Is your content distribution plan working?

Amid the seemingly unending debate over the measurement of content on the digital medium in the absence of a unified metric, brands and content creators are bound to use different methods to ascertain whether their content is effective or burning money.

Kartikay Mehta

Talking about how can one know if their distribution plan is working, Kartikay Mehta, Vice-President, Sales, Unibic Foods India, said, “Profitable commercial success is the best way to know if it’s working or not. The other way is if one is meeting every step by the goal. If yes, then one can be sure that things are going fine.”

Be it a textual content, video or pictorial content, their performance is being measured using different tools by different platforms. In the case of social media, engagement with the content, including likes, shares and comments, become the parameter to measure the success of a content piece. At the same time, engagements and views generated by bots remain a challenge in digital measurement.

Karan Kumar

Karan Kumar, Chief Brand and Marketing Officer, Fabindia, said, “There are several ways to do this. One approach would be to work with Google Analytics, which can help track various performance measures like unique views, time spent, page and website visits and conversions. These need to continuously monitored against benchmarked campaign objectives and the distribution plan needs to be tweaked depending on performance.” 

Whether a content piece meets its objective or not, which could either be generating a certain conversation around the brand or making the content viral among the target audience or benefiting the brand commercially, brands these days need to remain observant during the execution period.

Sandeep Balani, Head of India at content discovery platform Outbrain, suggests that digital environment enables brands to track the effectiveness of the campaign nearly in real time and they should shift their budgets if something is working better.

While the content being generated in real time could be changed or tweaked according to the response generated, a video content piece as a part of a long-term initiative cannot be easily replaced and there the distribution plan plays a big role.

Darshan Bhatt

Darshan Bhatt, Director, India, South East Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Goquest Digital Studios, pointed out that the number of people responding to content pieces in the digital world is almost immediate, unlike a TVC where one has to wait for an entire week to get the numbers out. “In this world of digital, measuring response to gauge success or failure can be done instantly. Social media gives you the right insight almost immediately, case in point the HUL Red Label content on Kumbh Mela that backfired quickly,” Bhatt said.

Shamik Ghosh, Head of Content and Communications, Paisabazaar.com, believes that often, as content creators, they get it wrong. “The important thing is to realise it quickly, retract and start measuring again.”