You Ask, I Answer: Tools Missing From Content Marketers Tech Stacks?

Lisa asks, “What tools do you think are missing from most content marketers tech stack?”

Without a doubt, the ability to know what content is resonating, either by individual channel or by owned media content. This is a giant blind spot I experienced for myself, and one of the reasons I wrote software for Trust Insights to fix it – I wanted the answers for my own content. Watch the video for a couple of examples.

Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here.

Listen to the audio here:

Download the MP3 audio here.

Got a question for You Ask, I’ll Answer? Submit it here!
Subscribe to my weekly newsletter for more useful marketing tips.
Find older episodes of You Ask, I Answer on my YouTube channel.
Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let me know!
Join my free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics!

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.

In today’s episode, Lisa asks, What tools do you think are missing from most content marketers tech stacks. Without a doubt, the tool or tools I think are missing the most from our text access content marketers are what are knowing knowing what content is resonating the ability to be able to see into individual channel level stuff or by owned media content, what is really working. And this is a blind spot that I experienced for myself my own content. And one of the reasons why I end up writing software writing my own software to fix this is because I couldn’t find any vendors that offered this, at least not at a price that could afford, you know, I’m sure there’s some enterprise content management system was that offered for like $50,000 a month, but as a an individual blogger, and as the the part owner, or the co founder of a small business, I don’t have that kind of money. Something that would be more like, you know, a couple hundred bucks a month maybe could afford but not not, not what the enterprise packages charge. So this is something that is a blind spot for content marketers. And it is something that if you had it, it would be great to be able to know what’s really working. So let me show you an example. Let’s, let’s bring up the example thing here. The first version of this looks at the pages on site. And one of the critical things that is not in Google Analytics is the ability to see, did a page accelerate somebody’s progress towards conversion, or do the page not do that? Now, this is predicated, of course, upon you having goals and goal value set up correctly in Google Analytics, if you don’t have that setup, it it’s not going to this, this tour technology would not help you at all. So what we see here is as I go down this list, these are all the pages and then how those pages have helped stimulate conversions. What’s important is that this is an attribution model. That is based on machine learning. So it’s not based on last touch, or first touch, or time decay, or any of the the standard models that are built in this uses machine learning to essentially look at the patterns of conversion and say, Oh, how many times did this page show up in the first position, before conversion, and the second position of the third position, and so on, and so forth, looking back it up at a person’s history and say, Look, this page here how to set your public speaking fee keeps showing up over and over and over and over again, within the path to conversion. So we’re going to give it the highest rank for the number of conversions that it drives. So this is a one of the most important pieces of content, my website, then the newsletter, the public speaking page, which I’m super happy about, because hey, if I can get you to book me as a public speaker, love it, the homepage, of course, how to start your public speaking career. Now what I do this information is based on this report, I’m going to go through and I’m going to update pages you can see here, this is the 2016 version of this, I just republish that post. And already, it’s starting to creep up in in terms of conversions and helps to drive. So if you’ve got a lot of content on the back end on your site, and know, for example, if I scroll down, down, down, down, down, down down to here, you can see there’s a whole bunch of pages that aren’t helping conversions. So for me, one of the things I would do is obviously help tune up and improve the pages that are driving conversions and then pick pages that down here that are you would be nice to if they did help convert particularly in the 20 1620 1728 period where I know that the content was good. And either refresh it or tune it up or things like that. This is where I would also use predictive analytics. Because if if there are certain pages that are topically important, at certain times of the year, like SEO, like a marketing reporting and things, and so on and so forth, those of you pay just to refresh at specific times to try and get that attention. So that’s the first version of this type of report. The second type of report that I would want to see that again, not a lot of content marketer stacks, is granular level attribution analysis for specific channels. Google Analytics does this out of the box with default channel groupings. But there’s a couple problems with that one. Most people’s default channel groupings have set up completely wrong. If you go with what’s in the box. About half your social media traffic is distributed, your email is going to be all screwed up. I had it took me probably the better part of two months to fix in two up all of all of my default channel groupings.

And second, even there, even if you’ve got it all correct, if it says social is the third most important channel for you. Well, that’s great. Social is a big bucket. Right? There’s Facebook, there’s Twitter, there’s LinkedIn, Pinterest, tick tock. YouTube does you pick your your poison, there’s a ton of different things that fall in that bucket of social and I want more granularity. So this version here. As you can see, it pulls out at the individual source medium, what’s working. So for me Google organic search, by far the big driver fall by my email newsletter, thank goodness, the West like wow, I haven’t spent a lot of time on that for no reason. Or an article. Sarah lyrics, Twitter referral traffic from Twitter. And this is important because this is other people’s tweets. If you see my own Twitter is a see did it. There it is Twitter social down. Alright, so my own Twitter activity is not driving a ton of conversion. But other people’s tweets are, that’s good to know, being organic. Hey, that’s kind of interesting, because a lot of people think of being as the redheaded stepchild of search engines, but remember that it powers things like some of the smartest systems, some of the assistants on your phone and things like that. And as a result, it’s got some juice, we have some prs a stuff, we have a bunch of referrals, there’s Facebook, other people’s posts on Facebook, other people’s posts on LinkedIn. So this level report now helps me understand, okay, where is my content? And what’s driving stuff to it. So for me build content to continue to build those relationships on Twitter. So good idea, continuing to do guest post content on certain outlets, that that bring in the juice is a good idea. other outlets when you know, one of the things you can do is whenever you get one of those posts, email focusing like, Hey, you want to submit a piece of guest content will be great exposure. Cool, or do you want to do an episode of our podcast will be great exposure? Cool, you do it once? Then you run the support and see Yeah, is it helping to convert? If the answer is no, then you did the one and that was fine. But you can say that person again. If you you know if you’re limited on time, as most of us are. Last time we did it didn’t really drive any results. So maybe there’s a different way we can exchange value. But clearly the exposure that that outlet offers is not not it doesn’t have enough juice to make it worthwhile. So this combination of tools using machine learning for understanding channels and understanding the pages on your website are I think critically missing from almost every marketers tech sec. I know they’re missing because I had to write them for myself. Shameless plug if you’re interested in having this run for you. We offer through trust insights, subscribe, trust insights.ai and felt the contact form will will will get you hooked up. But by knowing this, I can tune my efforts to what works to focus on what works to double down on doing more of what works and tuning up those things that I feel like instinctively should work. But the results aren’t there yet, at least on my own media. I can use that to experiment and test and build. Great question Lisa. Look forward to showing off some of this technology at content marketing world and other conferences coming up like may con. So hopefully we’ll see you there. As always, please leave your comments below in the comments box and subscribe to the YouTube channel the newsletter, I’ll talk to you soon. want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. Visit trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

You might also enjoy:

Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? Get updates here: