You Ask, I Answer: Measuring Content in the Customer Experience?

In today's episode, Stephanie asks, how can marketers measure if their content is improving the customer experience? So really good question. When it comes to the customer experience, we have to remember that the customer experience is divided into fundamentally two parts. There's the buyer's journey, which is the experience the a person has up until the point of purchase, and then there's the owner's journey, which is the uh the experience you have after ownership. And each half of the customer's journey has four stages to it.

Uh, you can make it arbitrary and divide them in more granularly if you want, but the generally accepted, at least by the like all the big consulting firms, is that there's going to be you know four three or four stages in each. On the buyer's journey side, that's awareness, uh consideration, uh, evaluation, and purchase. So awareness is do I even know what the thing is? Uh consideration is the big vendor set uh evaluation is you know, winnowing that down to uh a choice and then purchase is the actual uh making the decision. On the owner's journey side, there is ownership, uh satisfaction, uh retent uh loyalty and evangelism.

And each of these stages has behaviors that you would expect a person to be doing. So, for example, in the loyalty phase uh and uh of the owner's journey, um, is this person uh buying add-ons? Are they are you able to upsell them? Are they engaging with uh your content, your your marketing? Uh on the evangelism phase, a very important one, are people uh resharing and recommending your stuff, even if they're already customers?

This is especially true, important for um businesses where there isn't a lot of repeat business. Um example, real estate. Uh, when you buy a house, you won't buy another house in you know 15 days, right? Um, you will buy a house in what three to seven years. So that relationship and that loyalty and that evangelism is so important to the real estate industry to be able to say to somebody, you know, who's asking, hey, I'm thinking of uh selling my house, who should I talk to?

And you come up with a name that you want to recommend a person to as an as an agent. That's the an important part of the owner's journey. So when it comes to measuring the content throughout the customer experience, um, there's two different ways to do it. Uh in the buyer's journey portion, uh, there is the ability to do to look at the content you're creating and see how it accelerates pipe the pipeline. There's a bunch of different ways that you can do this.

Um the way that I like best is using what's called Markov chain modeling. It's a machine learning technique. In fact, we'll bring this up here. And what you're seeing here is a model from my website, my personal website for the month of August, and what pages accelerated somebody towards a conversion? Like they were on this page, and this page played a part in their path to conversion.

The way the mathematical technique works behind this is that it's like uh the the old uh archetype archetypical story of a college that didn't pave any sidewalks, then they let students walk around on campus for a year and then uh paved over where students walked the most. If you can imagine something on your website, where what are the content that people walk over the most on the way to conversion? In this case, there's a few blog posts in here, there's a few uh landing pages in here, and these are the pages that are helping nudge people towards conversion. This may not be the last page that they visited, but this is one of these are the key pages that people visited in their path to uh conversion. And so we would use this analysis to determine, yeah, is this page is this content helping improve the customer experience on the buyer's journey?

The answer is yes. Uh the fact that the number one piece of content there is a blog post, tells me that blog post needs to be constantly optimized and improved so that it continues to help convert people, so it continues to help uh push people forward. Now, on the other side of the coin is the owner's journey. And you could do similar things like this, uh, restricted if you have the data in and user ID turned on in Google Analytics to just people who are already customers, but it's probably easier to use either your marketing automation software or your CRM software. Most good modern marketing automation software tells you what uh pages people visit on a website.

Um, and so for the people who have converted for who are customers, you absolutely should be tracking the same information. What are the uh pieces of content that customers engage with that help them uh remain loyal, that help them evangelize. Um depending on how good your marketing automation software is, you may be able to determine that uh a piece of content is something that uh customer is sharing with others. Uh and that there's a lot of value in that, in that information, knowing that this is the content that customers find valuable. With your marketing, if you're following customer-centric marketing, meaning that you're trying to help people solve their problems, the best content you have should be almost equally applicable to a prospect as to an existing customer.

If uh you sell coffee and uh you've got you're in the middle of a pandemic, uh maybe uh you you're not fully open, um, you can absolutely be sharing content like how to prepare the perfect cup of coffee at home, how to store your coffee beans at home uh safely. And in doing so, you're helping obviously prospects, uh, you're demonstrating your expertise, but you're also helping existing customers, customers who have bought your stuff, and you want to help them get more out of their purchase. And so you can solve the problem for both audiences and create content that's valuable to both of them. But the measurement part is the key. Depending on your marketing automation system and how easy it is to export data out of it, you may be able to even construct a similar kind of model.

Um you would just have to figure out what the objective is that you're tuning it for. At the very least, um, you should be able to export all the URLs of all the content that your marketing automation system is tracking. This is in the owner's journey, and just do a quick tally month over month. What are the the what are the pieces of content that customers go to visit more often? Um, and that will help you match it up.

Now, where there's going to be interesting value is when you compare the two data sets, you say, okay, what are prospects like, what are customers like, how much overlap is there? If there is very little or no overlap in these two data sets, that tells you that you have content serving very different audiences, and you may want to think about is there a point where there should be more intersection? And if so, that may be a blind spot in your content marketing you can fill. On the other hand, if they are completely converged, you may have opportunities at the edges of each second section of the customer journey that you're not fully fulfilling, right? You're not you don't have enough content maybe on the far end, the awareness side of the customer experience and the beginning of the buyer's journey.

Or you may not have enough content that is uh suited for evangelism that people are sharing, that people want to be sharing. Um so you would use this data to help identify gaps in your content marketing for improving the customer experience. But that's the measurement system that I would recommend is using your marketing automation software data, using Google Analytics data to fill in the blanks for both sides of the customer experience and uh delivering a better overall customer experience with improved content marketing. If you have follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and talk to you soon.

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