To transform your marketing from ad-centric to story-centric, you’ll need enthusiastic buy-ins from the C-suites. To excite your corporate team, simply show them that story makes money. Then back it up with data.
Proof of storytelling’s financial impact calls for the collection and analysis of key data, but exactly what you measure depends on your core goal. Do you use story to differentiate your brand from your competitor? Expand brand awareness? Build brand affinity? Develop leads for your sales force? Identify likely purchasers? All the above? Your answers determine how you gauge success, but at the end of the day, one metric fortifies the rest.
The ultimate factor is margin growth. Companies that build positive relationships with the broadest reach of prospective customers charge the greatest differentiated margin for their goods and services. In other words, underlying costs being the same, a much-loved brand sells virtually the same thing as its competitors, but because it’s loved, it charges more and thus earns more.
Reach due to amplification-for-hire distorts the spontaneous connection between you and your audience, so to measure the power of your stories to build brand affinity, focus on three key metrics: organic reach, audience composition, and engagement.
Tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Marketing Cloud collect key content and reach metrics. With them, you can track how many unique people visit your content, how much time they spend consuming it, and whether they pass it along. Platforms like SEMrush or SpyFu for search, or TrackMaven or ONZU for social, enable you to compare your brand’s performance against that of your competitors.
Using public data from SEMrush, we can examine the success of Colgate’s Oral Care Center. According to SEMrush, Colgate’s content now earns 2.7 million visits each month from more than three hundred thousand keywords that prospective Colgate customers search to develop good dental habits or to learn about dental health challenges. SEMrush estimates that if Colgate had to pay for that same number of visits with Google AdWords, their marketing spend would cost another $93 million annually.1 Without a single brag or promise, Colgate’s Oral Care earns customer attention at a fraction of that cost by understanding their consumers’ needs and providing what they want.
If you market directly to consumers (B2C), measure your success by using the same three metrics suggested above: reach (total audience size), audience composition (who actually reads the content), and engagement (time spent on content, frequency of return, and social sharing). You can measure this information using content marketing platforms like Skyword and Kapost,2 or analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. If your company transacts business online, Google and Adobe can also be configured to measure conversions of sales or subscribers.
By integrating content marketing and analytics platforms, sales success can be tracked to specific topics, authors, distribution channels—even down to an individual story. Armed with this insight, you can shape your program to maximize sales or any other goal that you track.
Overstock, for example, analyzed the ROI on its storified marketing spend and reported that 70 percent of readers who visit O.info, its storytelling site, then shop at Overstock.com, its ecommerce site. In fact, post-story visitors convert at seven times the rate of visitors acquired elsewhere and spend an average of 35 percent more on each transaction.
Once you track your brand’s storytelling through to sales, you can compare that ROI to your advertising and other marketing spends to see how they compare. When it’s clear that your storified branding delivers better ROI, it’s time to shift your resources.
If you market for a B2B company, integrate your content marketing platform with a marketing automation system such as Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, or Unica. This link helps you identify which stories generate which leads, and, in turn, how these leads engage with and share your stories. Add to that system a sales automation platform like Salesforce, and you’ll know exactly when your story-generated leads result in sales. Measuring lead volume, quality, size, and close rate lets you identify the leads inspired by your storified marketing versus what’s coming down the rest of your pipeline. In other words, you’ll know exactly what topics, creatives, media types, and channels work and which do not.
In chapter 12, we advocated the use of story to qualify sales prospects versus the ratios-driven strategy of X calls = Y meetings = Z sales. We believe that the latter technique wastes your sales reps’ time on the least likely, while they burn through the most promising. So although numerical systems should not determine your out-going strategy, they can usefully measure your in-coming success.
To weigh the impact of your storified pitches, ask yourself these questions:
• Sales Calls Versus Meetings: At the outset, do our inquiries hook our prospects? To find out, measure the ratio of your storified emails and calls to the meetings they generate.
• Initial Meetings Versus Proposals: How well does our storified qualification system rank our leads? To answer that, measure your ratio of initial meetings to sales proposals.
• Close Rate: When my team pitches face-to-face with prospects, do they tell engaging sales stories? You’ll see your close rate the moment you measure your ratio of proposals to sales.
• ASP: Finally, have our storified methods raised our average selling price (ASP)? Are we getting greater value for our core offering and maximizing upsells? To know, simply compare previous ASPs to your current ASP; the numbers will tell the story.
Sales automation platforms like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, or sales clouds by SAP and Oracle, allow you to track sales activity. Business intelligence layers, such as InsightSquared, show you key ratios and trends at a glance. These systems also compare individual sales reps against your company average and identify your most and least effective storytellers.
Transforming marketing and sales from rhetoric-centric to story-centric requires initiative, leadership, and sustained investment. To succeed, you must consistently measure the metrics appropriate to your strategic goals. Once you see progressive improvement, you can confidently fund your storytelling into the future.