 Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I hope you can use your keys or your copies if you're not from the island. And I'm really excited to talk a little bit about content marketing and how you can measure the performance of your content marketing and what you need to do. First please don't worry about taking too many notes. These slides should already be uploaded to this URL, so you can access them. There's another link at the end of the slides if you don't manage to catch it now. So let's start with this. Why does it matter to measure your content ROI? Why should you even care about it? Isn't it just great to be putting out great content, you know, writing blog posts, producing white paper, sea books, whatever, videos, you know, all that is content. And you know something that you should always remember is that content marketing is not just about blogging or vlogging or producing any kind of content. It's a business strategy that can help you grow your company and grow your business. So with that you have to think strategically about it. You have to measure the performance in order to know what's going on and look for ways to improve it and make sure it's working for you. This is me because I've always heard this attributed to Peter Drucker who's a big American authority on management, but apparently it's not 100% sure it's the qualities for him, but it's a great quote nevertheless, you know, you need to measure what you're doing, otherwise there's no way to manage it. And just to let you know what we're going to cover today. So in the first part I want to talk about how to make content part of your overall business strategy and how to align doing the report and measuring your performance with that. In the second part I'll talk a little bit about how to set up a report and I'll give you an example of one customer I work with and how I did it for them. And in the end I want to talk a little bit about how to actually calculate the return on investment of your content marketing efforts. But before that, just to tell you a bit more about myself, I consider myself a content marketer. I work with many SaaS companies, that's my main focus, but I've worked with companies from all different spaces and industries. I recently started curating weekly newsletter on content marketing, so if that's something you're interested in I'll let you know how you can check it out. And you know, a fun fact, I love Southampton FC, if there are any football fans here in the room, I've been to games all over the country actually, that's how dedicated I am, I've traveled all over the UK to watch The Saints. So let's get to it. First, you know, how to make content part of your overall strategy. It's really important to remember, you know, something that, the thing that I started with that, its content is not just something that lives on its own, it should be part of your, of how you organize and run your business. And it should serve the goals that you want to achieve for your business. So things strategically about those goals, you know, something that I often get is that people want to get to generate traffic to their website, to their blog. And that really shouldn't be your business goal, because your goal is not to generate traffic, your goal is to generate revenue. So traffic can be something that you strive towards as a performance indicator, just to see how well you're doing, but it shouldn't be the end goal. And the goals for content can really depend on what you're going for with your business. So if you have someone, maybe yourself, doing sales, you know, the end goal of content can be generating leads, so that person who's doing sales can take the leads and turn them, you know, work towards getting them, turning them into customers. You know, I told you I work with a lot of SaaS companies and their, the main goal for them is just to get people to start free trials, because free trials is what generates revenue. You know, customers who complete the free trial become paying customers, and that's where the revenue for SaaS companies is coming from. You know, when you have an idea about your goals, it's important to come up with a framework of indicators that will let you track the performance on those goals. So you know, you have to think strategically about what metrics show progress on your goals. You know, the most popular ones that I've seen in my practice, in my experience, it's usually traffic, or things like shares and comments. You know, when we're talking about traffic, lots of people keep track of organic traffic or traffic that comes from the SEO strategy, traffic that comes from Google and other search engines. Shares and comments are always a good indicator of how engaged people are with your content. You might be getting a lot of visits on your website, but if people are not sharing that content and not commenting, that means that it probably doesn't engage them as much. Another good way to track your content are the leads that you generate, and of course the conversions, and I'll talk a bit more about these two in the next part, how to set up your content report. So let's start with a few tools that you can use to measure your content. Google Analytics is sort of straightforward. It's grown over the years, so now it's a pretty complicated tool, but everyone knows it. It's free. It's easy to set up and to get started with. It's easy to integrate with WordPress. Woopera is another tool which allows you for a very detailed level of analytics. It has a free plan, so you can also integrate it with WordPress in an easy way, and it's great. I'll show you one of the following slides. It's great for creating funnels and really tracking what people are doing when you visit your website. Google Search Console is something that you should be using for measuring SEO. It's also a free tool. It integrates with analytics and all the other tools, and it's great just to see how you're doing in terms of SEO, what keywords you're ranking for, how many clicks you're getting, and things like that. Finally, if you want to build, and like in the example I'm showing you, that's what I'm using. Google Sheets, another free tool, and there's an analytics add-on that you can use on Google Sheets to pull data from Google Analytics and build a really impressive report that gets all the data that you need in one place. When we're talking about a report, I would say the most important thing is to think about your content through a funnel. Create a funnel just for your content marketing that lets you imagine how people go from never heard of you to, I want to pay you money. Just think about the stages that it takes for someone who is completely oblivious of your brand before he or she becomes a customer. Most often, those stages that I see are, first someone is just, it's the new traffic that you get to your website that is someone who's unaware of your brand. Then someone becomes elite, usually when they give you your email, then as you have some interactions with them and they show some interest in what you're providing as a service or product, they become a prospect. Finally, you turn them into customers when they start paying you for that product or service. When you're creating a funnel, going back to those KPIs I was talking about earlier, think of what is the KPI that you can use to tie to that particular step in the funnel. In the case of traffic, that could be sessions, unique visitors, how many returning visitors you have, that's something that shows engagement. In the case of leads, it could be the emails that you collect because every email is a lead and that can be done using goal conversions, something I'll show you in a second. For prospects, it can be pricing page visited or how many trials have been started and then finally for customers, it's how many sales you get. For someone between a prospect and a customer, that doesn't mean they go out of your content funnel. They're still in the content funnel and you're still using content to turn that prospect or that lead into a customer. There's a lot that you can do at that stage to push that person into or earn their trust in turning them into a customer. It doesn't end at the point where they give you their email. Content can be used after that as well. As I said, Woopra works great for funnels. It's a really great tool to use to set up a funnel in a visual way and it also collects quite a lot of information about the people who come to your website. You can use that to really build a profile of what people are doing on your website and use that data to take other actions. If you know someone has visited your pricing page, for example, but haven't started a trial and you have their email, you can send them an email saying, okay, why don't you try a free trial? Maybe you know, maybe you saw our prices, but they're still like the two-week free trial that you can do. It allows you to really get really deep with your customers and do specific actions with them. When you're building your report, it can start really simple. Just as a custom dashboard, those screenshots would look really grainy, I don't know. Just build a custom dashboard in Google Analytics if that's all you need at the moment. It allows you to collect all the most important data that you need on them. Here, for example, I have all the sessions, just the SEO traffic because that particular client I was working for needed, you know, they were really looking at SEO. Then on the right-hand side, we have Go conversions, so we knew how many leads we generated during that period. So we put this on a custom dashboard in Google Analytics and we were looking at it. But if you want to build something more robust, more complex, you can use Google spreadsheets with that add-on I mentioned and do as much as you want. So here we were pulling data from Google Analytics, putting it in a spreadsheet and doing a lot of extra analysis with that. Some of the things that I think are important to consider when you're doing your report. Addition is one of the important things because you want to know and you want to have a good idea of how you count where a particular customer is coming from. So you should know, for example, someone might have seen a blog post and an ad on Google if you're doing Google ads and you want to have an idea for yourself of how, like, how you're going to attribute that sale. So did it come from your content or did it come from the ad that you placed on Google? Setting up goals in Analytics and Woopra and, of course, how to measure your data in a way to avoid issues with the data spikes if you get a viral post or something like that. So I don't know if you have an idea of UTM links, but it's just basically adding certain parameters to the link that you're using, which gives you information about where that visitor came from. There's a lot of information online on how to use UTM links. You can just research that. Unfortunately we don't have that much time to go into that much detail. But for example here, this example just shows several different types of banners and call-to-actions that we used on a blog. And by using UTM links on them, we were able to see which one works best. For example, here we have text links or just simple links that we placed within the blogs and they worked much better than all the other call-to-actions that we were using. So banners were getting very few clicks and so on. Setting up goals in Google Analytics, again, it would probably be easier to do it if you go online and research, but just to show you how to do it, just go to the admin, set up a new goal, give your goal a name. So for example in this case, we had an email course. So people who signed up for the course, we counted as email course conversions and we had a thank you page where people ended up after they signed up for the email course and we set the URL of that thank you page as the destination. So every time someone lent it on that page, because the only way they could reach that page was through signing up for the email course. Every time they lent it on that page, it counted as a goal conversion. And those were the goal conversions that you saw on the custom dashboard earlier. Finally in this section, looking at thinking, again, strategically about how you look at data. This is a simple comparison between two periods for that same client. So the first one is the beginning of 2015, the first half of 2015, and the second period is the second half of 2015. If you just look at that, it doesn't look so great. And it's like quarter, traffic is almost 26% down, you know, most things look down. But when you look at the data more closely, you know, you see that there was a certain spike in like at the end of the first period and that's when one blog post went viral on Hacker News and basically they got a huge spike in data. So for this particular client, something that we did was to start to look at traffic at three months averages with looking back three months and just taking an average of the three months, which kind of flattened out the spike a little bit. So it allows you to, you know, it gives you a better idea of how you're reporting and how you're looking at data. And it shows you with, you know, that would still show as a spike in traffic, but not as big as what we saw just by looking month to month. Okay, and just to wrap up at the end of this, let's discuss a little bit how to actually calculate return on investment. It really gets down to knowing two numbers. One is the cost of acquiring a customer, and the other one is the lifetime value of that same average customer. To find out your cake or cost of acquiring a customer, here's a simple calculation. Quite simplified really. So let's say that in last month you got four clients and you spent 1200 pounds on producing content. 800 of that was spent on getting four posts written by freelancers, and it took you 10 hours to edit those, get them on your blog, you know, get source images, do SEO optimization and all that. And I'm mentioning that here because it's really important to add up, you know, and to calculate everything that you put into producing content, even if it's your own time. Because otherwise that's time that you can spend working on, working for clients and generating revenue for yourself. So think about everything that goes into producing clients. Even if it's your own time. And finally, you spent 100 pounds on tools, you know, hosting, that really isn't the reason to spend more than 100 pounds, and even that is probably quite high. So you spent 1200 to gain four clients, so, you know, each client cost you around 300 pounds to get. And then calculating lifetime value is quite similar. It's just the average deal size you get from a customer. But it really depends on the industry that you're operating in. So if you're doing something like SaaS or product size consulting or something like that, it's just the average rate that you get from your clients. So you take all your clients, you know, how much each one pays you. You take the average of that. And then you just multiply that by the average time that you keep a customer. So if it's three months, you just take the average monthly, multiply by three, and so on. But if you're doing something like freelancing and you're working, you know, building websites for clients, just, you know, looking historically, look what's the average that a client has paid you for that service. And then compare the two. Obviously, if you're generating less than you're paying, that's not a great thing. If you're getting more from customers than you pay to acquire them, that's better. But if you're just generating one pound above that, you know, it's probably not so great. So a good rule of thumb that I've seen used is just getting three times the cost of acquiring a customer. Because at that level, you know, you have enough to produce the product or the service and actually make some profit for your business as well. Most of that stuff, so more details and, you know, the screenshots actually looking as they should be, you can get at that post. That's the client I was referring to. That's a link, so you can just click it if you access the slides. And before I finish, I mentioned the newsletter that I was talking about. So if you're interested, you know, I try to collect only the most actionable resources on content marketing. So not like people talking in general, you know, thought leadership, although that's great too. But actually guides and detailed tutorials on how to get stuff done, so how to set up goals, how to write an e-book, how to produce a video, things like that. And that's it for me. Thank you very much for your attention. I would be happy to answer any questions now or after we finish outside, so feel free to come and speak to me. And also happy to take any comments or criticism. Feel free to use my Twitter handle as well and just tweet me what you thought of that and if you have any additional questions. Thank you very much. Thanks so much for that. Very good. OK, so have we got any questions? I'm going to, you were attentive, weren't you? We'll go here. Hi. I've had an issue with traffic spikes, which have been caused by spam referrers, things like fake Google and motherboard and various other weird names. Have you seen that issue and what's your advice? I think you can do filters and that kind of thing. Yeah, I've seen that. I haven't dealt with it personally, but I've seen it affect websites. I guess in the beginning it's kind of hard to just, especially if you're running a site that gets a good amount of traffic. It's usually hard to find out about it before it's too late. But I would say the best way to deal with it is just filtering. And I think Google Analytics allows for that. I'm not exactly sure how it's done, but I would suggest just researching online and getting it done. Thanks for that. Hands up if there's another question. Sure, there's somebody brimming. Need a little confidence push. There we go. Like many people I've found online, I have a problem using Google Analytics with WooCommerce. It doesn't track the same revenue. I don't know whether you've ever used WooCommerce with analytics or whether anybody in the room has used it successfully and if this problem is overcomable. I haven't used it personally. But I've had to use Google Analytics with other tools that were tracking sales internally for a company. My suggestion would be to find out what's the source that you trust the most. So maybe it's WooCommerce, I would guess, and just use that as your baseline. So if you have to pull data about visits from Google Analytics, but compare that to your sales, like the revenue that you get from WooCommerce, and just decide on what you'll be using going forward as the most accurate source of data. The answer on that, I think there's a plug-in extension that helps with that. And also there's an analytics e-commerce setting. You can track different stages of the checkout to measure those things. And if you go to measurementsschool.com, there's a video on how to explain how to filter that. Have a look. We're very ahead of schedule, so don't feel shy if you. It's a little bit technical question, but are you concerned in any way that Google Analytics and Vopra are JavaScript-based tracking tools? And at this point in time, a lot of people are using extensions of a browser to simply block all those tools and that your report doesn't really represent real traffic? I think that might be the same problem that the JavaScript process that might involve. Of course, that's an issue that should be addressed. And I'm sure that people at Google HQ and Vopra are thinking hard about it and how to overcome that. But even with that, you're still getting... I mean, even the data you're getting in Google Analytics, if you're running a large site with lots of traffic, you're still getting a sample, getting the full data. So even when you have people blocking the trackers, the data you get from the people who don't block the trackers, it should still give you enough information about what users are doing and what their behavior is. I work at a large organization and I'm in content marketing, producing content mainly. My organization won't let me see the analytics, won't let me have a tracking campaign of my own. I'm not allowed to give out coupon codes at events when I speak. How can I do guerrilla tracking of my effectiveness? Honestly, I don't know. But I mean, one of the ways is just... So one thing I do is after these events, the reason why I ask people to tweet me, for example, it gives me an idea of how engaged the audience was. And I've had really good comments from people on Twitter, especially. Another thing I do is I look at the analytics on SlideShare to see how many people actually open the slides after the conference. So there's some hacks, some shortcuts. But I don't think you can do content marketing meaningfully if you're not looking at analytics. So my suggestion would be to, I don't know, go and talk to your boss or something like that. A little bit of an easier question here. How did you get started and why did you choose content marketing over something else? So I got started with content marketing because I've been blogging for a long time. You know, I was that person in the beginning, the end cool content marketer. And I got started by freelancing at first. Just started with writing. And then from writing, I had to learn how to write in a way that produced results. And then how do you set those results? So then you get to the point where you get to decide what the results should be. So you get to the strategic level. So you start, you know, it's a lot of, I would say a lot of reading, a lot of research online, reading online, subscribing to a lot of blogs that talk about that. And then doing it, starting with writing and editing, then doing the technical stuff, you know, SEO and all that. Setting up blogs, setting up landing pages, setting up funnels inside your analytics tool. And then getting to the strategic level where you decide how to move all the pieces and how to arrange them. Hi. Do you have any experience with guest bloggers and how to leverage all their followers? They can work really well, but they have to be invested in writing for you. And there are many people who will reach out and they will say, can we write a guest post? And usually if you say, it really depends on how you set up the relationship. So what we did with that same customer hub staff, we had guidelines about guest blogging. So we asked people to write between 1,500, 2,000 words to get it published. Like really new, not published before, not something just rewritten from their own blog or something like that. And that can work really well. And people who have large audiences, they will really go out of their way to promote their content because they've already put all the effort in producing it for you. And usually if it's something that's long and detailed and new, they need to put a lot of effort to produce it. So they will go out and promote it to their audience. You can also run just a topical campaign about guest blogging. Something we did with the same customer was we ran a remote work month campaign where we asked about, I think it was 20 people or so to produce guest posts on that topic of remote work and how they do it for themselves. They were mostly remote workers and people who run remote companies. And that generated buzz in itself. We had a Twitter hashtag and people were using it when they were sharing their content. So it generated a good level of popularity. Do you see any difference in the analytics between long posts, short posts? What type of average number of words in a post do you think works really well? And also posts with videos, do you see any difference in engagement between those and posts without? Or what sort of things do you add in terms of actual content to make posts more viral? Right. There's always a difference between long posts, especially short posts and real long posts. There's always a difference. There's also lots of research done that's been published online that you can see that long posts perform generally better. You know, for most competitive keywords, what ranks on the first page of Google is usually between 1,500 and 2,500 words. But it really depends. It really depends on the niche that you're working in. It really depends on what you're doing. It really depends on your audience and what they're expecting. My guess is if you are creating something for teenagers, probably they won't respond that well to a 2,500 post. Video might work a little bit better. So I would just suggest I can think of blogs that have 30 or 35 posts in total. Each of them is 5,000 words long, and they do really well. And then I can think of someone like Seth Goldin who writes 200 word posts, and he's also performing phenomenally. So it really depends on what you want to achieve with it. Hi. So I work with a lot of small, independent, high street businesses, and they're quite often interested in blogging and getting up in the SCA rankings. The big challenge, I guess, is what you've just outlined, which is to get high up on the rankings, you need 2,500 words, et cetera. What's your advice for small businesses? Because if they're busy during the day and they don't necessarily have the time to write this length of content, so is there a hack for the small, independent, high street business? Actually, I think content marketing works great for small businesses. One of the reasons is that very few of them are doing it. So it's not that noisy. For example, if you use content marketing in digital marketing, that space is incredibly noisy. So everyone's pumping out content. But for small businesses, it's not so noisy. And the people who run small businesses are usually experts on what they do. So they have a lot to share with their audience. And it could be a way to generate a lot of new business. In terms of time, yes, I know people are very busy. But everyone needs to be doing some kind of marketing. And it's a way to do it in a very cheap and scalable way. Yeah, I totally get what you're saying. I mean, to give you an example, I worked recently with a wine shop and they have amazing, incredible expertise. They do struggle with time because they're just so busy. One of the hacks they came up with was just reposting their newsletter, making sure that was locked down. Sorry, can you speak up? I can hear you very well. Sorry. I was going to say, so one of the clients I worked with recently was a wine shop and they've got incredible expertise. They're just busy, literally staffing their shop during the day. I guess one of the hacks they came up with was they produce a newsletter for clients and they've started posting that out on their blog. I was just, I guess, looking for other useful practical tips that you might have. Because I think the expertise is definitely there. It's just about the, OK, what can they be doing on a practical level to do it? Because honestly, I know what you're saying about the 2,500 words and the expertise and people are not doing it. But I just don't think they have the time, say. Yeah, I understand. And that's a very valid question. So I would say the first thing is just once they see that it works, they'll find the time, I'm sure. So the trick is to get it to work for a little bit. So one piece of practical advice I can give you is just get them to record a video or even like a short audio clip and get someone to transcribe it. I mean, go to a pork or whatever. Get someone who speaks very good English to transcribe it for like the cost can be very low to get that done. There are even services that you can just send a clip and they'll send you back the transcription of that clip. Get it published. And set up that whole structure that I was talking about earlier just to show them that how it can work for them, how it can generate footfall, how it can generate sales if they're selling online. And do that. Another thing, get them to record some videos and put them online. And I don't know if there's anyone in this room who hasn't heard of Gary V. He's a famous American entrepreneur, but he actually started in wine. So he was recording videos, doing reviews of wines, comparing different styles of wines, talking about what glasses to use for wine, and things like that. And that actually worked really well for his business. I mean, he used video content marketing exclusively. And I think just the wine business went from $5 million a year to $30 million a year or something like that. So just show them, find easy ways to do something small, get started with something small, prove that it works, show them how it can work, and I'm sure they'll find the motivation themselves. OK. So ensure videos of you drinking wine. Thank you very much for all those answers. I think that was just as useful to get all that Q&A as the talk. Very good talk. So thank you very much. Thank you.