Prove the value of content by managing the end-to-end process under one roof

The job’s not over until the paperwork is done—or, for content marketers, until results are measured. For most Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), the holy grail of content measurement is return on investment (ROI). Ideally, that means being able to say something like, “We spent $15,000 creating content this quarter and, in return, generated $30,000 in revenue.”

Advancing to this level is difficult—like climbing the Mount Everest of marketing analytics difficult—but it gets a lot easier when you start using a platform to keep track of everything in one place: strategy, ideation, planning, creation, distribution, and analytics.

Contently‘s industry-leading platform makes end-to-end content marketing easy with the tech, talent, and strategic insights you need to attribute efforts back to revenue. It’s almost as if the word “marketing” itself needs a marketing campaign because it no longer encompasses all that goes into building brands and growing revenue.

Keith Johnston, VP and research director serving CMO professionals at Forrester, notes the rise of data-driven communication:

“We’re at the tipping point where we’re trying to decide what marketing really means in this era.”

Evaluate new ideas by potential revenue

New content ideas come from all corners of a company, but you’re also probably sourcing ideas from keyword research, industry news, and events. An end-to-end content marketing platform like Contently can help you evaluate those ideas easily with a content request form that allows you to turn a good idea into an outsourced story in a few simple steps.

The platform also allows you to easily source ideas from our award-winning freelance network with the Pitch function. Send requests to your freelance team to get their unique perspective on an idea, then organize those pitches by tag or status.

Evaluate both pitches and internal requests with Contently’s SEO Story Ideas tool, which evaluates story concepts that are likely to rank well in search based on your content strategy.

Once published, Contently Analytics will show you which articles performed best, so you can double down on what’s working. Gated content can be analyzed using Docalytics. This unique tool provides insight into PDF engagement using heat map technology.

Docalytics shows marketers over 17 metrics to make sense of engagement, including views per page, time spent on that page, and heat maps that show where readers interact with your content the most.

Make content plans that align with campaign goals

I’ve never met a content marketer with only one goal. We’re all out here with at least four: increase reach, increase engagement, generate leads, and impact revenue—usually for several different lines of business or products.

A company blog, for example, might see five new articles published every week, but each with a different goal in mind. You’ll need to aggregate all the content you create for each goal in one place to accurately measure whether or not you’ve moved the needle.

Contently’s enterprise campaign tool allows you to group content by campaign goal. For example, if your company is attending an industry event, you can collect videos, articles, gated content, social media posts, and emails all under one roof and quickly view analytics.

You can also organize and analyze content using a drag-and-drop calendar tool that gives you complete visibility into where each piece of content is in the creation process. Plus, you can filter by a whole host of different variables, including function, campaign, format, and tag.

Create content efficiently and at scale

Content marketers are under the microscope for the cost of their content, which has a reputation for being high. But flocking to find the cheapest content creators isn’t the answer. It will cost you more in the long run when you consider the time it takes to edit the writing. Why? When you don’t pay people what they’re worth, they aren’t motivated to do their best work.

That being said, you can incur additional expenses if your workflow or brief isn’t clear. This often happens when a stakeholder requests an article be completely rewritten because it didn’t match their goals, for example. Avoid those pitfalls with a platform that makes content briefs and workflows clear, notifications automatic, and hiring freelancers easy. In the publication settings of Contently’s platform, you can edit your strategy so that each new project you create will automatically house your content goals, personas, tone of voice, and pillars. This helps keep your freelancers on track from the moment they receive a project.

Contently’s Intelligent Talent Recommendation (ITR) tool uses an algorithm to match companies to freelancers with the right experience and industry knowledge. You’ll also gain access to editors that help you manage those freelancers and their output.

One of the best parts of the platform is the ability to create workflow templates that can be customized each time you outsource a story. They make every stage of the content creation process clear, from strategy to workflows (including outline, creation, review, and approval), content optimization, graphic creation, and distribution. You can even pay freelancers immediately and save your finance department time cutting checks.

Automatic editing tools check for plagiarism, SEO effectiveness, reading time, reading level, and grammatical issues to support editors. Contently’s Tone Analyzer, powered by IBM Watson, drills down on the voice and tone traits that engage your audience the most and provides suggestions to optimize your content to match those traits.

Zoom out to see the big picture with a content command center, which gives a birds-eye view of workloads, delays, and content production time.

Distribute content in many places from one platform

Content is typically distributed across your website, social media, email, and internal teams. Most content marketers keep a distribution checklist. Then, they open up platforms individually to get the job done.

That process is slow and leaves a lot of room for manual error. Contently allows you to connect distribution directly to your workflows. The platform integrates with your content management system (CMS) to automatically port over completed webpages, including images, tags, alt text, categories, feature images, and multimedia. It also integrates with a variety of other tools using Zapier.

Content value is easier to measure under one roof

Proving ROI for content is the biggest challenge marketers face—but it’s not impossible. Contently pioneered a four-stage maturity model to guide content marketers toward the measurement holy grail: multi-touch attribution.

Each of those four stages—crawl, walk, run, and fly—supports content marketers in proving the value of their content marketing programs, no matter where they are in their journey.

Assessing the value of your content marketing operations is so much harder when you’re managing the process across disparate tools. When strategy, editorial calendar, creation, social media, invoice, and analytics are under one roof, the picture gets a whole lot clearer.

An end-to-end solution like Contently sets you up for success in proving the value of your content. Schedule a demo for a consultation on your content measurement strategy today.