by I’m sure everyone read last week’s story – it was everywhere, on entertainment, tech and general news sites – about the study from Netflix where they said they know which episode of a show it is that gets people hooked. Different shows obviously have different pivotal episodes that proved to be the key for people committing to a full season of the show or to the entire run, or whatever it is that’s currently available on Netflix.
The story was essentially Netflix’s way of proving – likely to investors who see the production costs for original material skyrocketing – that its “release all the episodes of a season at once” strategy was a good one since people could get to that pivotal episode sooner and not be bound to the serialized release structure that still dominates network TV. But it also prompted a question to start circling in the back of my mind:
As a content marketer, do I know what it is that got the audience for my agency or clients hooked on that content? Where did they go from someone who wandered in from a Twitter or Facebook post by a friend or an email from a coworker to subscribe via email or RSS or follow your update on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or anything else? What’s prompting them to take what I call “positive actions?”
The answer to these and other questions all usually lie in the data, but only if you have models setup correctly. You need to not only be tracking site visits and conversions but also be looking at all your data and be able to connect actions with the correct correlations. So if X post on Twitter generated Y site visits and Z engagements on Twitter itself, how many new followers did that post spur? How many email subscribers did that blog post generate?
More and more tools are around to help these kinds of analytics be brought to light. But it still takes someone who can read the resulting analytics correctly and say This resulted in That. Doing that will your content marketing efforts to the next level as begin to see what content is bringing real long-term value by creating long-term fans.
