I had the opportunity to be part of an all day workshop on Tech Content at Content Marketing World 2014. I joined content extraordinaires Lee Odden, Pam Didner, Koka Sexton and Deanna Lazzaroni to provide an intensive overview for B2B marketers.

My presentation was focused on how to measure content effectiveness. The deck below includes basic analytics to track at a high level. The second half outlines what we’re doing at Dell to make our content marketing more effective across the customer journey.

The five lessons I shared were:

  1. Keep KPI’s simple. You can track a lot of data points, but don’t drown yourself. Exec’s want to know the impact to their objectives. Simplify this to percent increase or decrease of desired outcome.
  2. Consolidating content calendars is the quickest way to provide a holistic view and facilitate cross-functional workflows and alignment between business functions. Where do your team’s content calendars live now?
  3. Measure production and inventory to show business value and increase quality of content. Our analytics team is excited about new data points. Imagine the business return that you can show by tracking these?
  4. Report on inventory and usage across customer journey and personas to optimize the content available, and minimize localization barriers.
  5. Content performance metrics such as engagement and sharing point to content that should be repurposed. This is your most effective content!

We had a really great question and answer session. My take away was that everyone is struggling with the same challenges that we are at Dell. The follow conversations have inspired my next steps which will include my writing more.

Here’s the presentation. What challenges do you have around content, collaboration and measuring success?