9 - Calculating the Caliber of Content
Web site content delivers information that raises product awareness, educates the customer, and persuades them to buy, but may not be directly related to the sales transaction. A customer who reads the content today may not buy today, but weeks in the future, after viewing the content several times. And there's nothing to say that a customer made a purchase because of the information he received on the Web site. The causal connection is tenuous, but it does exist.
It also varies according to your product and customer. If you're selling a cheap commodity good, chances are that people come, buy, and leave without perusing much content. If you're selling a medical imaging device with a six-figure price tag, content is a lot more critical in making the sale. The same may be true if you're selling cheap commodities in large quantities to other businesses.
The author gets a bit vague at this point: you can have too little or too much content, determining what content is "important" to the user, and so on. I don't think he makes a point.
Savings Versus Income
One fairly straightforward approach to "value" is looking at the amount of information served from the Web site, and comparing it to the cost of distributing it via other media. (e.g., if 50,000 people downloaded your annual report and it would have cost you $7.50 to print and mail it, then having it online saved you $375,000).
EN: I've encountered comebacks to that, mainly that people are getting it online because it's convenient, and wouldn't' have requested it by mail if they had to.
Content Interaction
There are some metrics that look into the use of content, in and of itself.
"Stickiness" looks at the amount of interaction each user has with the content, on the principle that more is better. Three main measurements:
- Frequency - How often does a person visit the site
- Duration - How much time to they spend, or how many files do they download
- Reach - What percentage of the target market has visited the site during a given time period.
You can also look at a download count of key items. Some items have a clear connection to sales (downloads of a product brochure).
You can group content by its subject (information about product X or brand Y) and measure trends over time, as well as comparing one to another to gauge levels of interest.
The "freshness" of content is much-touted, and much misapplied. If you're a news site, having new content is critical to success. If your products haven't changed in five years, the "old" product brochures are still relevant, and replacing them with different versions for the sake of having "new" content does not create any value, and may annoy customers who assumed something had changed.
The Investor Relations Perspective on Content
Investor Relations also has a stake in the content, though the kinds of content provided to investors often has no bearing on product sales.
On case-study is provided from DuPont, who paid close attention to investor relations. Specifically, it categorizes its investors (individuals versus institutions, percentage of shares owned, etc.) and modified its investor-relations material to position its company as attractive to the kind of investor it wanted to attract.
No details on the techniques, or the success - merely that it was done, and that the guy they asked about it seems quite cheery about it.