Scaling Your Company Blog? Measure Your Success Piece by Piece
I’ve directed a few of the SaaS’s worlds most successful blogs and content programs. The #1 problem they all share is likely the #1 problem you have: You’re probably judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree.
A blog is just a content medium. It’s like email or social. Its purpose varies greatly even within the same organization. Despite this, content professionals and our companies often judge a blog’s success based on just one or two metrics: top of funnel traffic or pipeline contribution. And I should say, it’s not just content professionals who judge it this way, its our peers and everyone up the chain.
If you don’t manage your team’s expectations about how you judge content, you risk your content roadmap… and your performance review.
To scale a blog effectively, you need to scale your measurements and their complexity. For example, at Amplitude, two content types are 1) blog posts that are specifically created to improve our SEO bets, and 2) blog posts that are specifically created to convey a particular thought leadership position.
Of course there are significant overlaps between these categories, but fundamentally, one is a content library, and the other is closer to a content publication. We can’t judge these by the same metrics.
Content library posts should be judged on their contribution to organic traffic and search ranking for key terms. These pieces are built to capture someone’s attention in the moment they need help — when they Google their problem, your advice pops up top. As such, this should not be measured by whether it helps build repeat visitors: if you’re the average SaaS blog, 83% of your traffic will be new visitors. This content’s job is to catch the audience in the moment they need you. Blog posts for your library thus should not be judged on other things like number of leads captured or newsletter subscriptions generated.
Hat tip to Animalz for originating this visual representation.
Meanwhile, content publication posts should be judged by their ability to drive repeat traffic from the key audience you’re trying to attract. You’re not looking to catch these folks via a Google search. These are people who have come in through social posts, email, and (if they’re in your database already) your newsletter. To gauge success here, you need to look at metrics that can show whether your relationships with the contacts have moved into a lower part of the funnel, and simultaneously you need to see if these posts are resulting in backlinks and social amplification as any other publication would.
Your content publication work is all about return users and deepening relationships with the particular audience you want to attract.
This brings me to problem #2 in content: Doing something productive with your learnings.
Sure, you have data you can trust, and you’ve picked your measurements, but are you applying this knowledge to improve your content and sales cycles? Or are you just passively tracking?
If you want to be an effective content leader who can scale a blog, you have to commit to spending a lot of time with your analytics dashboard and adjusting your roadmap based on what you find.
This could take the form of a weekly review and mini-report that you post in our content marketing Slack channel. Focus on what you’ve learned, and what you’re going to do about it next week.
A content calendar isn’t sacred. It can change based on what you learn. And what you learn is often that you’re better off spending your time adapting existing content than churning out new content.
And that brings me to problem #3: If you want to scale, you have to do more with each piece of content you create.
Scaling a blog requires you to place more and more smart bets with the same limited amount of time you had when the stakes were lower. It’s tempting to publish and forget, then move on to the next content problem you need to solve. Save yourself from a bloated, underperforming blog and make a concerted effort to ship, STOP, learn, and iterate. This normally takes the form of a content audit and brainstorming sessions about how to update and repurpose both your winners and your losers. Did one blog post kill it 6 months ago… but is plateauing? What could you do to reinvigorate it? Did one blog post have a great idea, but flop badly? Take it and rewrite it. It’s less time — and cheaper — than starting from scratch.