Branded content: why holding mid-campaign meetings are worth it

One of the worst things to happen when running a branded content campaign is to be surprised by the results that you’re about to share with a client

And I don’t mean surprised in a good way.

Maybe you can resonate with this experience: A report has been generated for a client, you review it and are shocked with how bad some of the metrics are. That could be a combination of low page views, poor newsletter open rates or just not enough social media reach.

At this point in the process, there is very little you can probably do to change those results.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. A mid-month or mid-campaign check in process can go a long way to help ensure that the results you provide your clients provide a good surprise.

Here’s how.

1. Get everyone to the table

First, agree that meeting to review campaigns at their midway point is a needed step to ensure you are delivering results that will delight your advertisers.

Because campaigns often don’t all start at the beginning of the month, this may mean that you hold a few meetings throughout the month and review several campaigns — based on when they started — at each meeting.

The goal of the meetings is to confirm that the campaigns are being fulfilled (making sure nothing was missed) but the real focus is to understand how each part of the campaign is performing and why. I’ll cover those metrics later in this newsletter.

It’s critical that all of the right people are at this meeting and that they prioritize attending it. This would include: Publisher and/or sales director, content leader and/or content strategist, an audience representative (in charge of social media and newsletters) and those in charge of fulfillment.

2. What metrics you should look at

This really comes down to what kind of distribution tactics are in the branded content program that you sold to a client.

But generally, I would look at these metrics:

• Pages views, users, sessions and time on page for the story
• Newsletter opens and click throughs
• Social media reach, plays and referral traffic
• Organic search results
• Ad impressions
• Results from anything special you provided (like a contest)

One important point on the page views: Because branded content — especially the evergreen variety — builds more traffic over time, it’s important to not just look at the first 30 days in your reporting but a 90-day window when you get to that point in the campaign.

This helps show the client that a value of working with you is that their brand is going to get discovered more and more each month, even if their story is no longer on your homepage.

3. What to do with the results?

These kinds of meetings should provide lessons learned on what’s working and what’s not and should lead to strategies and actions that build off of what to do more.

That could be the kinds of stories to write (content profiling a person does better than general expert stories, as an example). Or social media posts that ask questions seem to perform better than a post with emojis in it, for a specific kind of content.

It’s important to create a baseline of what you are trying to achieve on each platform, so you can determine what needs to be changed midway through the campaign. What this means is that you should have an average page view, open rate and social media reach figure that you generally want to hit with each campaign.

Once you have those metrics, then you could clearly see that a campaign isn’t on track to achieve those metrics at the end of a campaign. That’s when you may look at trying a host of things:

• Change the headline
• Rewrite the social media post
• Spend more money on a paid social media campaign
• Promote the story again in your newsletter
• Bring the story back out to your homepage again

When you get back together two weeks later, see if those changes created the results you were looking for, learn from the changes you made and apply the best practices to future content you’re creating.

I love this entire process as it’s filled with experimentation, collaboration and doing what’s best for the client in the end.

We can help

We’d love to help you with your branded content strategy. Email me at
david@davidarkinconsulting.com (mailto:david@davidarkinconsulting.com) or call me at 832 407 0188.