A trap that brands often fall into is being singularly focused on KPIs like conversions and sales. While such metrics are important, limiting your analysis to the bottom-of-the-funnel consumers fails to properly convey the total scope and impact of your content efforts.
Although the ultimate goal might be to push the user toward taking those final steps, a normal consumer may likely encounter dozens of touchpoints leading up to that point. And the impact of said touchpoints simply can’t be measured using those benchmarks.
So, how do you paint a clear, actionable picture of your content efforts?
By switching your attention to intent-based content metics. Here’s how.
Considering Your Audience According to Intent
The sales funnel is a visual representation of the various stages of intent a consumer will go through before making a purchase. It starts with a wide mouth (large potential consumer base) and then narrows as the uninterested consumers are progressively filtered out.
As Marketing Insider Group notes, most users don’t have a high-purchase intent from the outset:
- 70–85% of website visitors are simply looking for information
- 10–20% of website visitors are considering a purchase but are not ready to do so
- 5–10% of site visitors are already ready to make a purchase.
That leaves you with a small sliver of people who are ready to buy.
Intent-Based Queries
Try to think of intent as the specific goal a user has in mind when searching for something on Google. While the intent may vary, there are three general forms a search will typically take:
- Navigational query – The user looks for a specific website or page. As such, they’re likely beyond your ability to persuade.
- Informational query – The user seeks information about the topic, the brand, the product or service, or something related. Typically, this is done for fact-finding, not buying.
- Transactional query – The user plans to make a purchase or is narrowing down their options.
So, if all of your strategies and metrics are geared toward the transactional query—a minority of the population—if you’re singularly focused on closing the sale, you might miss out on delivering an exceptional brand experience to the other 90% of visitors who might otherwise be persuaded to go further down the funnel but simply aren’t yet ready to buy.
Measuring and Building Intent-Based Content
Every page on your website and every piece of content you produce should be geared toward the user’s intent. And each one should be optimized to yield an outcome that’s tied to the specific intent.
Separating pages based on intent is one of the first steps you can take to improve your reporting and analysis. Instead of limiting your concerns to conversion metrics, segmentation allows you to judge one page by certain metrics and a different page by alternative criteria. In doing so, you can more accurately gauge the value that various forms of content deliver.
To that end, some intent-based awareness metrics you should pay attention to include:
- Interaction rate
- Awareness display campaign CTR
- Percentage of new visitors
- Cost per new visitor
- Impressions per unique user
- Social engagement rates
- Average session duration
- Percentage of readers that finished content
Creating High-Quality Content
A winning content strategy should be tailored toward user intent as opposed to final outcomes. By reorienting your process to consider across funnel metrics, you can craft and then optimize a more holistic approach toward consumer targeting.
But what if you don’t know how to do that?
Then partnering with an SEM agency like Semgeeks might be the perfect move for your brand. By working with content creation experts, you can flesh out a content strategy that targets your audience at every stage of the sales funnel (not just the bottom), measure those specific intent-based outcomes, and then reoptimize for greater success.
Sources:
Marketing Insider Group. What Is Intent-Based Analytics And How To Leverage Them. https://marketinginsidergroup.com/strategy/intent-based-analytics-how-to-leverage/
