Frameworks, Metrics & Math: For Content & Brand Marketing
Content and brand marketing as an organisation function can, at times, be reduced to personal preferences and fads versus tying back the function to business objectives. It’s unsurprising that companies with cool Instagram content don’t have the most robust businesses, and stunning creative campaigns have lacklustre business impact. A great example of this is Budwiser’s campaign which got their CMO fired, vs Nike’s controversial but incredibly impactful campaigns with Tiger Woods and Colin Kapernick that consistently tie back to the brand’s promise, customer base and positioning.
Content and brand marketing team and channels stacks look different from company to company; the business problem should determine how to approach & how much to invest in content and brand marketing. For example, for a digital publisher (NYTimes, Buzzfeed etc), the content marketing stack should align most closely with distribution channels. However, for an ecommerce company, the content and brand marketing stack should extend across webcomms, category comms, upper funnel/brand marketing and distribution channels. To put in a different way, if you’re selling potato chips in offline stores, your SEO agency is unlikely to drive any amount of efficiency.
frameworks to use to determine your team and channel stack:
- customer truths: customers will shop your products based on their existing consumption cycles and channels of sale. Eg. AC sales peak in summers, whisky peaks in winters, electronics peak around festive, tshirts are all year round. Customer and consumption truths will determine your content and brand marketing calendar and cycle.
- your market: your market will determine what your content and brand marketing needs to be and the scale of your ambitions. Eg. If you’re selling floor cleaning products on amazon, your PDP copy and imagery is likely to earn you more net benefits than a hacky Instagram strategy.
- compete against luck: When investing in content and brand, I’d bet on compounding more than I’d better on luck. Luck is spending on buying Instagram followers and hoping your targeted click bait will help you build a community of customers. Compounding is building your Instagram followers organically on the back of content which adds value to your customers (and using advertising tools like boosting to drive results.)
Broadly speaking, content and brand marketing teams should have at least 2 of the below 3 goals:
- organic growth & % contribution of content and brand channels to overall traffic: all brand measurements should ideally impact this over a longer horizon
- efficiency in performance marketing & blended cac (customer acquisition cost)
- revenue and monetisation
Channels & Channel Metrics:
As mentioned above, channels for content and brand marketing differ from category to category. And while different campaigns have different objectives, two things:
i. Measure everything. It’s ok if you’re just running a reach campaign; but measure growth outcomes regardless
ii. Integrate to core business objectives. And please note that business objectives aren’t always incremental $. I work for a lifestyle ecommerce company, and one of our business objectives is building a customers category vocabulary. Content and brand marketing can be massive delta generators for this outcome.
The most common (digital) content and brand channels and their baseline metrics:
SEO: Impressions > CTR > Clicks > Visits (10–15% drop off from clicks to visits)
Instagram + Facebook: Reach > Engagement Rate > Channel Contribution to Platform (so what % of your overall traffic comes from IG; implementation of more basic practises like linkinbio and deep links/deferred deep links can cause a signficant change in attribution.) Follower growth is a lagging indicator.
YouTube: Views > Avg. Time Spent/Retention > Comments > Subscriber Growth (lagging indicator)
Influencers: Reach > Engagement Rate > Channel Contribution to Platform (deep links, UTM trackers… all can be massively impactful in driving dents)
Events and Experiences: Reach > Volume of Content Generated > Avg. Engagement Rate > Footfall
Emailers & Notifications: Deliverability > CTR > Visits > Revenue (where applicable)
Companies can have owned media which sits on the product itself eg. Amazon Mini TV, Nykaa Stream, Myntra Studio etc. On-platform media can be super powerful for activating new users; and if delivered well, can also strengthen usage from repeat buyers.
How you should think about your content and brand marketing calendar:
This is not one size fits all, so think and implement based on your customer truths, market and what it’ll take to compete against luck. Your content and brand calendar should have a mix of 3 buckets:
i. HERO: These are your big banger campaigns which you put your muscle and might behind. These are usually multi-channel campaigns, and scale beyond owned media
ii. HUB: These are core to proposition ‘campaigns’ or IPs which you want to be known for, but you know will take time to build.
iii. HYGIENE: This determines the baseline you want to keep and grow from based on the channels you actively invest in. Hygiene would be betting on YouTube as a long term compounding channel, and investing in its growth over a period of time.
Along with these buckets, principles to remember are:
- Great content distributes fastest. Metric impacted (for the better) when the content is 10/10 are CPMs, CPR & CPC
- Pretty-looking or “on brand” content and ‘great content which distributes fast’ are not the same thing
- Distribution eats average creation for breakfast
- Self awareness is an asset. If your team sucks at great content, invest disproportionately in distribution. If your team is great at great content, don’t make them lazy by bank-rolling distribution; push for organic lifts.
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At its best, content and brand marketing is a series of calculated shots on a business goal- some low risk long-term reward, some high risk dopamine hits. And content and brand marketing have proven to be insanely powerful in building long-term, sustained business growth- just look at most saas companies and some of the world’s best consumer brands and consumer tech companies for inspiration.
You’ve just got to think through how, when and where it makes most sense for your business.