No mat­ter how many con­tent projects or cam­paigns we com­mit bud­get and resources to, it’s imper­a­tive we under­stand the val­ue of that con­tent to the brand and the val­ue to the cus­tomer. Con­tent Score­cards are one of the best, most rel­e­vant tools for ana­lyz­ing past, present, and poten­tial future per­for­mance of con­tent.

Con­tent mar­ket­ing con­tin­ues to be a large focus of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing dis­cus­sion and requires us to answer some tough ques­tions:

• Should we cre­ate con­tent?
• Who cre­ates our con­tent?
• Why are we cre­at­ing con­tent?
• How much con­tent should we cre­ate?
• How do we bud­get for con­tent?
• How do we mea­sure the effec­tive­ness of con­tent?

Con­tent Score­cards help dri­ve an iter­a­tive process of cus­tomer-cen­tric con­tent and can be an impor­tant tool for the plan­ning, cre­ation, pro­mo­tion, and mea­sure­ment of con­tent.

What Are Content Scorecards?

In “The Lan­guage of Con­tent Strat­e­gy”, Scott Abel writes:

“Con­tent Score­cards are an assess­ment tool used to eval­u­ate con­tent against spe­cif­ic cri­te­ria. Rat­ings are assigned to each cri­te­ri­on and are pre­sent­ed in a score­card. It pro­vides insights about con­tent strengths, weak­ness­es and pri­or­i­ties. The score­card approach quan­ti­fies and com­mu­ni­cates qual­i­ta­tive data to stake­hold­ers in an engag­ing and per­sua­sive way.”

One of the most pow­er­ful attrib­ut­es of Con­tent Score­cards is that they lever­age quan­ti­ta­tive fea­tures to some­thing as qual­i­ta­tive as con­tent. Here are sev­en rea­sons why Con­tent Score­cards are valu­able.

1. Know Your Goal

Whether your goal is to cre­ate aware­ness, build brand loy­al­ty, or dri­ve sales, a Con­tent Score­card helps align cam­paign objec­tives and goals.

Focus­ing on a sin­gle met­rics (online sales) keeps the view fair­ly myopic. Hav­ing three to five met­rics can help cre­ate a more thor­ough under­stand­ing of the per­for­mance of the cam­paign.

We’re going to use five cri­te­ria for this exam­ple that includes brand, sales, and loy­al­ty goals includ­ing:

• Brand Val­ue
• Per­ceived Cus­tomer Val­ue
• Online Sales
• Offline Leads to Sales
• Refer­ral Val­ue

2. Give The Content Scorecard Numbers And Words

Think of the Con­tent Score­card as a way to tell the sto­ry of your cus­tomer’s expe­ri­ence with your con­tent. Each cri­te­ria in the score­card is a chap­ter in your mar­ket­ing sto­ry.

One Con­tent Score­card fea­ture that can help illu­mi­nate val­ue of con­tent to cus­tomers is inclu­sion of cus­tomer feed­back and sur­veys about the con­tent con­sumed. The cri­te­ria can be some­thing as sim­ple as Per­ceived Cus­tomer Val­ue of Con­tent, which gets a score as well as real feed­back from cus­tomers.

Some­thing as sim­ple as a tes­ti­mo­ni­al – “I loved the visu­al trends video exam­ples of how brands are lever­ag­ing the ‘LeanIn’ and “Like a Girl’ move­ments” – can help show how a sen­ti­ment (qual­i­ta­tive) can be quan­ti­ta­tive.

Anoth­er cri­te­ria can be Brand Val­ue of Con­tent. This can include organ­ic search traf­fic, social shar­ing, links gen­er­at­ed from the con­tent, and oth­er cri­te­ria that impacts reach and author­i­ty for the brand.

Build­ing a Con­tent Score­card with mul­ti­ple goals (brand engage­ment, loy­al­ty, sales) helps mar­keters see con­tent the way cus­tomers see con­tent in an ecosys­tem.

Look­ing just at one data point (rev­enue) gen­er­at­ed for one goal (sales) like­ly won’t pro­vide a full under­stand­ing of the val­ue of con­tent. (Note: the below image is a sam­ple, not actu­al data. )

Lever­ag­ing a Con­tent Score­card with num­bers and words aligns the analy­sis with the com­plex­i­ty of con­tent con­sump­tion, mak­ing it eas­i­er to more accu­rate­ly ascer­tain its val­ue.

The next cri­te­ria could be Rev­enue Val­ue of Con­tent shared with an aggre­ga­tion of data points.

3. Integrate The Scorecard

Don’t be afraid to include oth­er cri­te­ria such as Offline Val­ue of Con­tent. This could include a reduc­tion of calls to the cus­tomer ser­vice cen­ter because con­tent you cre­at­ed answered those ques­tions.

If your goal is build­ing brand aware­ness, your Con­tent Score­card may include met­rics such as vis­its, social engage­ment, sub­scribers, com­ments, or links that help dri­ve author­i­ty for your web­site and brand.

Com­bin­ing all of your KPIs into a sin­gle Con­tent Score­card, regard­less of goal or chan­nel, helps dri­ve inte­gra­tion.

If your goal is new leads in the pipeline, your Con­tent Score­card may include con­ver­sion rate as a key met­ric. With so many poten­tial KPIs for each goal, it’s impor­tant to agree in advance on which ones you want to track.

Lever­age the Con­tent Score­card as a way to inte­grate teams and high­light con­tri­bu­tions before, dur­ing, and after cam­paign launch.

4. Model And Build The Scorecard Prior To Campaign Launch

Give teams abil­i­ty to review and pro­vide feed­back on the Con­tent Score­card, its KPIs, and def­i­n­i­tions.

The Con­tent Score­card KPIs should be agreed upon, mod­eled, and built out before the cam­paign launch­es. This assures two things:

• Impor­tant ele­ments of con­tent assess­ment aren’t left out (brand, social, PR, organ­ic search, paid, mobile, busi­ness intel­li­gence, etc.)
• Cross-team align­ment on what the goals are and how to quan­ti­fy and qual­i­fy con­tent suc­cess (or fail­ure).

5. Set Regular Intervals For Analysis

Invest­ing in a con­tent audit, content maps, con­tent pil­lars, edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dars, and a Con­tent Score­card is a lot of work. It’s easy to instant­ly start obsess­ing about per­for­mance once a cam­paign launch­es. Mon­i­tor per­for­mance, but don’t obsess.

Let the con­tent do its job for a few days before you start jump­ing to con­clu­sions about what is and isn’t work­ing. Let the paid, social, and oth­er mar­ket­ing teams pro­mote and ampli­fy con­tent before you begin analy­sis at reg­u­lar inter­vals.

Plan­ning for, cre­at­ing, and pub­lish­ing the con­tent is often the eas­i­est part. Depend­ing on the type of con­tent cre­at­ed and the prob­lem that you’re try­ing to solve you may not have any con­clu­sive analy­sis for two weeks or even more.

6. Project Future Growth Potential

Your Con­tent Score­card can include action­able analy­sis by pro­ject­ing ways for new growth. One cri­te­ria could be Future Growth Poten­tial of Con­tent.

For exam­ple, you learn that a video you pro­duced had 10,000 views, with a 1 per­cent con­ver­sion rate. Don’t just think about get­ting more views. Lever­age the Con­tent Score­card to pro­vide analy­sis on ways to improve con­ver­sions. This is a great time to make the case for more bud­get or involv­ing oth­er teams. If lit­tle is being invest­ed in video cre­ation and pro­duc­tion, then more bud­get, improved sto­ry­telling, and bet­ter video pro­duc­tion will like­ly increase con­ver­sions.

Anoth­er cri­te­ria could be Refer­ral Val­ue of Con­tent. Work with your email/CRM team to under­stand how the cam­paign con­tent pro­vid­ed new refer­rals or newslet­ter sub­scrip­tions or increased the LVC (life­time val­ue of a cus­tomer).

7. Learn And Improve

As Avinash Kaushik has said, you should “test, learn, and suck less every time.”

Your Con­tent Score­card is an ongo­ing busi­ness need rather than just a project to test.

Help your inte­grat­ed teams under­stand the impor­tance of work­ing togeth­er toward the busi­ness goals as well as the goal of test­ing and learn­ing togeth­er.

Takeaways

Tak­ing these strate­gic steps toward a Con­tent Score­card ensures that along the path of plan­ning for, cre­at­ing, pro­mot­ing, and mea­sur­ing per­for­mance of your con­tent you can glean a lot about how your con­tent reach­es and engages your audi­ence to achieve busi­ness goals.

Once teams are aligned around the Con­tent Score­card, it helps solve the prob­lem of siloed analy­sis of con­tent and becomes a pow­er­ful vehi­cle for telling (and grow­ing) the sto­ry of what it’s like to be your best cus­tomers.

Cre­at­ing an insight­ful Con­tent Score­card can be a lot like sto­ry­telling, it takes a com­bi­na­tion of strong sub­ject mat­ter exper­tise and cre­ativ­i­ty to make a com­pelling Con­tent Score­card that inspires and illu­mi­nates.