CMO or content creator, you already know that content matters like never before. Everyone wants to do more content, on more channels, and understand how that content is performing.

We recently polled over 850 content marketers and strategists and found that 49% of them don’t know how their content is performing.

Watch this on-demand webinar featuring Parse.ly Co-Founder, Sachin Kamdar. In this session, he discusses the challenges content teams are facing, and breaks down why ‘content matters’ and what it takes to deliver content that proves results…using data.

You’ll come away with:

• New insights from Parse.ly’s “Content Matters” survey
• Best practices for making content analytics ‘easy’
• Examples of how organizations aligning content strategies with business goals

Transcript

Dave Cardiel:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to today’s webinar. My name’s Dave Cardiel. I head up marketing over here at Parse.ly, and we want to welcome you into our topic today: You know your Content Matters, and It’s Time to Prove It. I’m joined today by our special guest, Sachin Kamdar. He’s the co-founder and head of Parse.ly.

Sachin, welcome today. Really excited to have you on to talk about this topic.

Sachin Kamdar:

Yeah, it’s going to be a lot of fun. There’s a lot of … I’m an analytics data nerd, and we pulled in a lot of interesting data and insights here to share back with the audience, so I’m excited to get into it.

Dave Cardiel:

Same here. And for the folks on the phone, this is really exciting. This is going to be a bit of a … bringing to life a study that we launched earlier this year and we’ve deployed out around content matters and kind of how the content universe sort of thinks about content, where their areas and needs are. And so we’re going to be tapping into that here a bit. A few housekeeping items as we get started here.

First, want this to be interactive. We’ve got the chat feature available for y’all to ask questions. Sachin is here on standby to answer any questions you got, so we’ll be getting to those. We’ve got a suction dedicated to do that today. We also are live tweeting today, so hashtag content matters. Again, it’s #contentmatters. Feel free to tweet at us, share what you like. We’ll be tweeting there as well. At least our team will be. So we’re excited for that as well.

Yeah, so let’s just get into it. Sachin, I’m going to turn it over to you. You’ve got a lot to share with the audience today. So yeah, let’s talk about how content matters.

Sachin Kamdar:

Cool, thank you so much, Dave. And like Dave said, we’re really excited to have you here today. We’re going to go into some really good stuff around content, the evolution of it over the last couple of years, what people are focused around that are in your space, that are working with content today, their concerns, their fears, their excitements, we’re going to go in through all of that, and then we’re going to end with my specialty, which is analytics and how that plays a role into all of this stuff.

But before I get into that, I want to focus on the first statement here: You know your Content Matters. And we all know that content is important to the way that we operate in this digital age, but I want to really get to the meat of that statement: content matters. Why does it matter? And fundamentally, it matters because as humans, yes, that basic, as humans, we get moved by stories, by narratives, and the best way that we’re able to communicate stories online is through content: video content, text content, pictures. That is the way we communicate what is important to our audience. That’s how we communicate what’s important to our customers, our prospects, anything in and around is really about the story itself and the way that we deliver that story.

So we know that’s important because that’s driven everything in human history, the stories, the narratives, and really I think the frustration that we’ve seen in this industry is how do we actually prove how important content is, even though it’s accelerating in terms of its overall importance and budget and all the things we’re going to get into, how do we prove it. So we’re going to try to answer that here today.

So in terms of what’s on tap, we’re going to review that report that Dave just mentioned around us polling a bunch of people in this space around what matters to them in and around content. We’re going to go into why content analytics. And I’m going to tell you right now, so I’m going to give you the heads-up that this is going to be a pitch about Parse.ly. It’s important that I say that because I want you to recognize, first of all, there is going to be a pitch that will be around our product. But second of all, the reason that I want to pitch Parse.ly and why it ties into this content matters is because it’s solves a really big problem in this space. And I want to make sure that people recognize that there is a solution out there in terms of how you leverage content analytics to solve some of the core problems that this study may forth and available to us.

And then lastly, we’ve been at this for over a decade. Parse.ly has, and we’ve changed our platform, we’ve evolved it, we’ve included a bunch of new stuff. So even those people that are relatively familiar with Parse.ly, they might get something out of it. And then we’ll end with Q&A. But what we asked leading up to this is some questions that you had prior to the webinar starting. And so we actually have some of those audience questions sprinkled throughout this presentation. So we’ll get into those questions as well. And then we’ll end with just a general Q&A. So if you have any questions about the report, about analytics, about the intersection of the two, anything, happy to take that on and answer that.

As Dave said, we are live tweeting this, so if you have questions via Twitter, use that hashtag content matters. If you want to highlight things that we’re going to share today, also use that hashtag so other people can follow and get the insights that you have on top of what we’re going to be able to share. Also, there is a question module where you can ask specific questions through GoToWebinar, and then if you can’t find that or figure out the way to make that work for whatever reason, you can also just throw it in the chat. We’re monitoring that actively and we’ll be able to get things queued up there. Okay, so let’s get into it.

First and foremost, I think it’s important to recognize that digital content isn’t just a thing that you can choose to have anymore. It is a requirement. It’s been made a requirement really because of the pandemic. The pandemic showed us that digital was the main way and the main avenue that you were going to intersect with your audience, your customers, your prospects, and that if you didn’t have a really good experience, you’re going to lose out to your competitors in this space. We have the stat here, 50% of the S&P 500 will be replaced in a decade. It’s true that is going to happen, but one of the critical pillars that is going to change who’s going to last in the S&P and not is going to be your ability to create compelling digital experiences. And we all know that content is core to that. So this is no longer an option for anybody. We have to be invested in content and do it in the right way.

So we’re like, okay, well how are people doing this? How are content marketers, and I use this term broadly, anybody that’s really producing content for an objective is a content marketer. We wanted a survey, a bunch of content marketers, and just understand what the state of the industry is right now, where are they, how are they investing in this, what are their challenges, what are their problems. And so before we actually get to some of the results, we want to just poll the people that we have here. What are the biggest challenges you run into when it comes to content? So that poll is going to get thrown up for you. I’ll give people 30 seconds or so to fill this out, and then we’ll move on.

All right, should be enough. I think we could look at the results here, see what people build out. All right, very, very interesting stuff. So we have number one here, driving more engagement. Two is reporting on return, on investment. Three is driving more conversions, understanding what content create, and then targeting the right audience. So some of this stuff is very similar to what we see inside of the report that we’re about to show you. Probably the biggest point of differentiator here is the driving more engagement. That wasn’t necessarily the number one thing, although maybe if you take a broad interpretation of what engagement is and what we’re going to show you here. But really interesting, round number two and number three, those were very, very high too in terms of challenges that people ran into. So no differences really with those two.

All right. Going back to the report, first and foremost, content marketing is really, really accelerating. 66% of the survey respondents said that the change in the amount of content they created was more over the past year. So people are producing more. 50% of the people said their content marketing budget grew over the past year. So they’re creating more, they have more budget. And then when we go forward looking with this, 42% said that they wanted to invest more in content marketing. So not only did they produce more, not only did they have more budget, but they’re actually investing more in content marketing. And so there’s just an overarching trend that we’re seeing that people are double-clicking and double downing on content marketing. And that’s really accelerating in all areas.

In terms of where it makes the most impact. And this gets to a little bit of the poll that we just had here, really we can go into that first area here where it has been around creating brand awareness. That’s where we see a lot of people having results and impact from their content to educating audience, to building credibility and trust. And then we start to get … it’s almost like we skip over that engagement area. We get right to the ROI, how can we generate demand leads, how can we generate sales and revenue? How do we nurture leads? And then we see some more of the engagement stuff. So this is a little bit of a difference from … I know we talked about challenges and this is the impact, so a little bit of a different question here, but we are seeing that engagement thing fall below in the overall survey versus what you filled out. And in here, we’re really seeing brand awareness and educating audience as the top things.

And then really all the way at the bottom of the funnel, how do we generate leads, how do we generate sales, and so is this working? If this is what we want, how is this working? And in terms of driving revenue, the top three things that people are leveraging content to do is advertising placements, sponsored content and then drive traffic to sales teams. Now what’s really, really important, that’s not on the slide, but a stat that we did ask is that 53% of our respondents had no idea how their content was impacting revenue. So 53% weren’t tying the connection between content and revenue. And so pair that with the stat on the right here. If revenues goals are tied to content, is this need increasing? Of course, it is. 78% said that they needed to tie content more closely to revenue goals.

And so that I think is an overarching trend that we saw throughout this survey and the feedback anecdotal and quantitative that we got back from the respondents that ultimately what we need to do as an organization is understand how our content is helping driving our business goals, helping driving revenue at the end of the day, and we’re not there yet, 53% couldn’t connect the two, but 78% know that they want to.

In terms of just the type of content here, it’s really kind of everything they want. The respondents wanted more of all types of content, and 32% of the respondents wanted twice as much as today. So they wanted to double their content prediction, 48% said a bit more. So that’s 80% of our respondents saying that they wanted more of their content. And I bet a lot of people in this webinar are saying the same thing. We need to produce more stuff. In terms of what type of content, a lot of people wanted to produce more videos, more long-form.

And I think one takeaway that we can have from that is if you pair long form and video with the desire to create more, we know that the costs of producing those things are higher. And so it is a question of how do we take the resources that we have and apply them in those areas that are going to give us the most leverage. And though we might not have the ability to create video or long form and the scale that we want, what are things that we can do that to help supplant that.

And so this is a question for the audience here that we got or from the audience rather that we got leading up to this webinar today, which is how can we do more with less? And this really goes back to two things: how you’re understanding what your content is trying to do for your business, number one, and then two, how are you tracking this. So how are you able to understand the authors that are creating the right stuff that are impacting the end results, how are you understanding the topics that are generating the stuff, how are you able to look at your competitors and understand what is working from them based on signals that they’re seeing and leverage that to create more with less, even if we go to this thing here, even if we think about what we want here.

So the budgets that are being spent are on people, getting contractors to create more content, getting more agencies here. If we think about that, we still know that there’s going to be a lag no matter if we sign up twice as many people to produce content with us tomorrow, we know that there’s going to be a lag until we get those results. Is that going to happen in the next quarter, the next six months, maybe even a year out before we really see the results of those.

And so I go back to more with less is don’t think about what you’re going to be doing in the next 12 months. Think about what you’ve done in the past 12 months that you can really leverage and double down on to get more out of what you created. For example, one of the things that I think often get overlooked is the ability to create evergreen content that has really long life cycles. And oftentimes, it’s a really kind of easy thing to just hop on the latest kind of trend, but ignoring what’s going to have lifespans of days, weeks, even months, and creating the right content around that because the type of stuff that keeps on generating results for your businesses as opposed to those pieces of content that only have a 24 to 48-hour lifecycle. So that’s one way to do it. And again, you have to understand how that’s tying into the business overall, and you have to understand what you have enabled to achieve this.

I thought it was interesting that from the survey results here, that 58%, so the majority of this was looking at how to spend more budget on content creators and agencies versus technology, which I place under the kind of content management and analytics tools. I would assume that as we’re ramping up all of this spend inside of content marketing by hiring more people, by creating more content, the kind of secondary effect of that would be spending more on technology to make sure that we’re getting more out of less, but that’s actually not what we saw here.

So to me, this tells us, and we’ll see a little bit more about this, that we’re still in the early days with how we’re getting our results out of the content. And I think as we get into the next quarters and the next years here, you’ll start to see some of the tech trends equal or even beat what we’re seeing in terms of the content creators and agencies here.

All right, question from the audience coming out of that. How do you get executive buy-in to prioritize content marketing strategies and hire the right people? Another way to say it is, how do you get your boss to get excited about what you’re doing? How do you get your boss or whomever is approving the budget to prioritize content over other potential marketing strategies? And one of the areas that I often kind of see the kind of dynamic that happens inside of these conversations is, should we spend more on paid advertising models or should we try to build organic through content first-party data? And this goes back to what management cares about, and we all know that content is important. That’s one of the main kind of beliefs that we have here. But why is it so hard to justify it?

We know that management, this comes from a study from the Drum. Management has long been obsessed with ROIs, crucial barometer of success, but from their study, they only found that 8% of marketers were able to attribute ROI to their content plan. So if it’s only 8%, is it any surprise that it’s hard to get executive if you can’t go to an executive and say, Hey, the content program that I launched or the content that we have that are tying to digital subscriptions is generating X amount of conversions or X amount of leads. That’s the type of stuff that executives want to see because then they can say with some degree of certainty, if I double this, I’m going to get this type of result.

So I think it really is about how you’re taking the content that you have, aligning it with those business goals, and then providing the data and insights back to management so they can feel really comfortable saying, Hey, let’s double your budget. Let’s triple your budget, let’s quadruple your budget and really start to get serious about content. All right, so this is really, really super interesting to me. Again, with the bias of being an analytics junkie here, half the teams that we surveyed had no idea what was working. 49% didn’t understand how their content was performing. They did this because 9% weren’t tracking metrics at all. 8% didn’t even know if they had metrics that were tracked. And 32% said we’re tracking metrics, but we don’t know if those metrics are actually telling us what’s working or not for our audience or for our customers here.

So this is just like totally telling, you pair this question, how do you get executive buy-in to this, we know executives want ROI to this, well, 50% of us don’t know if our content is performing and all of a sudden all this stuff starts to click, right? We have to be able to track the right things here to really generate the right type of insights that are then going to compel the right people in our organizations to invest more in what we’re doing, to spend more in what we have.

Okay, so quick poll here. What dictates the content you create? Rebecca, do you want to throw that up? And we’ll give another kind of 30 seconds here.

I feel like we need jeopardy music or something in the background. Okay, yeah, I think we can share the results. Yeah. Okay, so this is exactly what we saw through our data here, almost to a T. And let’s just get into that. We saw six … Actually, you guys are a bit more distributed versus what we saw on our survey here. We saw that 69% of where content strategy decisions came from were from other teams, and in here was 46% rather from the attendees that we have here. But just think about that. Think about the fact that these requests are coming from other teams and not from you, the content experts.

Think about the fact that it’s coming from other teams and maybe not the data itself that’s telling you what’s working or not. Of course, of course, of course, of course, we have to make sure we listen to other people in the organization. We’re not acting in an entire silo here. We’re responding to what people are saying is working, what people are saying isn’t working. But we also have to look at the data. We also have to go with our own experience as experts here to decide what is going to work in terms of content.

And so again, this to me speaks to the fact that content marketing is an immature discipline right? Now. Let’s take another way to kind of frame this. Imagine if I asked this same question, but I didn’t say it in terms of content, but I said that in terms of Google Ads, right? Google search keyword ads, and I said, where are your requests coming from to create SEM or paid ads via whatever, and the response was 69% of that was, well, it’s coming from other teams. We don’t be like, what? No, we have to look at the performance of that stuff. We have to understand what’s working. We have to consider our competitors. We have to consider all of these other areas. It would be crazy if 69% of our decision-making was coming from other people telling us what to do.

And so that’s because from an ad perspective, we have all of the data and insights to understand what’s working. And we also have all of the sophistication evolution of the science of what’s working that comes into play in making those decisions. And so again, we’re earlier into where the sophistication layer is with content, but that also means that those people that really try to elevate this side of it, really try to take it to the next level. You’re going to get better results than your peers. You’re going to see more coming out of your content because the rest of the people that are trying to jockey for the attention of your audience aren’t. We know that. 69% here. So this means that we really just need to think hard about the second area, what, 53%. These aren’t all kind of mutually exclusive here. People are looking at multiple things here to make their decisions, but 53% still are looking at content analytics, content intelligence, but that means that 47%.

And so again, this just speaks to the importance of what we have here. So key takeaways in terms of what we think about with the content matter survey. And I’ll also just highlight that inside of the handout section, in the go-to webinar, you’re going to actually get the full report. So obviously, we didn’t take time to go into every aspect of that report. There’s more insights, there’s more data that you can grab from it. It’s free. Just download it, read it at your leisure. There’s a lot of interesting graphics that you can look at there too to help drive some of the insights that we cover today and some of the ones that we didn’t. So make sure to download that.

And then let’s look at some of the takeaways. So we know content marketing is hot. We know that if you are investing in digital experiences, which is every company in the world right now, you need to have content because that drives growth. We know that companies want more of it. People are producing more, they’re getting more budget, and we know that kind of they’re not taking a sophisticated way at approach in terms of how to get more of it. They’re just throwing it at agencies and consultants and content creators, whereas there’s probably smarter ways to make use of that money. And they aren’t really thinking about how should we take what we have right now and get better smarter out of it.

We know through these last few slides here that they aren’t really measuring to the degree that frankly I assumed they would be. I thought it would be much higher than the data that we saw here, and we know that we can help them produce more. The sophistication is there if you want to grab it. And so that really leads us into Parse.ly itself. Here’s the pitch for Parse.ly.

So this is where you can, if you’re not interested in the pitch for Parse.ly, you could hop off, but I think you guys all should just really take a close listen at what I’m saying you here because it is important to what you try to do as a content creator, as an editor, as a content marketer overall. So first, some social proof. Why should you listen to me? Why should you listen to what we have with content? Well, it’s because we have done this for so many different industries, for so many different organizations. And a question from an audience that we get that ties into this is, how do I connect content metrics to the business results so I can justify that investment? This is kind of similar to that executive buy-in question, but a little bit different.

And I often talk about this. These companies here, these companies that are leveraging Parse.ly, the best of them know why their content exists, and they use it to achieve their goals. It’s not enough to say, Hey, we need content. You need to know what your content is trying to achieve. And you need to be very clear about that internally, very clear about that internally with your department or group. And then externally to your executives, to your stakeholders. Are we trying to drive top-of-funnel awareness? Are we trying to generate engagement through newsletters, webinars, signups, or are we trying to use content to actually generate results out of it? Purchases, subscriptions, add-to-carts, getting a demo, or are we trying to do multiple things with our content? It’s important to recognize that too. If you know this and you understand what your content is going to achieve, you’re kind of like 50% beyond where a lot of companies that we start working with are right now because they don’t actually have this level of insight or clarity into what their content is supposed to do.

So first thing you need to do is this, understand why your content is there and what it’s trying to achieve. And then you need to recognize that, hey, the systems that you have, if it’s not Parse.ly, they’re broken, they weren’t built to really understand content. They weren’t built to really think about the journey. They focus around vanity metrics that don’t really tell you the full story with content and they focus around landing pages as opposed to the full journey, the 3, 4, 5 pieces of content that an individual might read in that journey to subscribe to something. And then finally, they just weren’t built to … Frankly, they’re hard to use, they’re hard to use, they’re not really that pretty or pleasant to use. And that’s really the opposite of what we think about what Parse.ly. We really walk that fine line of creating comprehensive, complex analytics, but trying to do that in a way that makes it really accessible and importantly allow you to democratize this use across your organization.

And so three reasons content and marketing teams use Parse.ly is really to these points. We help you align your content strategy with business goals. We help you understand the performance of your content and prove out that ROI, not just superficially, but really to say, Hey, content is driving this, these are the topics you need to invest in, here are the things that have been working. And then we make this a proof point for everyone’s process. It’s not about analysts using analytics, it’s about the rest of the organization using data and analytics to drive their results.

A couple of different ways we do this, we have unique and proprietary metric technology rather around conversion attribution so that you can really understand that journey of how a piece of content, gets credit for driving a conversion, which oftentimes content gets ignored because it’s like the second or third thing people visit in terms of all the ways that they’re going back to rather end up converting into something.

So we say, no, no, no, you can’t ignore the content. Content’s important. Here’s how we show you how content gets that weight. We also help you understand, improve that ROI. So how is content overall generating newsletter signups or subscriptions or demos, and again, giving those insights, these are the topics, these are the tags that you need to invest in, here’s the traffic sources that are helping drive these KPIs for you. And then finally, we just make it dead simple to use Parse.ly. We do have somebody that helps train your team, but you don’t really need a trainer to use Parse.ly. You can get into it yourself, understand what is working, what’s not working, and then leverage that to drive your business forward.

So I know that I did make that picture, but again, it’s important because if you know that content matters, you need Parse.ly to prove the value of your content. And so my poll for the people here is I really, really stress and encourage you if you have the latest, the slightest inkling of interest in Parse.ly, get a demo, see how this can be applicable for yourself and your organization. And so select one of the following, yes or no or don’t respond if you don’t care. But I do think it is really important for you to understand what technology is out there. If you’re not getting a demo of Parse.ly, get a demo of another content analytics platform that’s tailored for content and not just a kind of generic Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics or something like that because there are very big differences, and it’s something that you need to understand as someone who’s invested in content all.

I think that’s enough talking for me. We’re going to get into Q&A, and your time is valuable, so I always try to work on ending a little bit early if we can, to give you that 15-minute break or breather before your next meeting here.

So Cardile, maybe we can try to close this up by 1:45 Eastern.

Dave Cardiel:

Let’s try it. But folks are asking questions, so let’s just try to get to them here. So we give them a good experience here. One I like, and I actually wonder about this myself just in the B2B space here. Why do content goals and strategies differ for B2B companies with products and services that involve longer sales cycles?

Sachin Kamdar:

So that’s a really good question and it is going to differ in I think two different ways. So one is that kind of journey to get to a conversion is going to be more reliant on content maybe than point solutions e-commerce. So with e-commerce, it could be like, I don’t know, maybe you offer a specific discount and that gets somebody to convert and then pay for something, and that’s more on the B2C side. But on the B2B side, you’re going to have to educate them over the course, of days, weeks, even months before they actually raise their hand, sign up for something or sign a leave form.

So really content can play a longer role there. And you need to understand, well, not just what’s the one piece of content I’m showing, but what’s the cadence, like the 3, 4, 5 pieces of content along that journey. And again, you need to understand and have the analytics to know that these are the topics, the pieces of content that are going to play a role in that. That said, I think an interesting trend that’s happening in the space is really emerging of strategies between B2B and B2C. So on the B two B side, you might hear a lot about product-led growth and you might hear a lot about the ability to have people opt-in and sign up and pay for something themselves.

And so that is more closely aligned with B2C strategies and the B2C strategies. You’re seeing people really try to leverage a longer journey to help secure higher retention on customers that they have or to help have higher conversion rates overall for anybody that’s new. So I think there is crossover between the two, but those two kind of points I made earlier would be the big difference that I see right now.

Dave Cardiel:

Great. Great answer. Got another one for you. It’s good. One pertaining to Parse.ly. So how we tapped into that a little bit. Does utilizing Parse.ly help us as content marketers develop more skills related to measuring and predicting how content will contribute to business goals?

Sachin Kamdar:

Absolutely. So that’s like an absolute yes, it’s going to help you because it’s going to … I think it’s going to do one thing that I think oftentimes gets overlooked, but really, really important here. One of the things that you really need to do as a content creator or marketer is to get comfortable with data. If you weren’t able to pull the right reports, do the right analysis yourself, and you’re relying on somebody else to interpret that data for you. Fundamentally, what that means is that you don’t really understand what is happening with your audience because you can’t dive in and ask those questions yourself. You can ask the questions, but you can’t dive in and answer those questions yourself.

So why is Parse.ly so important? Is because how accessible and democratized the platform is. It gives you a window into this data really easily, where then you can start diving in and answering those questions. That then translates into building content strategy where you’re going to be forward-looking and predictive about where your business is going to be, because if you really want to get predictive about content strategy in your business, you have to be invested in the data yourself. And so that means that everybody has to become an analyst themselves, which I know is really hard, and I’m not asking you to get certified or go sign up for something to become a data scientist or a data analyst, but you do have the tools and technology, one of which is partially that hadn’t helped you get there today.

Dave Cardiel:

Great, great. They’re still coming in here. So a few more. Let’s get into looking at some differentiation here. How does content strategy differ from B2B to B2C?

Sachin Kamdar:

Yeah, so I think-

Dave Cardiel:

Go ahead.

Sachin Kamdar:

It’s similar to that kind of first question that I answered. So it is going to differ in terms of what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to architect and lifetimes with that. Like I said, with B2B, it’s going to be over the course of maybe many pieces of content, many sessions that get that conversion versus B2C, which can be more point. I think the other difference that I might add with B2B versus B2C is oftentimes with B2C, you’re dealing with very top-of-the-funnel software. It’s like brand awareness, kind of high-level engagement because you don’t have the ability. If you’re a retailer, maybe you don’t have the ability to track directly what’s happening on the purchase itself because people are going into a store to purchase something. And so it’s really about that top of funnel. And then B2B, you’re kind of more closely aligned with bond funnel, but again, all this stuff is changing with digital and these strategies are crossing over.

So I think it’s more dependent upon what you’re trying to do individually as an organization. And then tying that back to how you’re architecting your strategy.

Dave Cardiel:

Real quick on integrations with Parse.ly right now, does Parse.ly integrate with SEO tools like Semrush, BrightEdge, et cetera?

Sachin Kamdar:

No, we don’t. So we don’t have direct integrations with SEM tools, but I think the purpose is a little bit different between the two, although there’s a little bit of overlap. So we’re not going to help you with search engine marketing, and I would encourage you not to use Parse.ly for search engine marketing. You really should be using something like a Semrush, et cetera to really figure out what’s going on there. What Parse.ly could help you out with though is when it comes more to SEO. And so that’s where there could be some overlap because we will tell you, well, what does my traffic from Google look like, what are the topics that are really driving organic from Google over to my site, and then how does that exist in terms of my business outcomes.

So that’s where there’s a little bit more overlap, but I still would say that we’re not purely SEO-focused and probably would … if you’re really trying to drive up your SEO, there probably would be the need for at least another tool there to help you focus on that in addition to Parse.ly.

Dave Cardiel:

Great. Great. So I think we’re warmed up on questions now. Man, here comes a good one. Why should a content team choose Parse.ly over Google Analytics?

Sachin Kamdar:

Yeah, it’s kind of like those three reasons in that slide, which is number one, Google Analytics was not built for content, and Google Analytics will never really be built for content. Why? Because Google Analytics is trying to solve very, very broad challenges for organizations. They’re not focused on content, they’re focused on every kind of website, and not every website is a content website. And so they’re not going to be able to make the product decisions that we can at Parse.ly that are really oriented to solving content challenges and goals. So that’s number one.

Number two, they don’t do a great job of looking at that journey. And content, as we know is part of the journey; it’s not necessarily the destination that’s oftentimes a landing page. So, Parse.ly is going to help you highlight the value of content better, and then like I said before, we’re just way easier to use, you’ll enjoy using Parse.ly. Not to say that you wouldn’t enjoy using Google Analytics, certainly, I have used it and enjoyed it, but there is a learning curve there, and so you just should be prepared for that.

Dave Cardiel:

Great, great. Another one here. How do I explain the long game of content marketing? Right now content is bringing in results, but I know that building a brand and awareness takes time. So how do I explain that long-term game or that long game of content marketing?

Sachin Kamdar:

Yeah, so explain to I guess higher-ups or I don’t know if that was clarified with a question or no.

Dave Cardiel:

Let’s say that. Explain it to higher-ups, maybe they’re driving in results to say from leads and so forth, but just justifying that investment, that strategy going forward, and let’s just use that for example, higher-ups.

Sachin Kamdar:

Yeah, so I think there’s a couple of ways you can explain the long game of content. In general, you should just make the assumption that if you’re doing content marketing, it’s not going to be like a one or two-month thing. You have to be invested for quarters or years even before it really pays off. But when it does pay off, it pays off huge. And so one way that you could explain that is by looking at comparative companies to yourself that have really done well at content. And you could use that slide that we had in any one of those companies have done amazingly well in terms of producing content.

But the second thing you should note is that in a world where attention is so fractured and fragmented by all these different ways that we’re getting stuff thrown at, content is one of the more authentic ways that you can get someone to engage with your brands because the content itself has to have inherent value for people to read it, to consume it. That has to be perceived value when they find it through a feed or they search for it, and then it has to be actual value in terms of what it’s getting them to do afterwards. Whether it’s just thinking about something that’s interesting or compelling or actually getting them to drive a result, it’s kind of one of the last real authentic ways that you have to build a brand to build an awareness and to do that over time. And so if that is important authenticity to your brand, then it’s your only option right now.

And I think that’s why we’re seeing so many people invest in content. And I would say the last thing you could kind of say right now is that there’s a lot of doubt and a little bit of fear around what’s happening with paid advertising, with changes to browser, with privacy changes. We saw this recently with Facebook Meta where changes to Apple tracking really negatively affected their ad performance and people pulled away their ads there. And so what isn’t changing is first-party data and people coming to your website. And so if you need, again, another justification for why you should invest in content, it’s kind of again, one of the only ways that you’re going to have privacy-safe ability to get people to engage with you and your brand by producing content that’s meaningful and valuable to your audience.

Dave Cardiel:

Fantastic. Does Parse.ly help us identify goals based on characteristics of different content pieces, or is it purely meant to track performance against predetermined goals?

Sachin Kamdar:

So a little bit … It does both, right? So we do have goal-tracking functionality. So you can have set goals inside of Parse.ly where you’re saying, I want to achieve search engine traffic by X amount, or I want to hit these numbers of conversions into subscriptions by Y amounts and track that over a certain time period. But what I personally love about Parse.ly relative to a lot of other analytics I see out there is that everything is kind of clickable and you can go as deep as you want with Parse.ly. So a topic is clickable, a title is clickable, a tag, like a CMS tag is clickable, content creator is clickable. All these things you can click into and you can start to get more in-depth information around what is working and why. And that’s where you can start to get to different types of goals.

And so you might recognize, for example, even though it’s not a predetermined goal, that there are certain types of content that are really great at generating evergreen traffic for your site. And that might not have been a predetermined goal for you, but that might be something that you start to see through one of our pre-canned reports that are really focusing on evergreen or something that you see through exploring the dashboard and all of a sudden, that can start to be a goal that you’re orienting towards as you move towards the future.

So familiarity with the data and the audience diving into things and really just getting comfortable with it is going to allow you to really speak towards what future goals should be.

Dave Cardiel:

Great. Really appreciate you doing that. So great. That kind of covers the queue right there. Sachin, so you kind of called it right there at about a quarter till. Let me just give you just the floor for a minute. What are some core takeaways you’d like the audience to walk away with today?

Sachin Kamdar:

We all know that content matters, that’s why you’ve attended this, right? That’s one of the core assumptions that we have at Parse.ly. But we can’t just assume that people that are in the peripheries of what we’re doing have that same assumption. We have to prove it to them. We have to give them the right data, the right insights to make that decision and to invest more in you. So that’s one of the main things that we try to aim ourselves for at Parse.ly is if we can give you the ability to speak to the value of your content, how it’s moving the needle for your business, that’s going to translate to more success for you, more success for your team, more resources overall. And so if there’s one takeaway, it’s figure out how to prove the value of your content to those that matter inside your organization. And if you do it, more will come.

Dave Cardiel:

Excellent. Really appreciate that insight. Again, folks, theme of today is how content matters. Folks will be sending out a copy of this recording and slides here in about 24 hours, usually about 24 hours after the event. We’ve got that in your inbox. We really do appreciate everyone joining today, joining Sachin, asking the barrage of questions, and hopefully enjoy the Content Matters report that we’ve provided to you.

This concludes today’s webinar. Again, really appreciate everyone’s time, and everyone have a wonderful afternoon.