Hello 👋 Does anyone here measure the impact of your content marketing activities on retention? Is this a common thing to do?

no but this is something I'd love to learn more about! we discussed this at my previous company but couldn't figure out a good way to do it.

We wrote a post about it because I love the concept: https://www.contentharmony.com/blog/content-marketing-for-customer-retention/. From a measurement perspective, I think you're limited. Options I can think of: • tracking multitouch attribution to see how customer content affects acquisition • tracking content consumption as events in your customer tracking software like mixpanel/intercom/etc and comparing segments • tracking user feedback signals like the thumbs up or down button that you'll see at the bottom of help docs

I read your piece, Kane! We at some point tried to implement a cohort-based system that would compare customers who had seen content vs. customers who hadn't, and try to see how that affected retention... needless to say, we stopped fairly quickly because it proved too complicated 😅

Hey @stocky-zebra-68352, here are some real-world examples (skip to Step 3 if it doesn’t take you there automatically!)

I think it'd depend on whether content marketing can actually make a meaningful impact on retention rates? What are the usual reasons for churn discovered in churned customer interviews? Can these reasons/problems be tackled with content? If yes, maybe one way to measure the impact of content on retention could be: a.) a customer wants to churn b.) he gets a list to select the cause of churn c.) as the customer selects the cause, a relevant article pops up or is displayed in some way at the last ditch attempt to prevent churn. The comparison here would be how many customers ended up canceling after being served relevant articles vs how many customers canceled previously when this system wasn't implemented. Another option would be to structure the goodbye email in a way that it contains the articles that tackle the cause of churn the customer selected. And you could then measure how many winbacks this email achieved compared to emails that don't contain relevant articles.

Thank you, @elegant-battery-10609 and @most-mechanic-91418!

Ajdin's points are good, but I don't think content can rescue a churn situation. I think the value is earlier in the process by helping build loyalty aside from just the product. EG - how much sales can REI attribute each year because people love their brand and the content they create? what percent of revenue can Stripe attribute to developer who specifically love their docs? (Note: in both cases the lines between product and editorial content are super blurry. I don't think that means it's not content marketing) In both scenarios attribution is effectively zero and yet content is a huge brand asset for both brands. Can you measure it? I'm not sure. Will the brand who invests in it succeed over the brand who doesn't? Yes in many cases.

I came to the same conclusions, @some-thailand-38703 — it's one of those cases where we can't prove it with hard numbers, but it just feels like it's the right thing to do vs. doing nothing. Hard to convince Directors or VPs who want to see numbers, though 😄