Measuring Success
Engagement is often the measurement yardstick for corporate content. How many people visited? How long did they stick around? How many times did they click on something?
But it may not be the measure that drives success.
The number of people who read something is an easily understood yardstick. Keeping them on site longer is an equally alluring goal. It’s nice to know you’re producing work that people enjoy so much that they visit in numbers and consume it at length.
In the news media world, neither of these are the most important driver of business outcomes.
The most important measure of news media success is the same as it always was - how many people are willing to pay you to read what you produce. And the media industry is hyper-focused on what drives that mysterious purchase decision when someone stops being a mere ‘reader' and becomes a paying ‘subscriber'. Subscribers are the holy grail.
Consistently, one factor drives subscriptions above all others - frequency of visit.
The most important predictor of subscription is not how many people read a story or how long they spend reading it, it's how often they return. In fact, a recent university study* found that regular skimmers are more likely to subscribe to a news service than their more ‘engaged’ peers.
This finding has important lessons for companies and corporate content. You may not be trying to sell access to your content, but you do want people to make a purchase decision of some sort - otherwise you wouldn’t be producing content in the first place.
So, it’s worth testing if the driver of purchase decisions in your business isn’t the size of your audience or their engagement with your stories, but rather how often you produce something new and useful - and how often people come back to skim.
This is closely aligned with regularity, or cadence, of content.
You want customers, and potential customers, to get into the habit of coming back to your content regularly because it’s of value to them.
If they start looking forward to seeing what you’ve produced, you’ve won the battle.
* spiegel.medill.northwestern.edu: what causes subscribers to pay for news
Link of the day
Aylmer Anderson
Aylmer Anderson has begun producing a fortnightly “newsletter” based on what we know about content. It’s short and hopefully useful.
Each fortnight we will also include a website we like, or a comment we enjoyed, or a bigger piece that’s worth thinking about.