Survey is repeated at intervals (e.g. biannually) with the same people to track shifts in equity and consumption. 
5. Survey and social media data are linked to database analytics to fully diagnose how behavior and attitudes are affected.

 

Because we are tracking a very specific group of ‘users’ who we know are engaged ongoing with our content we can start to see: 

• Any impact of engagement on equity and consumption at a macro level 
• Specific diagnostics of what types of engagement are correlated with the biggest changes in equity / consumption 
• How different segments of an audience are likely to be affected differently (e.g. are we just doing better with those who already love us)

 

Applications

What can you do with the outputs? 

• Fine tune content strategies to isolate those parts that have the most impact 
• Understand who and how content strategies are really influencing 
• Identify the behaviours we are really looking to influence in the digital space 
• Assess the impact of our content in the context of what competitors are doing 
• Better understand the audiences and communities we are building online

 

Going forward, we see the return on engagement model becoming a key metric to understanding how using content as an engagement strategy can really pay for itself and how to maximise its impact in the areas that matter most – equity and sales.

 

This content was provided by Face. Visit their website at www.facegroup.com.