Hannon Hill CEO Kat Liendgens will discuss the need to support organizations of all sizes with a centralized platform that empowers them to measure the success of their content, to promote their content through various channels, and, ultimately, to create even better and more targeted content.
2. WHAT WE’LL TALK ABOUT
• Why Spectate?
• Content Strategy: Benefits and challenges
• Analytics and Content Strategy
• SEO and Content
• Social Media: Promotion and metrics
• Additional ways to use Spectate to improve your
content strategy
3. WHY SPECTATE?
• Challenges for organizations:
• Analytics
• SEO
• Social Media
• Measurement
• Engagement
• Sentiment
• ROI
4. CONTENT STRATEGY
• Benefits:
• Get more contributors involved
• Identify opportunities for content reuse
• Better, more targeted content
• Better SEO
• Greater visibility
• More engagement
5. CONTENT STRATEGY
• Challenges:
• Getting buy-in
• Finding the time
• Keeping the momentum
• Measuring the success
of your content
6. ANALYTICS AND CONTENT STRATEGY
• Setting goals
• Editorial calendar + analytics side by side
• Search terms
• Keywords
• New visitors and visitor loyalty
• Page views and time spent on page
• Referral pages and inbound links
7. SEO IS DEAD
• Not really
• SEO then and now
• The freshness factor
• Engagement
• What it means for your content strategy
8. SOCIAL MEDIA
• Content promotion
• Metrics
• Clicks, visitors, leads by post and by channel
• Engagement
9. ENTER SPECTATE
• Content promotion:
• Social media module
• RSS Broadcast
• Analytics:
• Traffic Sources
• Inbound links
• Referral sources
• Visitors
• Search terms
10. ENTER SPECTATE
• Tracking and measurement:
• Campaigns
• Forms and conversions
• Files and custom links
• Conversations and sentiment
• A/B testing
Is there anyone in the audience who has not heard the phrase “Content is King”? Is there anyone who does not believe that it is? We’ve been to a lot of conferences over the past few years, and we’ve also talked to a lot of you guys as well as prospects about some of the challenges with regard to implementing a content strategy and measuring the success of their content. And we tried to respond to those challenges by developing Spectate to supplement your CMS. So what I would like to talk about today is how Spectate can help you and your content strategy needs. We will discuss the benefits of a content strategy, as well as some of the challenges that come with it. Specifically, we’ll get into analytics and talk about some very specific data points that can be helpful in assessing your content. We will also spend some time looking at how SEO has changed over the years, making it even more important to develop the best possible content. Of course, we will also get into social media as a tool to promote your content, as well as how to measure your social media campaigns. And then we’ll quickly walk through a few Spectate use cases so you can determine how to best incorporate it in your content strategy.
I saw a discussion on one of the CMS related LinkedIn groups a few months ago. The question was “Don’t you think that CMS vendors are really missing out on an opportunity by not providing meaningful analytics data? By meaningful, I think what was meant by that is actionable data. Google Analytics provides a plethora of data to the point where it’s hard for people to extract any specific action items. Another challenge has been SEO, because a) there are so many components to it and b) there are so many moving parts. How can you make things easier for your content contributors? Furthermore, social media can be a challenge, because it can be quite time consuming and difficult to measure, which is a whole new set of challenges. These days, you want to measure more than just traffic. You want to track engagement, sentiment (for reputation management), and, ultimately, you want to be able to calculate your ROI. When it comes down to it, all of those challenges really impact your content strategy. You have a great system to manage your content, but the next step would be to have tools available to help you work on your content strategy.
Can we have a show of hands: whose organization has a content strategy in place? For those that do, what were the main reasons for developing it? I am a big proponent of content and strategy. Content is why people come to your site. Period. Can they find what they’re looking for? Are you providing the value that they’re expecting? The benefits of implementing a content strategy are multi-faced: 1. You can get more contributors involved. You have invested in a CMS, so that your business users would be able to easily create and update their content. So why not take full advantage of your CMS? The more fresh content you create, the better. Another benefit is that by formalizing a strategy and an editorial calendar in particular, it makes it a lot easier for your content managers to see and seize opportunities for content reuse. Reuse is hugely underrated in my opinion. You can drastically improve traffic to your site by increasing content reuse. For those of you who are involved on the marketing side of your organization, you always strive to make your content as targeted as possible for your personas. Putting a content strategy in place keeps those personas top of mind and allows you to better address their needs. One thing that I can’t stress enough is that executing a content strategy will result in better SEO. I guarantee it. And, of course, your organization can get a lot more exposure. Since Emory University implemented their News Center, their traffic went up by 30%. And, another benefit worth mentioning is that a violently executed and comprehensive content strategy helps you foster more engagement, which increases customer satisfaction and potentially, increased enrollment.
But, as with anything worthwhile, there are certain challenges to overcome. For one, getting buy-in, from both the higher ups and the content contributors is not always easy. They may consider it a waste of time. They may not want to be held accountable for content creation. Developing and maintaining a content strategy also takes commitment and a willingness to invest your time, and I know that you guys work under a lot of pressure and with a lot of deadlines. In addition, your content strategy is an ongoing project, so it’s important to never neglect it, but instead to always measure what works and what doesn’t, so that you can make it even better. One of the most important things you need to do in order to continue to improve your strategy is to measure how well your content is performing, which presents another challenge because it’s not just about visitors and page views.
Any strategy starts with goals. Without goals, metrics are meaningless. You also want to be able to correlate your actions with your results, so I recommend a side by side analysis of your analytics and your editorial calendar, so you can see what type of content performs well. One of the most underrated data points, which can have a huge impact on your content strategy is your search terms. Are your search terms and the keywords for which you are optimizing your site in alignment? Are people looking for something that you’re not currently providing? Of course, you also want to look at some of the more standard metrics, such as the number of new visitors and returning visitors, the amount of time people spend on a specific page, so that you can check if they actually read your content. And you want to get some intel on where your visitors came from. It can give you some great new content ideas.
SEO has evolved so much over the years. Previously, it was much more HTML based, and therefore, pretty much the sole responsibility of the technical team. However, as you know, search engines continue to update their algorithms, placing more and more importance on the freshness of content and on engagement. What this means for your content strategy is that it’s becoming increasingly important to focus on producing valuable, fresh content in various formats, such as blog posts, features, videos. And you want your content to be as high caliber as possible. To enable your contributors to do that, you want to give them metrics and data.
Social media is often only considered a tool to interact with your audience, but it’s also a really powerful vehicle to promote your content, have others promote and share your content, and to foster engagement.
Spectate is really designed to help with everything we talked about. With regard to smart and measurable ways to promote your content, there’s a social media module that lets you schedule social posts, automatically creates tracked links and measures clicks. It also has an RSS Broadcast that can automatically send social posts whenever a new piece of content has been created. You can also gain a lot of valuable insights into the effectiveness of your content and into your target audience through the reports that the tool provides.
And, perhaps most importantly, Spectate allows you to tie anything you want to one or more campaigns and measure the impact of each of your marketing tasks. You can quickly create forms and measure conversion rates, track files and links, monitor web conversations for specific keywords and phrases, as well as positive and negative sentiment, and you can even run A/B tests on specific pieces of content. So let’s go ahead and actually look at Spectate.
