A Super Bowl Lesson in Content Performance Marketing

Andy Betts

In Super Bowl XXIV, the San Francisco 49ers stomped the Denver Broncos 55 to 10. Twenty–four years later, the game retains its record as the most lopsided in Super Bowl history. As is the policy with Super Bowl, neither team could claim a home-field advantage. Both teams clearly had a respectable record to contend for the Super Bowl championship. So why such a skewed outcome? It boiled down to performance.

San Francisco 49ers Logo

The 49ers are the only team to score eight touchdowns during a Super Bowl game, with quarterback Joe Montana executing a stellar 75.9 pass completion percentage, the second highest in Super Bowl history. Obviously, Montana was on top of his game while Broncos’ quarterback John Elway definitely was not.

When it comes to performance, all athletes can hit a plateau at some point in their careers. And the same is true for marketers.

So, when it comes to your organic content marketing strategy, are you an all-star or do you feel you’ve hit that plateau? If you think your strategies are falling flat, you’re not alone. Content marketing as a whole is currently reaching a plateau

In this post, we’ll review what the organic content marketing “game” looks like now, and share tips on how to transform your strategy’s performance from that of an Elway to a Montana.

The Current State of Organic Content Marketing

Today’s state of organic content marketing has hit a “performance plateau” of sorts. An Elway status of being good, but not good enough to “win” in terms of Web traffic, conversions and engagement, versus that of competitors.

Content marketing was deemed a high priority among businesses surveyed for Content Marketing Institute’s 2014 B2B Content Marketing report , with 93 percent of B2B brands responding that they were implementing it. More recently, data from the BrightEdge Data Cube show that organic content marketing is driving both traffic and real revenue for B2Bs. What’s more, our data indicate that organic search outperformed all other channels — paid search, social, display, email and referring — in Web traffic generation for both B2B and B2C businesses, driving 51 percent of total traffic.

While all that may be good news for those engaged in organic content marketing as a whole, it also means a more fiercely competitive realm. Coupled with the massive amount of data now on the Web, it means that simply generating and distributing quality content in and of itself is not enough to win the day.

So, just as Elway’s inconsistent performance could not stand up to Montana’s superlative one, it’s clear that the current state of organic content marketing is not sustainable – and certainly not sufficient enough to “win” without performance marketing.

From Elway to Montana: Transforming Your Content Marketing Performance

So you’ve reached a content marketing plateau in the organic search channel– what’s next? Pushing through that plateau from “content marketing” to “content performance” involves three crucial steps:

  1. Creating content based on data that show what types of content your target market prefers
  2. Optimizing that content for search visibility and maximum ROI
  3. Measuring the results of your content marketing efforts

Content Creation

Although it may seem a formidable challenge to plan content creation efforts based on data, as Jim wrote in his column for the Huffington Post, “the modern marketer has access to more data than ever to help them understand how their content performs and stacks up to competitors’.”

From that post:

By leveraging both historical and real-time data, content creators can discover what content will perform best instead of relying on the lengthy and often expensive trial-and-error method. In fact, data should play a significant role in the entire content creation process – all the way from initial development to publication and analysis.

A tactical content creation strategy should include:

  • Understanding and benchmarking how your content performs across different media, such as video, mobile and traditional text (articles, blogs, white papers, etc.), and factoring that into budgetary decisions.
  • Tracking the performance of competitors’ content and spotting opportunities. (Where are they out-performing you, and where could you surpass them?)

Content Optimization

Besides the usual on-site factors we consider when thinking of content optimization, such as keywords, Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions, there is also the key consideration of how to best use data to optimize the performance of your content in terms of ROI by:

  • Using predictive analysis to target those channels best suited for any given piece of content. (Would the content perform better in social media than in an email marketing campaign?)
  • Bringing key content creators on board, allowing them access to crucial information such as what your competitors are doing and what the “hot topics” are in your vertical.

Content Measurement

Measuring the metrics in your content marketing efforts helps you look back and look ahead by giving you data that can aid in decisions on what your content creation, distribution and budgetary priorities should be going forward.

Some of the key Web content metrics to track include:

  • Organic traffic
  • Page views
  • Conversion rates
  • Bounce rates
  • Inbound links
  • Social shares
  • Video engagement rates

In sum, by using the tools for analysis and metrics readily available, the more successful brands will prove themselves to be the Joe Montanas of the content performance space, while those who continue on a non-strategic path will be, well, the John Elways of Super Bowl XXIV.