Do you really understand how your content affects revenue?
In the 2018 Demand Metric benchmark study on Content Experience Impact and the Buyer’s Journey, “Almost two-thirds of study participants” reported having “only basic or no measurements of content marketing effectiveness”, even though 96% “believe that content interactivity impacts buyers’ decisions”.
At OpGen Media, two of our guidelines are:
- All B2B lead generation activities should be measurable
- Data is only when useful when it can reliably inform our marketing decisions
Our paid advertising and lead generation reports, which we send to clients on a weekly or monthly basis, are a critical part of our budget allocation and campaign planning process. When running content syndication campaigns, we track the number of leads generated from each content asset.
Similarly, tracking blog-sourced leads in Salesforce will help you decide the trajectory of your content marketing strategy and hone in on the content generating the most revenue for your business.
HubSpot’s Landing Page Field
One of the standard fields in HubSpot, in the Web Analytics grouping, is called Landing Page. It’s a simple field that captures the URL of a contact’s landing page. When integrating HubSpot with Salesforce, most companies do not sync this field, as it offers little utility to salespeople. For marketers however, this field can be used to gain insight into exactly how content marketing affects the top of the funnel, in terms of leads, all the way down to opportunities and revenue.
Create a field in Salesforce, a text area with a 255 character text limit called - Raw Landing Page URL. The HubSpot landing page field can include URL parameters that make your data less clean and useful. To turn this field into data we can actually use in Salesforce reports, we’re going to use formula fields to summarize and standardize our landing pages.
Building Our Content Attribution System
The first field we’ll create is called Landing Page Type. This field will use a formula to categorize Landing Pages by the type of page. For example, the values of this field can be: Homepage, Blog Post, Support Article, Press Release, etc. The formula for this field will look at the Landing Page URL, checking for specific strings of text, and then select the appropriate value. For example, if the landing page URL contains blog. or /blog, you can confidently categorize it as a blog post. Similarly, use support. or /support, depending on your domain structure, to categorize your knowledgebase
To get to this point, we’ll create a few more fields and also set up a few starter reports that’ll provide immediate insight into your content marketing performance.
Blog Post Deep-dive
The next field we’ll create is specific to your blog. Create a dependent field of Landing Page Type, called Blog Post Topic. Make this field required if the Landing Page type is blog. Now we’ll create a formula that uses the URL of a blog post to determine its topic. For example, if the Landing Page URL contains /blog, set Landing Page Type to “Blog Post”, then if Landing Page URL also includes “”, set Blog Post Topic to “Real Estate”. Now we have insight into which blog topics are generating the most leads.
To drill further down the funnel into actual revenue, map your new fields to from the Lead to the Contact object. Then create formula fields on the Opportunity object that pull from the originating contact for that opportunity. Now your data will persist as your leads move down the funnel.
Useful Reports:
Depending on your content marketing strategy, there are various ways to use this data to create useful reports. Here are a few I find useful:
Leads by HubSpot Score by Blog Post
In this report, score can be substituted with any other automated signal of lead quality. This report will show you how many leads your blog posts are generating on a weekly basis, along with the quality of those leads.
Leads by Blog Post Topic by Source
If you’re using paid channels to promote content, this report will give you a breakdown of which sources and topics are resonating. With this report, you can answer questions like - “What types of content work best on LinkedIn?”.
Won Deals by Blog Post Topic
By mapping this field from converted leads and contacts to opportunities, you can get deeper insights into how your content affects won deals to see measure the ROI of your content.
