Long have Rock Content clients had the capability to categorize their content—but how many of you are utilizing the full power of this feature?
In any piece of content, you have the ability to set a category. When used correctly (i.e. don’t treat your categories as tags!), they can provide structure to your content that can prove valuable—these categories can be used to not only organize your content but to measure, optimize and build on what’s working.
Here’s a few guidelines for setting up categories:
- Have one person in your account create the categories that your team will need.
- Categories should be treated like broad, topical buckets in which your content can live. Think: news, sports, chat, marketing.
- Categories should not be used to specify keywords within a piece of content such as: cat, climbing, trees.
- When new content is created, team members should choose from this existing list of categories. They should not create new categories.
- Voila! All of the content you create will be organized and, as you’ll see in the below scenarios, able to be optimized.
Rock Content’s Enterprise accounts offer in-depth insights into your content in general, and proper categorization of your content can help you make the right decisions around the content you’re creating. Rock Content’s Pro account users can gain insights into content performance using categories too, but the data available is admittedly less robust.
Both products, however, are capable of helping you answer the question: Is my content working for me?
Scenario A: Content marketing campaigns
You’re an organization that has entered the foray of content marketing using Rock Content Enterprise product. You want to create a number of content assets as part of a campaign you’ve initiated, but how can you best measure these assets against each other?
Enter categories. In this scenario, your team could create the category “My First Campaign” and assign it to each piece of content in that campaign.
Once you’ve executed the various content assets throughout your campaign, head to your Measure Content page. On this page you can now filter your content by any number of parameters. In this case, you’ll use the filter “Category equals My First Campaign.”
Once you apply the filter, you’ll be able to see all of the content that ran in that campaign. Add additional filters if you’d like to get even more specific—want to see only the pieces of content in that campaign that kept people on the page for more than five minutes? Or the pieces of content that was shared more than 10 times on social media in this campaign? You can do that.
Once you’ve filtered down to the level you’d like, you’ll be able to see the content assets that fit the criteria you specified. (Bonus: Save these settings as a segment and you can come back to it at any time.) From here, you can gather valuable insights about the campaign you ran, the assets you produced and their performance.
But what was it about these assets made them successful and how can you replicate their success in the future? With these insights, you’ll be better-equipped to answer that.
Scenario B: Live event resourcing
You’re a large organization that runs a lot of live content—from live chats, to live coverage of the latest news, sports and entertainment events—but your resources are spread thin. What should you focus in on?
If you’ve been categorizing your events—”sports,” “news,” “chat,” and “entertainment” could be appropriate in this scenario—you would be able to filter your All Events page by each category, giving you insight into how many events you’ve run dedicated to this topic and the frequency with which they’ve ran.
If you have added the Enhanced Metrics package to your account, on the All Events page you’ll have access to the stats in each event, and be able to export the data to CSV. This would mean you could take a look at all of the data related to your sports events and compare that to your news events. Which type is garnering you the most engagement minutes? In what events are users staying on the page for longer?
The next question is important: What are you doing in those events that could have gathered that engagement? The answers to that should help guide your decisions around the resources you have, how you dedicate them, and what they’re producing.
