The ROI of content has remained the elusive white whale for marketers. Content strategies are planned months in advance, but the impact of that content is measured with a “rear-view mirror” approach to ROI.
The problem is, with a backwards-looking approach to ROI, marketers have no insight into what’s working and what isn’t. (More on that here.)
This lag between distribution and measurement of results creates a marketing blind spot. Take a look at the example below based on the content performance of U.S. retailer West Elm on Pinterest.
The graph below shows West Elm’s output of Pins and average interactions per Pin over the past 90 days. According to this data, West Elm’s Pinterest strategy appears to be the picture of content marketing efficiency: less output with greater return.
Over the past 90 days, West Elm dramatically reduced their weekly output of Pinterest Pins (down from a high of 155 Pins per week in early December 2014) and tripled the average number of interactions per Pin.
However, when we put West Elm’s Pinterest performance in a competitive context, we see a very different picture. Compared to home decor retail competitors Pottery Barn and Anthropologie — which has a competitive house and home product line — we can see that West Elm produced drastically more Pinterest content over the past 90 days.
However, when we look at the total Pinterest interactions from these three competitors over the same time period, we can see that West Elm is actually in last place. Despite producing more Pinterest content than its competitors, West Elm is actually seeing dramatically fewer interactions from its Pinterest audience.
We can see this concerning trend even more clearly by looking at the average interactions per Pin over the same time period. In the graph below, we can see that Pottery Barn actually has the most efficient content strategy on Pinterest, averaging over 200 interactions per Pin.
Pottery Barn’s dominance over West Elm becomes even more apparent when we account for differences in each brand’s Pinterest audience size. The graph below shows the average interactions per Pin per 1,000 followers on Pinterest. Normalized by audience size, Pottery Barn actually sees 3 times more engagement than West Elm on Pinterest.
What does that mean for West Elm? While its Pinterest strategy looked effective on its own, West Elm’s share of interactions on Pinterest actually dropped by more than 75% over the past 90 days, dwindling from 44% down to 10%. Pottery Barn’s share of interaction, however, grew to 46% over the same time period!
That’s the danger (or for your competitors, the opportunity) inherent in waiting weeks or months to assess the impact of marketing content. Given a blind spot opportunity, a nimble competitor can get into market with weeks or months to build awareness and gain share of voice. Competitors can seize on this blind spot and quickly gain momentum, a fact which will be unsettlingly apparent — but irreversible — come time for the quarterly report.
Don’t give competitors a blind spot opportunity. Monitor share of engagement and content performance relative to competition over time, and understand what is taking off and what is failing before it’s too late to fix.
For more on how to take a real-time approach to content ROI, get your copy of our latest report, The Content Marketing Paradox.