Regardless of the size of your B2B enterprise, you may already be well aware that content is an important part of your marketing assets. Content creation and production can both be timely processes, however, and optimizing the workflow is a difficult process.
Too often content goes unused, so it’s important to measure content production efficiency. Be sure to download a copy of our eBook The Blueprint to B2B Content Metrics for an in-depth look at maximizing content efficiency and measuring your campaign’s performance.
Here are some key ways to measure content production efficiency.
Content Production Health
This multi-step process is a must for measuring how efficient your content production phase is. You’ll want to calculate the following metrics:
Average Length of Production
Calculate this metric in its entirety, from the idea phase to publication. How many days, on average, does production take?
On-Time Delivery Rates
You’re probably no stranger to pushed-back or missed deadlines, but how often does it happen? Measure how often deadlines are missed and categorize them by types, like asset and contributor.
Bottlenecks in Workflows
Workflows will always guide content creation, so it’s important to calculate this metric too. Compare the average time it takes to complete a task with how often that task misses a deadline. This will help you figure out where your bottlenecks exist.
Covering Content Gaps
For this metric, you’ll want to determine if there’s enough content to cover all stages of the buyer’s journey. Measure this by calculating the number of assets in production, categorized by persona and sales stage.
Internal Reach
While the reach of your content might seem like a post-production metric, it’s important to measure the reach of content within your enterprise. Too often marketers only measure external reach, missing out on an equally important group of people utilizing that same content—their own staff.
Accessibility
Ensure that content is organized in a central, accessible place for your entire team. This will help you get around the common problem I mentioned earlier, of content going unused.
Tracking Internal Reach
Measure your content’s internal reach with a few basic questions:
- What is the month-over-month internal view-count of your content?
- How many monthly internal shares are you seeing from your content (including email and social)?
- How much referral traffic are you seeing from internal shares?
If you measure your content’s reach internally, tracking your external reach will be a smoother process.
Scoring Your Content
Scoring content gives you cold, hard numbers that measure content production efficiency. By scoring your content, you’ll be able to prove its value at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Scoring your content also means you’ll have a clearer picture of how to more efficiently devote time and resources to each stage in the journey. In short, you won’t exhaust your resources on one stage and neglect the others.
Calculating your content score requires assigning a weight to each stage in the content journey. For example, if you use a first touch/last touch model, you would attribute 30% to both the first and last stage in the journey and evenly divide the remaining 40% across the other four steps.
For a better idea of how this works, here’s our representation of a first touch/last touch model:
Metrics Dashboard
In the end, all of the metrics for your content operation should be recorded in a marketing metrics dashboard. This interface will help you organize your production stats as well as post-production metrics like conversion rates.