This episode, we’re answering a question that’s been bothering Irene Triendl:
“How much content actually gets consumed in B2B? So, how much of the stuff that we create is actually read, or watched, or listened to? And how can we use that knowledge to create better content?”
It’s a damned good point. We spend all this time writing blogs, ebooks, white papers and video scripts, but who knows how much of it finds its way to an actual reader?
Katie Colbourne, Senior Manager of Global Demand Generation at Basware, that’s who. So we asked her.
This month’s episode also features a copywriting tip from Katherine Wildman, and Ettie Bailey-King is back with more of her brilliant inclusive writing advice.
Plus, get insights from our co-host, Matt Laybourn, founder of Rockee.io – the first B2B audience feedback platform.
You can read a full transcript of this episode at the bottom of this page.
Too long; didn’t listen
Katie brings a lot of valuable insight to this month’s podcast episode. If you find yourself without the time to listen, here are some highlights:
- Not a lot of people are reading (but that’s OK)
B2B audiences are smaller than B2C ones, meaning you’ll always have fewer readers. But don’t get disheartened, it’s not an entirely bad thing.
The effort to create B2B content isn’t wasted because that small number of people still need to find the answers they’re looking for. And often, the answers they need only occasionally are the most influential in the buying process.
“Your evergreen content is your bread and butter information around your proposition – your solutions, your fact sheets – which aren’t being read every single day, but actually they’re being read when they need to be,” Katie explains.
- Monitor metrics that indicate engagement
Keeping track of clicks, views and plays will tell you how far your content is going, and how many people it’s reaching – but it can’t tell you how many people are really engaged.
“By the time somebody lands on a web page, I’d love to tell you 100% of them engage with it and read every single word, and they fill in all the forms you want them to,” says Katie. “But actually, we’re talking sort of 10-to-15% of those people doing something on that page.”
To track engagement it’s important to look at how many people are taking action based on your content – whether that be following links, commenting, sharing, subscribing to a blog or newsletter, booking a meeting or making a purchase.
- Get to know your audience
At the end of the day, it’s not about creating content that will go viral, it’s about helping your readers solve their business challenges – and that starts with understanding their pain points.
“If you’re producing content that doesn’t resonate with your audience, in today’s world, then you’re doing something wrong,” Katie adds. “Because I think that’s a massive alert that you’re not listening to your customers and you don’t know your customers.”
Katie says to research your target audience, run focus groups and questionnaires, and read reports about them. It’s the same advice we got last month from Claire Drumond, Head of Marketing for Jira Software and Agile Solutions at Atlassian, when we answered “What content works best for B2B audiences?”
Get a sneak peek at what’s inside…
1:03 – Meet our hosts, David McGuire and Matt Laybourn
4:20 – What’s Katherine Wildman’s favourite short copywriting tip?
5:15 –We ask Katie Colbourne this month’s big question
23:00 – Guest co-host Matt talks useful metrics and analytics?
32:48 – Ettie Bailey-King shares some inclusive writing advice
You provide the question, we’ll deliver the answer
To get your burning B2B questions answered, just send us a voice memo at podcast@radix-communications.com. And if there are any other thoughts you’d like to share, you can find us on Twitter @radixcom.
How to listen:
- You can download the episode here. (Right-click and select “Save As”.)
- Or you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts.
- Alternatively, add our RSS to your preferred podcast player.
Credits
- We’re grateful to Irene Triendl for the great question.
- And thanks, Katie Colbourne, for sharing your breadth of knowledge.
- Thanks to Matt Laybourn and his fancy microphone. You were an excellent co-host.
- And, of course, thanks to both Katherine Wildman and Ettie Bailey-King, for some wonderful copywriting advice.
- And thank you, for listening.
Podcast editing and music by Bang and Smash.
Transcript: B2BQ&A 108: How much B2B content actually gets read?
Irene Triendl: How much content actually gets consumed in B2B? So, how much of the stuff that we create is actually read, or watched, or listened to? And how can we use that knowledge to create better content?
Matt Laybourn: That’s a really interesting question. Let’s ask Katie Colbourne from Basware.
David McGuire: Hello listener, you are completely welcome to B2BQ&A, the podcast where we go in search of an answer to your question about B2B content writing. This is episode 108.
Matt: In a few moments, Katie Colbourne from Basware will tell us how much of the B2B Creative Director at Radix Communications, the B2B writing agency. And we have a super interesting guest co-host this episode. It’s Matt Laybourn from Rockee. Matt, thanks for joining us.
Matt: Thank you, David. Really, really appreciate it. Thank you for having me on.
David: No, absolutely. I think people will actually be quite interested when they hear what Rockee does. It’s a new thing, right? So could you introduce it to us?
Matt: Yeah. So Rockee is an audience feedback platform that is hopefully going to help B2B marketers to make even better content.
David: All right, so how does it do that then?
Matt: Good question. So it’s basically from a bit of a challenge that we found from speaking with different marketing leaders, performance marketers or creators, demand gen marketers, we were all kind of looking at what content does and hypothesising about what the good version of it looks like.
So some of us use Google Analytics, some of us used like, I don’t know, SEM, Rush and SEO tools, some of us are just looking at the amount of leads that come out of it. And all of those essentially are proxies around what content does. Now, what good content is, is in the eye of the beholder. So Rockee is designed to basically ask the people who matter most and that is the people who have actually read that piece of content. So it’s basically a feedback widget at the moment that sits on a website, which is collecting that data, getting insights as to whether the content was useful, helpful, solved problems, all the things that content is supposed to do.
So yeah, early stages, we’re only a beta stage at the moment and taking on a few early users. But yeah, we’re really excited and seeing some really interesting data already.
David: Oh, that sounds very interesting. Sounds like another very interesting data source that marketers will have, and not tell copywriters if anything works.
Matt: That’s the problem. We’ve got to tell the creators, man. We can’t just keep holding that to ourselves and then not putting it into good briefs and actually helping you guys – because the feedback loop is a thing that we hypothesise about as a theory that has never come into action.
David: When we do emails, we get asked to do different headlines and things for A/B testing. And then they never tell us which one worked.
Matt: Wow. Yeah. It’s weirdly reassuring to hear everyone having the same challenge, put it that way. Because you’re like, is someone doing this amazingly that no one told us about.
David: I know that you’re going to have lots to say about this topic, this question that we’re talking about today. But we’ll come on to that. Before that, could you tell the listener how they can get in touch with the show, please?
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. So, listener if you have any comments or suggestions you can find Radix on LinkedIn or Twitter @radixcom. Or if you want us to answer your question on a future episode, record a quick voice note and send it in by email: podcast@radix-communications.com.
David: That’s marvellous. Thank you very much.
Katherine Wildman: Hello, this is Katherine from Haydn Grey. And my favourite short copywriting tip is to remember that you’re only ever writing to one person at a time. So it’s never about the collective, all of us, some of you – nothing like that. It’s a conversation between me and what’s happening in my head, and the reader and what’s happening in their head. One to one, very intimate, very privileged. So only, only ever write to that one person. Thanks for having me!
Matt: Thanks, Katherine. That’s really great advice. So simple, but so very effective.
David: Yeah, do you know that might actually be my favourite copywriting tip of all time?
Matt: I can see why. It’s time for our big question for this episode, and it comes from Irene Triendl at Say What?
Irene: Hi podcast listeners. I have a question that pretty much bugs me every time I create a content programme for one of my clients, or actually write any content in the B2B space. And it’s how much content actually gets consumed in B2B? So how much of the stuff that we create is actually read, or watched, or listened to?
Especially in B2B, I think we all share that belief that content works, because we assume that when the vendor shares valuable expertise and shares knowledge about their market, they’re able to engage their prospect, and they drive leads because they build authority, they build credibility.
And we know that B2B tech companies invest a lot in content creation, and hope they measure the value of that. Yeah, so I would love to hear from someone who measures this sort of stuff. That’d be super interesting. And ultimately what can we learn from that form for our content practice? And how can we use that knowledge to create better content?
David: There’s a lot to answer there, Irene, but you are absolutely right. As content creators, it can be super easy just to publish and think that job’s done. But actually, what does happen next? And how do we respond to that and learn from it?
Okay, Matt, I know you have lots of thoughts on this. But first, I’d like to hear from Katie Colbourne, who’s Senior Manager for Global Demand Generation at Basware. I started by asking her Irene’s question, essentially, how much of the content we write actually does get read?
Katie Colbourne: So I think that’s a tough question to answer. But my gut would tell me that probably not all of it, or not a lot – surprising as that may sound. Just because first hand from obviously working in the industry for several years now, I know that we spend lots of effort and time producing white papers, research reports, case studies, etc.
But actually, because we’re talking about B2B audiences, they’re quite niche anyway, if you compare that to B2C, and then if you consider conversion rates and engagement, and all of those types of things, by the time you actually get down to the bottom of that funnel, if you want to call it that, I think those numbers are actually quite small.
But what I would say is that I don’t think that’s a bad thing, because I think it does, for the people who are looking for that content, they need to engage with it, they need the case studies for an RFP, or whatever it might be. I think the effort sort of pays off and does that job.
But then you also always have that evergreen content, which I think is always there. It’s kind of your bread and butter information around your proposition: your solutions, your fact sheets, which again, they’re not being read every single day, but actually they’re being read when they need to be. So when you get to certain points, no conversation with prospect, and all of those types of things.
And then I would add one more thing to that. I think if we’re talking about research reports, or anything that’s considered thought leadership, or current affairs, or anything like that, I would always say there’s a naturally a big peak in the way that’s being absorbed and read, but then that will naturally tailor off. And it’s harder to make those types of materials be evergreen content after a certain number of months. So that’s a long answer. Hopefully, that sort of answers that in many ways.
David: I think so. So to summarise, it’s a small audience for a lot of content.
Katie: Yeah, exactly.
David: But that’s okay because potentially it’s a high-value audience or it’s a valuable job that it’s doing when it is used. And also, some of them are like a long, slow burn with a little audience, but stretched out. And some do attract a lot of attention, but those might not be the most valuable pieces in the long term.
Katie: Yeah.
David: Wow. That’s interesting. You mentioned engagement and readership and things like that. In that situation, where you have different kinds of audiences for different kinds of things, what kind of metrics do you think are sensible to define what a B2B piece of content is doing?
Katie: Yeah, so that depends on obviously the piece of content. So if we’re looking at things like blogs, it would be looking at the number of page views that you’ve got, anybody that shared that blog with anybody on Twitter or email, whatever that might be – so they forwarded it on to a colleague. And equally as well, if there are links in that blog, if they’ve clicked on that. So again, it’s not just saying who’s looked at the blog, but actually who’s engaged, digested it, and read it.
If you’re talking about videos, it would obviously be video plays, but importantly, video plays sort of to the end or further on in, so you can see those statistics in most of these video platforms now.
And then I think when you’re talking about things like white papers, or research reports, it would naturally be conversions. And that’s what I was meaning around my comment earlier about, “there’s a small audience,” because by the time somebody lands on a web page, I’d love to tell you 100% of them engage with it and read every single word, and they fill in all the forms you want them to. But actually, we’re talking sort of 10 to 15% of those people doing something on that page. So again, that number is sort of dramatically reduced. So I think those would be the main statistics we would be looking for.
But then also as well, I would be also considering things like blog subscriptions, and newsletter subscriptions. So these are kind of some of those softer metrics. But if somebody’s coming to the site from their own organic searching, or whatever it might be, those are types of things that would indicate an interest there, and that they’ve been they’ve liked the content, and they want to see more and hear more from us.
David: So again, it’s not just the raw number of how many people are reading, it’s actually what those people are doing, and how much it’s kind of affecting, or engaging them, or moving them forward through the process.
Katie: Yeah, because I think, obviously, in the B2C world, you get millions of views on a YouTube video, you can see that when they release movie trailers and things like that, trailers even.
But that’s never going to be the case in B2B. And even if you did get, let’s say, I don’t know, 100,000 views on a video, the propensity of those viewers actually having any intention to buy now or if in a time in the future is so low that actually – that’s fantastic as a vanity metric and obviously, it’s great to sort of say. But if you get 100 viewers that are all engaged, that’s actually much better, in my opinion – just in the context of B2B that is, not B2C obviously.
David: Yeah, absolutely. So, you mentioned 100 really engaged viewers there. And I guess it depends on the brand and a lot of other things. But when you’re looking at the bucket of metrics that you’re looking at for different pieces of content, are there particular numbers, particular benchmarks that kind of give you a rule of thumb that – “yeah, this one!” – what stands out to you as a success? What does that look like when you’re evaluating content?
Katie: So I think if we want to get a general perception of how the content is, what good quality it is, if it’s interesting, engaging, all of these types of things, we would actually be looking across all of the different channels because that gives you I think, a fair representation, rather than just say, looking at people that are coming on to the website.
So are people engaging in it on LinkedIn? Are they engaging with it on Twitter? Are they clicking through from newsletter features? Equally, are our telling us that that was a great piece of content, it helped to start a conversation? So some of those kind of metrics or opinions, if you like, are a mixture of offline as well. If you’re at an event booth, is that the most sort of picked up asset? If you’re presenting on it, similarly, in an event Keynote, are people actively asking questions about it?
So there’s so many ways, I think, to define what a great piece of content is. But I think, again, for us, for me anyway, in my career, it’s always been a piece of content that has enough breath to be repurposed in lots of different ways. So it’s not just the white paper itself, or fact sheet, whatever it is, but actually, it’s something that can be divided up and used across different channels and definitely spread kind of the content from the asset itself.
David: Yeah, one sidebar to that I’m interested in is, you mentioned kind of the offline stuff, things getting picked up at events, people asking questions about it, that kind of stuff. Is it possible to capture that anywhere and include that in your reporting? Or is that all sort of done through word of mouth in your marketing department?
Katie: Yeah, again, I think it depends. So obviously, if we’re talking about sales guys sending a prospect a piece of content and then talking about it with them in a follow-up meeting or something, there are various tools you can actually use now to do that, to see if the prospect has engaged with it.
So you can add that to any anecdotes that also come out of the meeting. So there’s tools like Showpad, Brandfolder, all of these types of ones that allow you to see if a prospect has engaged. And that’s just coming from an Outlook email or even a LinkedIn InMail invite, whatever it might be. If it’s at an event or kind of a round table, then I guess, that is more anecdotal. Unless she was sort of capturing contacts at booths for an asset, but I think people tend to veer away from that these days, because it’s such a kind of blocker.
David: Yeah, I suppose even these days when everything is quantified, sometimes you just get a sense of the temperature of the response to something that can’t always be quantified and measured, I guess.
One of the things I wanted to ask is, how common is it that a piece of content really doesn’t deliver? Like, it just doesn’t resonate, nobody’s interested? Like, does that happen a lot? Is that half the time, is that one in 10? How many ones are there that really, really engage the audience? And how many are there where it’s like, crickets? Because there must be some that for whatever reason, just miss right?
Katie: Yeah, trying to think now. Let’s have a think. Do you know what? I think sometimes, and this isn’t any disrespect to you because I know you’re agency side, but – and I’ve been agency side for 10 years – but there have been a number of ideas over the years that we’ve suggested to clients where we suggest it because it’s cool, if you know what I mean.
So it’s actually a good idea that creators are really excited about it. But when you actually deliver that piece of content, the prospects aren’t interested because it’s just a different audience. So I think sometimes, I’d like to say that doesn’t happen as often now, I’m talking sort of years ago, when you’d sort of come up with these ideas, and not do the research.
But I think as long as you know – if you’re close to your audience and your customers, so not just from your own research, so focus groups, questionnaires, whatever it might be, but actually, you’re reading reports about them, like what are their challenges, what are their pain points, then I’d like to think that in today’s world, most of the content that you do write is relevant to somebody, it’s not a complete, sort of, waste of time.
But I think sometimes when we try and do like the bigger ideas in B2B or do those kinds of things that we want to go viral, and again, I am talking years ago now when that was kind of a thing. You know, when clients say, “Oh, can we have something that goes viral?” I think those are the ideas that, actually, they kind of don’t work.
David: But so these days, the less that you’re kind of trying to be cool, the more that you’re plugged into your audience – you might not always get those bits of content that just get a stratospheric response. But similarly, your baseline will be better. There’ll be relatively these days, relatively few pieces of content, then that just don’t resonate at all, because everything kind of has its place for someone. Is that right?
Katie: Yeah. I think that’s a fair summary. I would say that if you’re producing content that doesn’t resonate with your audience, in today’s world, then I think you’re doing something wrong, really. Because I think that’s a massive alert that you’re not listening to your customers and you don’t know your customers.
David: Wow.
Katie: Well, I don’t know, that’s just my opinion. But we –
David: No, no, I think it’s valid.
Katie: Yeah. And also I think there’s less of that in B2B as well, because obviously, budgets are smaller, things like that. So you do have to be really focused on what you’re doing. You have to be constantly thinking about “what is the cost of getting a new customer? How much is this going to convert?” There’s that constant ROI of marketing spend being analysed in B2B and that’s across the board, that’s not just where I am now. That’s always been a thing. So I think you have to deliver.
David: Yeah, absolutely. So the advice then for the listener is really to listen to the audience to avoid a piece of content that really doesn’t get read. Do you have any advice practically on how they can do that? Or which metrics to watch to see if it’s working?
Katie: Yeah, so – well I think before you even do that, I would just really ask yourself, if you think this is going to add value to somebody, and is it interesting?
So I used to do loads of social media training a few years ago and that was the first one we used to always say about posting tweets, LinkedIn posts, whatever. “Is this actually interesting? Would you want to read it?” So I would always start with that question.
And then in regards to actually releasing those answers to your audience, I would do maybe some desk research, see if there’s any latest studies on sort of what are the top challenges, and you’d be looking for sort of industry analysts, research preferably, but even analysts from sort of business publications like The Economist, they’re always good ones to look at to get that broader view.
And then if you have any customers that you can call on, or if you can speak to any of the account managers in your business that are talking to the customers regularly, just ask them what they’re hearing, what are people’s challenges, what are they struggling with, what what’s working for them as well, like, where do they want to sort of keep building on? And then to me, it’s a bit like a jigsaw, you have to sort of fit all of that research together, to come up with a piece of content, hopefully, that works, and engages and delivers.
And I would also look at what’s worked before as well for yourself. So look at your top-performing assets, so views, watches, shares, all of those types of metrics. And then equally as well, I would see what your competition are doing, that’s always really good to be aware of, because whatever they’re focusing on, obviously, I’m not saying copy your competition, but it’s good to be aware of the challenges their customers are seeing too. So I think it’s that rounded picture that you need. They’re very simple in isolation. But when you bring them all together, I think that that really gives you that holistic view for what your audience wants to engage with.
David: That’s amazing. Katie, thank you so much. If the listener wants to hear more from you, get more of your kind of wisdom and insights, where can they find you?
Katie: Yes, so you can obviously connect with me on LinkedIn. Or you can follow my Twitter handle, which is just my full name, Katie Colbourne.
David: That’s perfect.
Katie: I tweet regularly there.
David: Thanks, Katie, you’ve taken Irene’s question in a really interesting direction there. Matt, I know, you’ll be revving your engines wanting to weigh in on this one. So what stood out for you from what Katie had to say?
Matt: There’s loads, loads of really good stuff to go through there. One of the things that actually was really sort of landed for me was around audience size and total addressable market. And I think to answer kind of the overarching question “how much content actually gets seen?” Sometimes very little of it.
And that’s not a bad thing. I completely agree with what Katie’s saying on it, because that one article, that one blog, that was sat somewhere on the website that you wouldn’t expect it to be, might have influenced the most important person in that decision making unit. It might have been the thing that made them go, “You know what, I really want to work with this company.” And that unlocks a huge deal, a huge opportunity for that business, which is absolutely incredible.
So I think we have to be quite smart between some of the metrics we look at and what the relevance is sometimes, because I think we get lost in those comparisons you can see with this YouTube video got 100,000 views, she said that perfectly. Like, it’s not gonna happen in B2B, our market might only be 100,000 people, not all of them are going to watch that video. So it’s so relative.
David: Oh, it might be way fewer than that and sometimes intentionally so. Sometimes you intentionally write a piece that’s for a subset of a subset of a subset of a market. So within a vertical, it’s someone in a particular job role that’s facing a particular challenge, at a particular time.
And that’s why ABM works so well, because the content is so laser-focused on a particular person, facing a particular challenge. And no one looks at ABM content and goes but the audience is really small. That’s the point. So if the size of the audience and the size of the readership is not necessarily that meaningful a metric, what kind of metrics actually are useful in improving content, do you think?
Matt: Yeah, it’s a good point because we rely, as marketers, so much off of quant data. And I feel like such a nerd when I talk like that because I – “was quant or qual data”. And I look at it like that because I look at numbers. But we rely so heavily off of those quiet kind of quant metrics. And the difficulty is sometimes, is ascertaining where the real value in some of those metrics are.
So you’ve got your distribution metrics, just reaching people and having an exposure of your content or your advertising, be it on a website, social media, whatever it is, isn’t necessarily a metric of quality or performance. It just shows your distribution strategy worked, and you found the people. So we can’t measure things like that. But can Katie really came on to it quite nicely, it’s when you start to work into that data, you find some real meaning and value.
So I suppose the next line of metrics you look at are around value and engagement. And those are things like how many people actually viewed the video all the way through? Or how many people scrolled to the bottom of this piece of content, or what the dwell time was on a website, for example? Now you’re starting to get some proxy around that content to say, “oh, do you know what, we’re getting good engagement with it, it’s keeping people entertained or interested”.
And then again, she said it perfectly, the next kind of value is, are people doing things with this content? Are they commenting on it on social media? Are they leaving notes on YouTube videos, or on your LinkedIn posts? Are they sharing it? Are they tagging people in? That shows you’re getting traction, and obviously, we know social media algorithms love that as well.
And then there’s the final metrics, which I think are possibly the most valuable. The first one is obviously has it led to someone going to make a very positive action. So in the content itself, is there a call to action? “We want you to do X or Y, or take a demo,” whatever that might be. That’s a great indicator that content has influenced that person or changed their behaviour
And the other thing that I think is valuable and interesting, and I know has been mentioned on previous podcasts, is their feedback. Is there someone saying, “you know what, I read this, and I really enjoyed it. It helped me solve a problem, it gave me an answer to a challenge I couldn’t face, or I found it incredibly entertaining or amusing”. Those are the kind of the real deep qualitative metrics which we can go, “do you know what, we’re making valuable stuff here. We’re really adding stuff to organisation”. So, a super long answer there but there’s lots of different tools to look at.
David: Yeah. Are there any sort of, when you look at the quant data – see you’ve got me doing it now – when you look at that quantitative data, are there particular benchmarks or rules of thumb within that, where you can kind of say, well, if there’s one piece – if someone’s spent four minutes on something, if someone has spent five minutes on something, if someone has read 80% of it – is there something where it will then correlate with the other qualitative stuff, where you kind of go, alright, if the average read time on this, the average dwell time is beyond a certain amount, we kind of know it’s doing well, or are there so many variables, that you can’t actually get any meaningful rules of thumb out of it?
Matt: Yeah, you’ve just uncovered one of the biggest problems we have, because I don’t think there’s many people doing this well. So I suppose the two metrics I would always consider the most valuable out of quant is essentially, the dwell time, which also in GA4 now is, we’re kind of looking at as engagement rate. And also something called scroll through rate – so how many people have got maybe towards the bottom of the page. But these are still imperfect indicators, they’re proxies.
So as a perfect example of that, to say the best dwell time has got to be relative to the content. So I don’t know how big that piece of content is, unless I’ve got a very fancy spreadsheet or Data Studio report which tells me that blog should take someone five minutes to read therefore we expect a dwell time of five minutes. And to have that data married up with stuff that’s coming out of analytics, there’s only a very small amount of very sophisticated marketers who are doing that to kind of go “we’re really getting high read-through rates and engagement rates of our content”.
But that’s kind of what I mean, there’s a lot of imperfections there as well. Even things like the UX of the website, the layout and structure of how you put that content, has it got too many images in? Is it hard to scroll? There’s so many things, so many variables, as you say, which actually make it not quite as black and white as we need. So I think it’s a challenge we have to be talking about more in content marketing.
David: A thing I hadn’t planned to ask you about actually, but you mentioned there so I’m gonna is GA four. So the new Google Analytics. So engagements in there as a metric, is there stuff in there that’s going to help people make better content, do you think? Or is it too early to say, because I know GA four was a thing that people are just beginning to get their heads around, if they’re even doing that at the moment.
Matt: Yeah, and we’ve got to get onto it quickly, because Google are kicking out the old version of Google Analytics, I think summer of next year. So we have to embrace GA4 now, or similar packages – other providers are available, of course.
But it’s an interesting one, because they’re much more goal focused. And it is essentially a tool that is built around website performance, as opposed to content performance, we have to remember that. So we’re just trying to find the best bits of it to fit into what we do. But because they’ve got engagement rate, which is sort of replacing things like bounce rate as kind of a primary metric. And it’s also bringing into how people are scrolling through a page and how long people are staying on that page. That’s going to be a really meaningful metric.
But it is hopefully going to be easier as well in terms of managing internal attribution of our websites – so how many people read this content, and then went on to make a meaningful action or meaningful engagement. But we call it goals or conversions or events, depending on your setup. It should be a lot easier for that, and understanding what valuable customer journeys look like.
As to how we plan it into our content, in terms of how do we improve our content, that’s still going to be a bit of an interesting one. And I think it needs a bit more exploring, but it’s certainly going to help us understand the information architecture of our websites and how we structure our content, I think that’s going to definitely improve that.
But I suppose the creative element is a little bit of an unknown at this point. And I suppose that’s kind of where my theory is, you still need that qual to get the context behind what good content looks like. Because we’re always sort of gonna guess, from just quant alone, so whoever gets that blend right first is the winner, I think.
David: Matt, thanks. That’s fascinating. I could genuinely talk about this all day. But we only have so many minutes in the podcast. Where can people get in touch with you if they’d like to know more about this stuff?
Matt: Yeah. So best bet, find me on LinkedIn. Just look for Matt Laybourn. There’s not many of me, I’ve got a weird enough name for it. Or check out Rockee.io and yeah, see our new website hopefully launching this week.
David: Wow, amazing. Good luck with that. Perfect. So, before we wrap up, there’s just time for some more inclusive writing advice from Ettie Bailey-King.
Ettie Bailey-King: Avoid generalisations. Generalisations, broad umbrella terms and catch-all terms obscure difference. If you’re talking about asexual people, then just say asexual people, don’t hide under a broad umbrella term like the LGBTQ+ community. Unless of course you are talking about the entire community and then, of course, feel free to use that term. But just be sure that you’re genuinely speaking about the right level of detail here and you’re not trying to sweep people in under a blanket definition of their identities, their wants and their needs.
Matt: Thank you Ettie, that’s really clear, useful advice. And listener, you can hear more inclusive writing advice from Ettie next time. We should also thank Katie Colbourne for answering Irene’s questions so very well. And Katherine Wildman for the writing tip earlier. Plus, of course, thanks Irene Triendl, whose question kicked the whole episode off.
David: And thank you, Matt. You really have been an excellent co-host – no wonder you have a fancy microphone. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.
Matt: Yeah, very much so thank you so much for having me on. Yeah, hopefully some of this is some valuable stuff for the people out there.
David: Yeah, I’m sure people are nodding along and really beginning to think about this stuff and how they can use it. Remember listener, it could be your question we answer in a future episode. If you have a question for B2BQ&A to answer, email a voice memo to podcast@radix-communications.com. Or find us on social media.
I’ll see you next time for another B2BQ&A. Until then, make good content and remember, once you’ve experienced excellence, you’ll never again be content with mediocrity. Yeah, actually now I think of it that sounds more like a warning. Oh well.
Matt and David: Goodbye!
