None of that means very much, though, if we’re not getting a return on the time we invest in creating that content. We are, after all, in the business of serving people’s digital media needs — not education. Our sites get traffic from a healthy balance of web sources including search, referral, and direct visits driven by SEO, PPC, PR, social media and some other paid advertising, earned content placements and events.
The metrics our marketing team watches span from top-of-funnel brand awareness benchmarks to customer acquisition goals.
For example, as of October, we were observing the following:
- Over 12,000 monthly searches for "Digital Asset Management" (not including related terms)
- 4,200 average unique visitors per month make it to Widen.com in a buy and/or research phase of their DAM projects
- About 330 Web visitors per month identify themselves as what we would consider “leads.” That is, they’re seeking our resources or wanting to talk about our services.
- 35-45 people per month are champions leading projects and are ready to talk with us while in a “buying mode.”
- 12-15 organizations per month are able to establish budget, authority, strategy and timeline for their DAM projects.
- 4-5 of these actually become customers each month (not including those who come to Widen by some other means, like personal referral).
These statistics are growing and accelerating on a monthly basis and a big reason for that, of course, is "content".
All of this reflects a rapid growth in marketers’ interest in DAM software to harness the value of their growing content libraries. So... what do we do with all this data?
It’s a funny mix of art, science and guessing, but we take all these figures and do our best to establish a set of objectives that we’ll shoot for each year and beyond. For instance, we estimate that, of a certain kind of DAM researcher, about a third will go on to be classified as "one that will lead the purchase of a DAM.” These kinds of ratios help us set our annual baseline marketing objectives and ensure that we’re not just keeping pace, but growing year over year.
Where does our content fit in?
Marketing content, which sometimes sits behind forms that ask consumers of that information to identify themselves, is critical to our success in reaching these goals. Here are two ways it helps us in that regard:
- Quality content helps us rank higher in Google and other search engines. Not only do we optimize the copy for search engines, but we also produce helpful stuff, which means people share it and refer to it on their networks, further amplifying its contribution to our findability.
- Quality content is also useful to our advisor and customer development teams. Even after someone’s found us in organic search or through paid advertisements, our content is of a high enough quality that it becomes a useful part of the process of educating people on our software, service and company culture even after they become customers.
It’s important to understand all those ratios for your own marketing efforts. Even if you’re doing all the right things, having that knowledge will help inform how much time and effort you put into doing even more of it.