Still concerned about the traffic with your content? Well, I guess in the venerable words of Mrs. Potts from Beauty and the Beast, it’s a tale as old as time. (Sorry if I got that song stuck in your head now!)
Lately, the “beast” of a question has been popping up again. Why doesn’t a customer story (i.e., the “beauty”) get more traffic? I’ve always loved the quote that “content is king, but distribution is queen.” It’s so true. If you’re not giving the distribution love or building up the SEO, it will languish.
I always like to think about how the website hits aren’t everything, but there is a caveat in the end. Bear with me. A piece of content has so many other measurements and outlets. Don’t just publish the customer story as a one-and-done on the website or measure its success only there. The first given is social promotion and fine-tuning your SEO. Take it further. Do you check all of these boxes for just one customer story?
Work with PR to identify any potential cross-promotion activities before a story is written
Create a PowerPoint slide with notes on the key metrics and success of the story for sales to easily use
Create a PDF version of the story. (Many sales teams still clamor for these.)
Communicate internally and widely to ensure any sales or marketing teams can use your content
Write a blog post curating the customer story in a larger-themed story
Those are just a few additional mechanisms. When it comes to measurement metrics, you also have to think about how these bits of additional distribution and promotion make an impact.
Did a marketing team use it for an important email campaign or landing page? Were you able to provide a key reference for a sales rep that resulted in a new customer? Was this story inspirational and compelling enough that the PR or marketing teams wanted to build on it with a speaking opportunity or pitch an angle of the story? Did the story became an easy “lead” for booking the customer as a speaker or guest at a company’s annual conference? The answers to these questions may not be quantitative, but they are certainly important qualitative measurements.
Of course, building traffic and momentum for a story is crucial. We all want that, and it should definitely be part of the goal. If it’s not happening for your stories on a long-term basis, there are other factors to start investigating. But just remember that there are other important metrics to follow in the meantime, too.