Bygone days. It used to be simpler. Marketers would create super-well designed brochures and pay to advertise their product/service in front of their audience.
Don pitching in the TV show “Mad Men”
Wait. What just happened? Internet of course. Internet changed everything. 90% of the world’s data has been generated over the past 2 years. Buyers now go through 57% of the purchasing process before ever talking to sales. That’s logical: access to information is easier and people more educated. Consumers make their own research before making any decision. That’s why the old SEO rules have died to let the King – content – emerge and take over. Marketers thus have adapted their job functions to do more and more of what we call content marketing: I quote – “creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Achieving Content Marketing ROI requires you to follow best practices.
Content Marketing ROI can take time to achieve. Even with the best content and the smartest strategy, it can take weeks or months to build the right audience and see the compounding benefits that cumulate over time. So while you’re executing your content plan, how do you know whether you’re on the right track?
If you’re like 90% of marketers who are not confident about their content effectiveness, you’re probably trying to benchmark what you’re doing against industry best practices. The problem is: which ones? Content marketers are practicing what they preach and as a result, the Web is not lacking content marketing advice… To the point where this can be really overwhelming. There are so many blog posts telling you to do this or recommending to try that, how can you get an overall assessment of how you perform?
That’s where we come in. As a content marketing start-up, we’ve been working hard over the past several years to create content to help you as a marketer to be better at content marketing. During this time, we’ve been curating the absolute best and leanest practices from top minds in our industry such as Andy Crestodina, Barry Feldman, Jayson DeMers, Ian Cleary, Joe Pulizzi, Jason Miller, Neal Patel, Lee Odden etc…. Even better, we had the privilege to work with many of them as they kindly contributed to our and our eBooks. We’ve also observed and collected data points from thousands of marketers who use our platform every day. And last but not least, we put our money where our mouth is: content marketing is our #1 strategy to generate leads and revenue so we’ve also experimented a lot ourselves to separate what really works from what doesn’t.
Over the past year, as more and more of our customers were asking us for recommendations, we started developing an assessment methodology to help them evaluate whether they were on the right path towards content marketing ROI. We manually looked up their content marketing activities from various different angles and compared them with our set of best practices that we’ve called “Lean Content Marketing” and this blog and our resources are all about. The feedback was so positive that we decided to create an interactive test so anyone could do the same on their own and assess their chances to achieve content marketing ROI in just a few minutes.
We’ve created the first interactive Content Marketing Grader.
It’s not just another funny test with doubtable outcome. We’re not reading into your palm or telling you when your content marketing will die and how. But don’t worry, it’s still a fun test to take. We made sure that each question accurately measured your performance, that the whole test covered the most quantifiable areas of content marketing and took into consideration the time and research you’d invest to take it. And in the end, you won’t just get a score (and an awesome .gif), you’ll get actionable tips on each of those aspects you can leverage to improve. Hence you can take the same test every other week and see the improvement in your score!
Content Marketing influencers took the test and they love it.
Circling back for consistency, we asked several influencers whether they would dare to take the test. And they did! Have a look at what the experts that shaped content marketing as we know it think about our content marketing grader:
Scoopit’s Content Marketing Grader for ROI from Scoop.it
So now it’s your turn: the Scoop.it Content Marketing grader only takes 5 minutes to complete. Just 5 minutes to get a score along with the personalized inputs you’ve been looking for all this time. So don’t wait any longer, take the test now!
This content was originally published here.