In today’s marketing world, trying to accurately gauge content performance remains far more mysterious than it should be. Marketers are left wondering which metrics will show how engaging my content is? And how do I use that data to optimize my strategy?
That’s why attribution is one of the three pillars of amplified marketing: We want to help you answer those essential questions through measurable means.
Finding the Best Metrics for Your Brand
Metrics have never been more important in revealing what’s working — and what isn’t. Many of our clients have come to this realization, and we want to highlight how a few of them are expertly using metrics to make sure they are measuring up.
Carolyn Chapin, Director of Marketing at LogicGate, shared her thoughts and advice on incorporating your podcast into your digital strategy, including how her company measures its effectiveness.
“We use account-based marketing tools, so we could use those to see what accounts are viewing the pages that we have links to our podcasts and draw inferences there,” she said.
Carolyn then explained how the metrics she is seeing are encouraging.
“I think right now I feel really confident and comfortable with the fact that we are boosting awareness [and] getting new ears on the brand. Right? So there’s a lot of qualitative feedback we’re getting. And then I think there’s definitely ways that we can continue to work towards grabbing the quantitative as well,” she shared.
Meg Johnson joined us on our podcast to share how she uses Casted metrics to work her marketing magic at OpenView Partners.
“Casted metrics have been extremely helpful for us as we look through what episodes are performing the best, what short clips or pieces to the episodes [are] really interesting. Whether it’s the person or the topic, it really allows us to dive a little bit deeper than just that general downloads or that general listens number. And so just kind of, again, looking through the metrics and also just seeing what people are commenting and saying about the show, or maybe what they’re not saying. If no one’s saying anything, it might be a little bit difficult. But again, always doing a pulse check on your audience and what they want and what they need in that moment.”
Also joining us on our podcast to talk metrics was the host of “The Growth Show” and VP of Marketing at HubSpot, Meghan Keaney Anderson, who discussed her company’s specific marketing goals and how they measure whether they are meeting them.
“Your North Star is typically listenership and the audience you’re going after, and you want to see that growing year over year. You want to see the audience come back when you break for a season. You want to see the engagement rates stay high all the way through. That is the beautiful thing about podcasts; when people sit down to listen to a podcast, they listen all the way through it.
“You’re getting their attention, their full attention in many cases, for 20, 30, 40 minutes. And that’s so rare there. So certainly those listenership and growth numbers are what we’re looking for. We’re looking for distribution and access to a broader audience.”
Brand Awareness Indicators
When we think about brand awareness indicators, we focus on the big three: audience growth, traffic growth, and social shares and mentions.
Jillian MacNulty, Content Marketing Manager at Terminus, shared how her company not only watches the numbers of listeners but also keeps a close eye on the commentary.
“At the end of the day, I think listening is so important, and there’s nothing that we ever put out that we don’t look intensely at the analytics, read the comments. We have a whole folder of basically feedback that we get from people that we screenshot emails, we screenshot comments, we throw them in this folder so we can pour over them and go, okay, what are people saying about this? Let’s find the connection. Let’s be detectives for a second and connect these dots and figure out what our audience is craving and how can we better work that into our strategy over the next couple of months,” she said.
Brett Linkletter and Camberlyn Sparks from Misfit Media discussed metrics and how they’re using podcasting to grow their audience in the restaurant marketing niche.
“I think any industry could use a podcast,” Brett said.
“I think a podcast, there’s still not that many businesses that have their own podcasts. So it’s still an early thing. I mean, for us, our podcast — Camberlyn knows the numbers — is growing every single week. It’s really cool. I mean, if you just search ‘restaurant’ on Spotify, we’re one of the top podcasts now, and I’m like, ‘What the hell? How did this happen?’ And we’re just pushing it out, and that’s it. So it’s still early. For me in our business, personally, I’m looking at most podcasts as a way of organically building our reach. That’s number one for us,” he added.
Carolyn Chapin of LogicGate added some insight on how they’ve dabbled in using shows to replace live events to set themselves apart and how keeping tabs on social media comments is helping them gauge what’s good.
“Another way that I’m seeing the impact is the social conversations. Because we are, especially since we started using Casted and sharing the clips in social, then that way people can actually listen to a bite-sized clip if they aren’t ready to make that commitment and spend a bigger chunk of time with us.
“We’ve seen some of the conversations that are happening in social that either thought leaders in the space, or consultants, or potential customers are talking in the comments. So we’re seeing that — that we’re able to be part of the conversation and able to get the conversation going. So that’s another way that I can see the impact,” she explained.
Demand Indicators
Knowing what is in demand (what content users want) is paramount in marketing today. Metrics help reveal what users respond to (wanting and demanding) versus what they couldn’t care less about (much less click or comment on). And metrics are the way to reflect what is resonating and aligning with your audience’s desires.
Top demand indicators include:
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- Increased traffic to conversation-driven content
- Greater number of conversions from conversation-driven content
- Substantial uptick in content’s impact on the buying cycle
- Spike in revenue attributed to content
Janes’ Joshua Wales shared how Casted helps him keep a close eye on indicators:
“From a brand awareness perspective, I think the monthly average listeners that you’re getting is really important and to track how that’s evolving over time and changing, and then with the lead generation as well. You’re able now with Casted to track the contacts on HubSpot. So it has that HubSpot integration, and you’re able to create campaigns with UTM tracking as well. So we can really see the attribution there by using UTM tracking and HubSpot across social media posts and email campaigns that we use to promote the podcast. So I think it’s a combination, really, of brand awareness and then lead generation and attributing those leads to the podcast using the technologies of Casted and HubSpot.”
Also not to be missed is Terminus’ Jillian MacNulty’s podcast discussion, where she shared advice on how “brand drives demand.”
“I think there’s so much room in the podcast space to build that community and build that audience. And that’s something that I love so much about it. And I think we’re almost trying to think of ways to flip the script a little bit too, of okay, we have this great kind of… fan base with our video content we’re putting out. How can we then almost create this, we joke about it, but this Terminus cinematic universe, where then you’ve got fans of ‘The Roof’ and of our dumpster fire video and of our other things that we’re going to be putting out this year, and how do we have podcasts that kind of springboard from that?
“And how do we have conversations with people that were behind the scenes of those things that want to know how those things were made? I mean, I’ll own up to it; I’m a huge fan of the Bachelor franchise. I absolutely love it. And I am so impressed by their whole like bachelor universe of how they have the TV show, and then they’ve got these podcasts that spring off of it, and then they have these bloggers, and then they have this whole fan base and community online.”
Tobe’s Jared Sanders’ also shared insights about how podcasting generates scalable content.
“We really quickly figured out that if we record a podcast regularly, we’re able to create this mass amount of content at scale with just two of us, and we didn’t need a lot of extra help. So early on, this was really important in our agency just to get content out. So, fast-forward to today, we’re on the podcast train 100%, whether it’s with video or audio-only. We obviously are big proponents for video as well, just because you can open up a lot more channels if you’re using video with your podcast. But we sell it as a service in our agency. So, we’re providing this for our clients as well as using it for ourselves.”
Ready to get started on the next exciting chapter of your content marketing journey? Reach out to us for more information, and check out our Amplified Marketing Playbook.
