I am struck by the notion that we have spent the last few years talking about how content marketing, as an approach, focuses on one thing: building a loyal, subscribed audience that we can monetize over time.
Many of us at CMI have written about how audiences are an asset, and that their value can be the true return on investment (ROI) that we seek.
- I recently wrote that content marketing builds a strategic asset – a subscribed audience.
- Joe Pulizzi recently wrote how the new media and content marketing models are identical – they build loyal audiences.
- I wrote a while back about how we should look at content marketing as a product – to engage audiences, not simply to acquire leads.
- Michele Linn recently wrote on how to explain content marketing to anyone and noted how content helps a brand – grow an active and engaged subscriber base.
If audiences are the asset – how should we value them?
I have spent the last two years trying to answer this question and develop a reusable and foundational model for our beloved approach. I will share the details of this new model and our audience valuation engine at Content Marketing World. But, I’d like to share the high level of this framework with you now.
Why an audience valuation model
There is a classic joke where an economist, a physicist, and a chemist are stranded on a desert island. One day a can of food washes up on the beach. The physicist and chemist each devise ingenious methods of how to open the can. When it is the economist’s turn he simply says, “OK, assume there is a can opener.”
Like the valuation of companies, valuing audiences in media has always been a fuzzy science at best. We frequently deal with broad assumptions, beliefs, and attention/engagement values based on personal experiences or gut feelings. Our audience valuation model is meant to be an economic model for a range of monetary values for a specific brand’s audience.
We believe content marketing is valuable for the business. Therefore, it stands to reason, loyal audiences that coalesce around a topic are an asset to be monetized in different ways over time. To maximize the value of this asset, we must create consistent, high quality content that attracts and builds this loyal subscriber base. The challenge is there is always a level of uncertainty about which content will perform better than others. We have two audiences:
- Anticipated (or desired) audience – the ideal audience for which we are designing our content and to whom we are seeking to deliver value
- Actual audience – the audience realized through the content we created and promoted
If we look at this through the classic lead scoring or advertising lens, we say, “We have a target audience we want to reach called ‘buyers.’ But after the campaign, we only persuaded a few of them to ‘buy’ and a few others to perhaps show ‘interest.’ ” This is our anticipated vs. actual audience.
However, for a content-marketing, audience-building framework, this model is too simplistic. Audiences have the potential to have more value than simply as a lead or a buyer. We have an A-level target audience we want to reach and inspire to subscribe. These A-level audiences may be buyers. But, we also have B- and C-level subscribers too. They also have value. They may share our content, amplify our reach, and reach hard-to-get A-level target audiences.
In the absolute simplest version of this, think of the existing subscriber (and previous customer) who shares our content among their network and attracts a new customer. Our existing customer might be a B subscriber, attracting our A-level audience. Put simply: Audiences are not leads. They are measured differently.
If we apply a measurement framework to the two audience types, we get two primary beneficial outputs:
- Modeled audience – provides marketers the ability to make assumptions with the measured data to understand how changing the makeup of the audience, growth, or churn rates, or even the amount of data on the audience, affects the value. In turn, this can help us create the business case for strategies to increase the value of that audience – and thus create more value for the content marketing approach.
- Audited audience – provides the analytics and profile to understand how we are doing against the strategies we devised. After an initial audit, we can understand how we are progressing toward improving the density profile of our target audience, and increasing engagement, the level and quality of data we are assembling. It even can help us apply these values for lead scoring.
With these business goals serving as WHY audiences should be measured, now we should define what it is we are going to measure.
What is an audience?
The simplest definition of audience is a group of people who gather together to view or listen to performances; or the group of people who consume or admire content – a book, art, or other media. Put even more simply: Audiences are made up of people who want to consume the content you create.
If the goal of this framework is to put a financial value on the depth and dimension of each person in a brand’s audience (commonly called a “subscriber”), we must ask what defines a subscriber, and what makes that subscriber valuable?
The first attribute of a subscriber vs. a general audience member is that a subscriber is addressable. In short: A subscriber is someone we can reach and know that we have reached any time we choose. For example, broadcast television audiences, podcast listeners, Twitter followers, and those who have “liked” our brand on Facebook are not addressable audiences.
Now, no doubt, technological advances make addressability measurable across multiple types of platforms. However, most realistically, what marketers are valuing is their email subscription database.
As it stands, email is one of the…
