How Do You Put a Price on Digital Content?

Notes de l'éditeur

1. My name’s Simon Bennison, I’m an agency side content marketer, with experience across a range of sectors from travel, to retail, finance and the arts. I’m here today to talk to you about how you can work out: - How much you should spend on online content, and - The amount you should spend on each piece of content you invest in.
2. Sir John Hegarty recently came down pretty hard on content marketing, said it was a load of rubbish. He won’t get out of bed for less than a million views of his ads. You can mention Vorsprung durch Technik to anyone, and they’ll know what you’re talking about even though it was a 60 second ad that launched 35 years ago.
3. He’s a knight. A legend of advertising.
4. And I’m not. Maybe there never will be a knight of SEO. But he’s wrong about content marketing. I’m not going to make an argument for entire marketing budgets to be redirected to online content. I understand the value of offline media, but I do think online content should get a fairer share, based on the impact it can have on your business.
5. Hegarty’s version of advertising is great when you exist in a 4 channel TV era. When you had millions to spend on production and media, and the only way people could opt out was by getting up to make a cup of tea. But now, in the age of ad blockers, second screens and mobile first customers, we need to look at all of the available channels, and understand each channel’s contribution to the bigger picture.
6. Those of us in the SEO, content marketing, inbound, earned media industry need to focus on what we can achieve within the scope of our channels. What we can do is: - Earn coverage for our products and brands. - Enable more people to see and think about the products and services we offer. - Maximise the number of people who go on to complete an action such as buy, sign up, or donate.
7. To make the argument of why online content needs more investment, we need to first look at it in the context of total marketing spend. Econsultancy’s Marketing Budgets 2016 survey found that on average 37% of marketing budgets are spent on digital.
8. When we split digital out into the top 8 channels, we see that in reality, Hegarty really has little to worry about from any online channel taking his TV budget. Less than 2% of budgets are spent on SEO 2% on data management 3% on display advertising 3% on social media 3% on lead generation 4% on email 4% on content marketing 5% on paid search 11% on unspecified ‘other digital stuff’ – we’ll call Pokémon Go based ideas.
9. If we looked at this as £100 in your average marketer’s pocket.
10. They’d spend £63 on traditional offline advertising, £4.44 on content marketing, and only £1.48 on SEO.
11. £6 of every £100 a marketer spends goes on content for owned and earned media. 22% of spend goes on paid online media (display, social, paid search and other).
12. If people are willing to invest so much more in paying for media, than they are on earning it, surely this is because it drives more traffic?
13. Well it’s not that.
14. Research by SimlarWeb has shown the traffic split of online channels in the shopping industry. Let’s take a look at how traffic splits out: - Email 1% - Display Ads 1% - Social 4% - Referral 19% - Direct 36% - Search 39%
15. Direct traffic is pretty huge – this probably has a lot to do with the ‘dark web’, the referrals we don’t know how to measure.  But search is the largest traffic driver, sending 39% of all traffic to shopping websites.
16. We established earlier that around the same amount of money is spent on paid search as is spent on SEO and content marketing combined, so you’d expect that they drive the same amount of traffic. Right?
17. I ran this as a Twitter poll, and Twitter came back with these results: - 50% said they thought paid search drove less than 30% of the traffic - 0% said it would be about 50/50 - 13% said more than 70% paid - 37% said half a cup. Only 8 people responded to this poll, so don’t believe all of the stats you find online.
18. Before we look at how search traffic splits, can anyone guess the percentage of traffic driven by paid search? The SimilarWeb results are more reliable than my poll, they come from 3 billion web interactions every day…
19. They estimated paid search accounts for just 2% of traffic to shopping websites. 2%. Organic search drove 37%.
20. I know I’m preaching to the converted here, but next time a client asks you why they should invest more in their SEO and content, you should tell them this: - The average business spends less than 6% of their marketing budget on content marketing and SEO - These channels are responsible for 37% of their online traffic - You can’t afford to let 37% of your customers down by providing merely ‘ok’ content
21. Even the traffic you’re paying for needs better content. As the cost of online advertising goes up, you can’t afford to get your content wrong. This is the money spent on online advertising in the USA, in Billions, in the last 5 years. The retail industry is spending over $10 billion dollars per year on online advertising, with the other four major industries spending around $5 billion each.
22. A look at the most expensive keywords in PPC shows you the amount some companies are willing to pay for a visit to their site. https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/04/14/the-top-100-most-expensive-keywords-in-the-uk/
23. If you want value for money, and are willing to invest in results, you need the best content you can afford. It can be easier for companies to invest in paid media because the results are instant and almost guaranteed, and it’s easier to forecast the results for your boss. This is why it’s so important that content marketing proposals are accompanied by the right numbers.
24. We need to make content marketing easier to invest in.
25. I recommend a strategic approach to justify better investment in online content In his book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, a must read for anyone interested in strategy, Richard Rumlet talks about how to create a good strategy, and how to recognise a bad one.
26. A strategy might be bad because it’s pure fluff, fails to address the challenge, or is just a statement of goals with no clear way of getting there.
27. I particularly like his definition of fluff: “a superficial statement of the obvious combined with a generous sprinkling of buzzwords”.
28. For example, this one from a bank: - “Our fundamental strategy is one of customer-centric intermediation” Intermediation means the company accepts deposits and then lends them to others. In other words, it is a bank. - The buzz phrase customer-centric could mean better terms, or better services for its customers, but if this bank doesn’t really differentiate in this area, it’s meaningless.
29. Remove the fluff and you’re left with: “Our bank’s fundamental strategy is being a bank”.
30. In contrast, a Good Strategy is a coherent action backed up by an argument and a basic underlying structure.
31. In contrast, a Good Strategy is a coherent action backed up by an argument and a basic underlying structure. It should comprise three key features: - A diagnosis of the nature of the challenge. - A guiding-policy to deal with the challenge - A set of coherent actions to carry out the guiding policy.
32. Diagnose the issues: Find the content that’s either missing, or failing: - Align with the company vision– what are the wider vision and objectives of the company? What direction is the brand being taken in? - Competitor research – explore the best examples of content from within and outside of your industry - Audience segmentation – get closer to working out the content you need by developing a deeper understanding of your audiences - Keyword opportunity analysis – will show you where you could do better, and where you’re entirely missing out on the things your customers are searching for.
33. Set measurable objectives that you can achieve through new or better content: - Look for opportunities to communicate with customers at different stages of engagement with your brand, what are they doing right now? - The content you create can influence each of these stages, but it will live or die based on your ability to measure it by what it can realistically achieve, because one piece of content can’t do everything. - Will Reynolds talked about this at Turing Festival in Edinburgh, we need to think beyond the most popular search queries, stop thinking of the world in SEO terms, where someone searches “Holidays to Spain” and instantly buys one, and look wider to the queries that build a relationship between your brand and your audience.
34. We use a framework to calculate return on investment at different points in the user journey. When you use this as part of a forecast of measurable results, it becomes a powerful tool. If you can place a value on each of these interactions, and some are easier than others, you can use it to show your client or your manager: - The results that are achievable, and what they will do for your business - The results that are needed to make your content a viable investment
35. So how do you know if your campaign is going to be worth the money? You should be able to forecast that, whilst there’s always a risk of failure with earned media, your campaign must offer a degree of confidence that it can earn more than you would pay for the results elsewhere. Let’s look at this again in the context of See, Think, Do, Care. When you’ve got this in place, define a roadmap to put this into action over a set timeline Can your next content plan include a balanced output that touches on all these moments in the customer journey?
36. Finally When putting a price on content, consider what a great campaign can achieve for your business.
37. If you are going to be working long hours, investing time and money, and putting your heart and soul into your marketing, it better be worth it, right?
38. Work out the potential benefit of the results you need, and invest as much as you can in a campaign that will achieve these results.
39. Don’t merely settle for good. You may achieve nothing at all.