By Janus Boye
Noz Urbina is a globally recognized leader in the field of content strategy and customer experience
What are the common mistakes that content teams make when developing their content measurement strategy and how can you fix them?
In a recent member call, Noz Urbina shared how to position content in a way that resonates with the organisation that funded it, and the users who consume it, by focusing measurements on customer journeys and top user tasks.
Looking back on two decades of project experience, Noz has become a little obsessed with measurement. Despite having more raw data than ever on content and user experience, content teams still measure their output with metrics like simple hits, likes, clicks, and shares.
Instead, we should be measuring whether it fulfilled its reason for being. Below I’ve shared my notes and highlights from the call. Further down you can also find the slides and the entire recording.
Getting content right requires measurement
Just at the very opening of the member call, Noz put on a big slide with only these words: What’s wrong?
As he answered on the next slide, analytics data is not business metrics. Or to quote:
We have fallen into the trap of measuring what vendors can do easily - interaction data. Those are not real business metrics
A business metric is indeed a data point, but remember that while every KPI is a metric, not every metric is a KPI. You may have a KPI which is not directly measurable, but still you need to report on it.
These are the kind of metrics that senior management really cares about. How fast are we growing? Are our customers happy and do we make a profit? Slide shared by Noz Urbina
Moving onwards to content in all its shapes and forms today, the obvious question that many organisations would like to answer is: What’s the return-on-investment of this piece of content?
It’s not about clicks, downloads, impressions or likes, and as many have found out and Noz also confirmed, the real return-on-investment can be extremely difficult to measure. Still, as Noz said, you can get to it by proxy, e.g. by using probability numbers. Noz shared an example, where the customer knew that people who look at 6 pieces of content are twice as likely to become premium customers. That’s not 1:1 proof, but it’s good enough data to justify investing in good content as the people who engage with our content are more likely to spend money.
Noz suggested finding multiple compelling correlations of content behaviours to commercial behaviours to tell your ROI story.What should we be doing better?
To quote Noz:
“The focus has been on what was easiest to measure. We need to focus on what adds real value. To our users. To our employers. To the world”
At this point, I felt like Noz was already quite convincing and he had the full attention of the group of participants, but to further bring his point across, he weaved in first a McKinsey quote and then a Gartner one. Let’s stay with McKinsey from The three Cs of customer satisfaction:
“Measuring satisfaction on customer journeys is 30% more predictive of overall customer satisfaction than measuring each individual interaction”
He then moved onwards to this 2019 post from Gartner: What’s Your Customer Effort Score?
Customer effort is 40% more accurate at predicting customer loyalty than customer satisfaction.
So what does real value look like to you? The advice from Noz was to better understand customer expectations, then design everything to meet them and finally measure whether you did so. Or as he also said: Customer effort is the new net promoter.
Getting ready to measure content
Avoiding making the call the perfect consultant pitch – lots of pretty words without actionable tactics – Noz shared quite a few helpful tips. Before you start measuring, his recommendation was to consider these two deliverables:
Journey maps: A shared, consistent definition of what you’re measuring (who, what, when, where, why?)
Taxonomy: A shared framework that makes numbers make sense
Customer journeys have been the big thing in the past decade and I’ve seen some impressive ones on the walls of meeting rooms and recently also in large digital boards. Building on what he said earlier in the call on customer effort, he takes a much simpler approach as illustrated on the slide below:
A customer journey is equal to questions divided by time. It’s as simple as that according to Noz Urbina
If you consider this for your product or service, just think about the questions that the customer needs to ask him or herself to get through the journey and then map that out by how much time it takes. Sounds oversimplified? It is simple yes, but it will help you zoom in on the customer effort required, and therefore identify the content required to support – and hopefully minimise – that effort.
If you want to get more sophisticated,you can also start to consider emotions. So Noz offered a slightly more advanced formula:
Emotions help you prioritise content efforts and decide on the right tone and approach. An example of this could be car insurance. You are probably quite calm when you buy the insurance, but if you ever need it, your emotions might be quite stressed. For more on this read our notes from an earlier member call on how to design for the human stress response.
Noz continued with one final iteration, where he also added context to the equation as illustrated below
This might look like advanced math, but remember, it’s all about the customer effort based on answering the real human questions and less so about drawing out the usual journey maps, which shows the beginning and end of the journey and details each and every step along the way.
In his presentation, he then went into examples from Big Pharma and Big Fintech of content-only metrics – like time to understand a piece of content or the confidence it inspired in a consumer – and also how those were mapped to channels and onwards to business metrics.
Regardless of channel, Noz shows you can measure the difference between pieces of content.
Finally, he talked about how we need to not only be data rich, but also insight rich.
Bringing it back to the metrics that management cares about, he closed with this one. Where we started with growth, customer satisfaction, and profit, we now have content correlations with commercial outcomes, effort and satisfaction scores, and content process efficiencies:
Learn more about improving the value of your content
Back in 2012, Noz co-authored the book Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits with Rahel Anne Baillie.
A year ago, I tried to summarise some of our recent conversations in the Boye community with this post: What’s going on with content? Towards the beginning of that post, I used this good Noz Urbina quote
“Content is not King. Content is a product.”
You can also get out from behind your screen and join one of our upcoming group meetings or conferences. Those are great for learning and networking!
Finally, you can also download the slides (PDF) or lean back and enjoy the entire 28-minute recording from the call