I found this great infographic today, ironically from April Dunford’s post about infographics being “the Lindsay Lohen of content” …
In my defence, she was using this one as a great example of an infographic and that’s why it’s inspired this post. Anyone who’s worked with me knows my obsession with measurement and tying activities to business goals, but one thing I’ve understood but often had difficulty explaining is the relationship between certain pieces of content and how those pieces fit together. I’m no sales expert, so while I know that putting out great content such as a whitepaper, an interesting video or infographic can reflect back to business goals, I was never really sure of how to put it… fortunately this graphic visually explains it so well:
This is obviously a software model, but I think the information can translate to any industry/product service.
A great content strategy is essentially making sure you have a piece of well-executed content at each important step above. The one thing I don’t like about this infographic is it’s strictly talking about a broadcast content model. This should be a piece of your overall social strategy, but there is a lot more too it. If you just treat your Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter/etc a account as a broadcast account then your content may end up falling on deaf ears. And if you’re only looking at the above, it may be hard to understand why.
I also want to draw attention to the key performance indicators at the bottom. I love that they’ve been categorized in three ways and break down the relevant metrics at each stage. This makes it really clear that you are working towards something and what to measure at every step. You may only care about making the sale (outcomes) and therefore think you only need to measure the sales, or leads or whatever indicator makes sense, but without the insight on how you got there (i.e. traffic, clickthrough, form submissions etc) you are missing the data that can dictate how to do it better next time, a HUGE missed opportunity.
One thought to “Why are you creating content?”
Thanks, Kelly. This is a great visual to get the conversation started on leveraging LinkedIn. I would love to see more of these as I prefer pretty pictures over reading reams of paper. If you find more, then could you post with your commentary as well which is also very helpful!