The Indian content marketers' quest to overcome content measurement-related challenges

No matter how unique a content idea is, it means nothing if it isn’t improving the business bottom line. Therefore, measuring effectiveness of content marketing is as equally important as the creation and distribution of content. But it’s not a cakewalk. According to a report by the Content Marketing Institute, 49% marketers think measuring the impact of the content was one of the biggest challenges faced by them. 

In the first story by BuzzInContent.com, as part of a series on finding solutions to challenges related to the measurement of content marketing effectiveness, many marketers and content practitioners said if industry standards for measuring content marketing are put in place, it might help brands to save time. On the other hand, a few say that there is no need for industry standards, and measuring the effectiveness of content marketing depends on the objective of a content campaign.

In this part of the series, content marketers discuss if there is a solution to it or if brands would have to rely on varied measurement metrics offered by agencies and publishers with whom they collaborate each time for different content marketing needs. They discuss if coming together of content marketers and forming an institutional body can help resolve this issue.

When a brand initiates a content-driven campaign, it collaborates with different platforms, publishers, creators and agencies. It is not necessary that the brand works with the same partner each time. Most of the times, a new relationship is built. Each partner has a different way of measuring content marketing effectiveness and the brands have to rely on the metrics, tools and data provided by these partners, which might or might not be satisfying for them. 

Sonia Notani

Sonia Notani, Chief Marketing Officer, IndiaFirst Life, believes it is joint accountability of all stakeholders in a campaign to uphold brand values and together agree on the content quality and numerical outcome. “We definitely track the basis of our agreed KPI and measure-derived ROI with full transparency along with our partner agency/publishers. We can streamline some existing metrics with evolving mediums to enable improvement based on collective learning,” she said. 

In fact, a lot of times, the agencies, publishers and creators are also not okay with the metrics set defined by the brand’s previous partners but are asked to adhere to them. Like this, it turns out to be a vicious circle. A few metrics justified for one person can be useless for the other. The one-size-fits-all philosophy doesn’t work here. 

Rahul Jain

Rahul Jain, Co-Founder, Flickstree, said, “The real task is to educate marketers on how they can implement end-to-end tracking and put the right attribution models in place.”

Depending on the campaign and its objectives, the measurement metrics of content marketing effectiveness also change. 

Sambit Dash

Sambit Dash, VP Marketing, Honasa Consumer (parent company of MamaEarth), said the challenge at hand is that the objective for any content marketing campaign varies from brand to brand. It can vary from driving traffic to the website to increasing visibility to engagement versus conversion of KPIs, and hence outcomes are measured differently. 

Until then, “The brands do have to rely on the competence and experience of the agencies executing the pieces as their performance will still be symmetrical across their set of brands, thereby bringing some synergy to the metrics,” he added. 

Is an industry body a solution to the challenge?

Unlike the advertising industry, there isn’t any Indian institutional framework or a setup that brings the content marketing industry together to improve the way it functions, find solutions, improve knowledge of each other or even network. 

A few content marketers believe that if a unified industry body is formed, where problems related to content marketing can be put forward and resolved, it will be a big step towards resolving the challenges related to the measurement of content marketing effectiveness. 

Tusharr Kumar

According to Tusharr Kumar, SVP and Business Head, Global Creator Network, the solution will come from platforms, publishers, agencies and brands coming together to work on this. The unified body will drive acceptance by the industry at large.

He said, “A coalition of platforms, publishers, agencies and brands will definitely help in forming this metric and driving acceptance. What is important is for this body to be constantly evolving and delivering measurement standards (since there will be more than one) that can enable cross-media comparability as well.”  

Navin Khemka

Navin Khemka, CEO, MediaCom South Asia, seconded Kumar’s thought that it would then have the buy-in of all stakeholders and teams can focus more on delivery rather than acceptable benchmarks.

Neena Dasgupta

Neena Dasgupta, CEO and Director at Zirca Digital Solutions, is of the notion that more than industry body, it is the aligning objectives that will help bring this change. She said, “An industry body will only help reach out to all stakeholders, but till the time every single player is not working towards a single goal, of maximising consumer delight, we will not be far from finding any solution.”

But Flickstree’s Jain doesn’t agree with the idea of forming a coalition of content marketers to solve the problem of content marketing measurement. He said, “A lot of work is anyway happening on the technology front – be it third-party pixel integration, or end-to-end tracking, which are all leading to a healthy content marketing ecosystem. Creating a new industry body will only complicate the growth of content marketing.”

Indiafirst’s Notani seconded, “Today, we have way more transparency than we did a decade ago. Most content is delivered through digital or electronic mediums, allowing for great targeting, customisation and trackable outcome. The ROI is a derivative of the measurable goals arrived prior to the campaign, based on the business objective, the platform and the medium. We are evolving very quickly and so are the metrics for new platforms and mediums (eg, voice).  I am not sure if an industry body will have a role to play in this context.”

Dash doesn’t have a definitive answer regarding forming a body. According to him, it’s worth waiting and seeing how consumers engage with brands, and how the brands evolve in the usage of the content as well as modelling of metrics.