From clickbait fails to problem solving - a B2C content approach we can learn from
- Summary:
- I don't see a good deconstruction of clickbait often. A recent piece by FirstRound makes the case, while presenting a worthwhile alternative. Content that solves customer problems wins. Here's how it's done, and how it's measured - along with my critical review. I also contrast B2C and B2B content strategy.
But in FirstRound's The [Adjective] [Number] Things You Need to Know About Clickbait. we get a different twist. It's a long-form piece detailing the field views of Tara-Nicholle Nelson, now a book author and consultant.
If all we had here was a debunk of clickbait, I'd be disappointed. Clickbait is at best a weak play, at worst a slow-burn alienation of the brand's target audience. But this First Round piece presents an easy-to-grasp content alternative, along with the type of metrics that support it (hint: the heck with counting clicks!). It's a long piece, so I'll break out the high points for you, and critique.
Why clickbait fails - even in B2C
I'm not going to spend much time on the clickbait part of the article. I think we all understand that for a B2B audience, clicks are cheap and earning topic authority is hard. Winning trust while building an active community is the B2B play.
But even in B2C, consumers will trample on brands that betray their trust, with Yelp, Amazon and app store reviews serving up viral justice. Bad reviews and influencer smackdowns give a sour aftertaste to any viral clickbait benefits. Two misconceptions about clickbait before we move on:
1. It's not clickbait if you deliver on the article title. This is not a war on outrageous or clever blog titles. Titles matter. But to sustain brand credibility, titles must deliver the goods upon clicking.
2. Avoiding clickbait with quality only works if it's relevant to your brand. The knee-jerk response to avoiding clickbait is to create better stuff. But better stuff that's outside your brand's audience is a questionable investment - at least when you compare it to projects with customer relevance. Example: Adobe could have funded an appealing YouTube comedy series. Obviously the brand-relevant CMO.com is a far better content/community investment.
Clickbait is fueled by worshipping the wrong KPIs. As per First Round:
Building a content team is often an inspired decision, so the content is inspired, too — at first. Then someone tinkers with headlines and puts KPIs on the program that are misguided. The only way the team knows to meet them is to publish more and publish more bait-y headlines,” Nelson says. “You then see content performance decline and ultimately readers stop clicking."
No one is saying clickbait doesn't work in a short term, myopic way. It just falls apart over time. Nelson:
You can buy growth through big ad spends, but you can’t buy engagement. That requires a steadfast commitment to quality over quantity.
Beyond clickbait - solving problems with content
So what's a better approach? When I tell you that Nelson recommends mapping a customer journey and applying content to it, please don't yawn and check Facebook. She's got a big twist on how we've been trained to think about it.
Roberts advises:
- Map the so-called customer journey, but do it with rigorous attention to the problems customers have along the way. Pinpoint the problems customers are having and create content that helps them solve that pain - and progress. This is not a generalized journey map, but a careful investigation of where your customers trip up.
- Take that mapping further by isolating and researching all the "micro-moments" in the prospect's research and engagement. Figure out what triggers the search that leads them to you. Hone in on the precise moment when their attention shifts towards you, and deliver valuable content for that moment.
- Take this approach without falling into a narrow view of the customer. Expand your reach to a broader audience beyond a strict profile of existing customers.
Building this type of map is a rigorous project - that's a big reason many companies don't. But the reward is a precise grasp of where your content hits home. Nelson cites an example from her work at MyFitnessPal:
First, we mapped a person’s journey from unhealthy to healthy. We broke it down into four stages, starting with inertia and ending with the phase at which people default to healthy behavior and are resilient to being derailed. It got us clear on where we could reduce friction on a customer’s path to good health.
On customer stages and micro-moments
The trigger points you want to know: where do your prospects/customers get stuck, and what gets them unstuck?
Nelson also advises breaking down that journey into tangible stages. While working at Trulia, Nelson's team identified five distinct stages: buy a house, researching mortgages, dream home shopping, discouragement from the buying process, and then either the sale happened, or no home was found. Nelson: "Understanding that helped us build content for each part of a homebuyer’s path.”
Micro-moments hone this research further. A term coined by Google, micro-moments are those points where customers look to their devices - increasingly, their smart phones - to get that key piece of info they need to progress. Nelson cites a Trulia micro-moment: they determined that when people were paid on the 15th of a given month, they would check their bank accounts. That balance check triggered a search on the typical amount of a down payment. Trulia created content that targeted readers during that "search moment," which caused an increase in email newsletter opens, blog visits, and reader comments.
Nelson gets results. One stat: As the VP of Marketing for MyFitnessPal, she "doubled the user count to 100 million, drove a 25 percent increase in user engagement, and oversaw the eventual $475 million acquisition by Under Armour."
One more benefit in this type of mapping: you can share the process beyond your content team. This research can impact product development, HR, and customer service.
Better metrics for better content
If bad KPIs lead to bad content, we need better KPIs. Nelson advises to measure real engagement instead of relying on false approximations like opens, clicks and traffic growth. I'm not crazy about all of her metrics, but here's the list:
- Social media shares - This assesses virality, audience reach and growth.
- Repeat to unique visit ratio - You want this ration to increase over time as people return to your content.
- Time on the site, blog or app - A basic engagement metric and indicator of quality. Since people quickly abandon clickbait, you want this number to go higher.
- Net promoter score (NPS) - This number quantifies how likely people are to tell others about your brand, product or content.
- Word-of-mouth referrals - As this number grows, the lifetime value of your customers goes up - while the cost of acquiring them decreases.
- Unsubscribes - Obviously you want this number to remain low in proportion to total subscribers. When it spikes up, it could be a clickbait or irrelevant content alert.
- Comment and product sentiment, including reviews - User-generated content matters. It shows like how engaged readers are with your product or content. Reviews can have a huge impact on e-commerce sales. That's more true on the B2C side, though we're seeing the impact of review sites on less complex B2b products also.
Most of these metrics are pretty good, though I'm not s huge fan of social media shares as a measure of engagement. Shares could be viral and have no connection to subscriptions. Aside from actual sales, the strongest content measures are subscriptions and push notification enablement - folks opting into future content. Otherwise they may tweet and never come back.
I also find most social shares are fairly thoughtless, quick behaviors that don't represent real engagement with the content in question. We may need a separate category for actual social media discussions about content, which are far more valuable than compulsive retweets. Reviews, or any user-generated content, are big engagement milestones.
I'd also warn that while time-on-site is a valuable metric, many analytics programs, including Google Analytics, offer misleading time-on-site data that do not measure the time actually spent with the article (example: leaving a browser page open for half a day is hardly a good data point).
My take - good strategy, but B2B needs better metrics
Most of Nelson's advice - and metrics - applies to B2B as well. Granted, figuring out how a B2B customer gets stuck or unstuck is probably more nuanced than consumer behavior. But solving problems through content is still a terrific approach for brands. However, this is not the only form of content that matters in B2B. I'd put so-called "thought leadership" in a different, but equally important category. See my piece The two non-negotiable principles of B2B content strategy.
More content metrics to consider:
- increase in subscription-based offerings, free or paid
- special event sign ups
- increases in on-the-ground event attendance
- increase in relevant demographics - like target job titles - for sign-up content
- content isn't just about engagement and audience-building. Attribution into lead generation matters also. Attributing contgent to sales is an essential project (here's how MongoDB ties all their content to lead attribution) blog posts and meaningful references
- impact on support - e.g. reduction in first-line support inquiries
- increase in community-driven events (recent my recent video on the future of enterprise tribes with community expert Mark Finnern, where we discussed metrics for community-building.)
The clickbait temptation never really goes away. Interruption marketing - which First Round itself is unfortunately addicted to - is clickbait's twisted sister. But that's another article. Meantime, I hope this piece provides fodder for a different approach.