How Content Scoring Can Save Your Budget (and Your Butt)

3 minute read

Upland Admin

Isn’t it great how we marketers all have unlimited time and budgets?

You know, I hear that over in the sales department, they don’t get to paper their cubicles with first-edition Chaucer novels. And, I don’t know if it’s true, but someone told me that accounting uses regular office chairs that aren’t even stuffed with royal eyelashes. Can you imagine what life would be like if we, in marketing, had to actually use our resources conscientiously, too?

…Oh, hello.

You caught me daydreaming there. Yes, I’ll have those analytics for you right away, and absolutely, we can A/B test that subject line. This is the marketing department, after all. It’s what we do in 2015.

marketing dream of unlimited budget

It’s funny to think how just a few years ago, we all laughed knowingly at the famous John Wanamaker quote, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

What used to feel like an unavoidable truism now feels like the height of lazy business. Our measurement tools have become so advanced and so easy to implement that it’s inexcusable for marketing departments to not measure campaign performance on some level.

The problem is that if you’re not running granular analytics as well as big-picture metrics, there’s a good chance you’re wasting part of your limited time and money on the wrong content pieces.

How Content Scoring Can Save Your Budget (and Your Butt)

Content scoring is the data-driven process for tracking how each piece of content is driving leads and conversions.

Let’s say you run a campaign and—look at you!—it’s a great success. After it launches, you see a lift in sales for the featured product. But let’s take a second to think this through:

  • Did every piece contribute equally to your campaign, or did one or two pieces drive most of the adoption?
  • Was one piece particularly successful at driving leads, while another was good for closing deals?

Content scoring can help you determine the answers to these questions, which in turn helps you avoid a major time- and money-wasters, including:

  • Repeating ineffective types of content, not knowing they weren’t effective
  • Not focusing energy on effective content types, not knowing they’re effective
  • Experiencing a failed campaign without knowing why it didn’t work
  • Experiencing a successful campaign without knowing why it did work

With content scoring, you’re able to determine an ROI dollar value for each piece of content, and doing so makes it much easier to improve future campaigns by focusing on content that works. It also makes it a lot easier to meet an organization’s expectations that marketers are directly responsible for revenue growth.

So how do you go about scoring your content? That’s a good question, requiring a deeper discussion. Here are several resources that walk you through the philosophy and process of content scoring. You can even pick your learning experience:

Use your time wisely. Spend budget on the things that count, and prove to your executive team that you’re proactively improving your results.

…Then call your 7th-grade math teacher and apologize for saying you’d “never use this again.” Turns out that, in 2015, basic math is a digital marketer’s best friend.

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