What really matters and why pure numbers games are not everything
The one big hit: That one article or video in the corporate blog that exceeds all previous hits by far. But why? And: How can it be possible for all other pieces of content to spread with a similar reach? But the next time brings great disappointment: Although all factors seem to be the same - promising headline, eye-catching article image, a similar teaser - the new article flops and hardly spreads. Why is that, and why was the great success not reproducible? Everyone who publishes content online with the aim of achieving visibility and ultimately demand for their own products, i.e. who is responsible for a company's content marketing, is probably familiar with this question. Can such successes be reproduced? What is important? That is what this article is about.
I remember a talk I heard several years ago from Diaspora founder Maxwell Salzberg. In it, he described how the student founding team wanted to raise a relatively small five-figure sum through crowdfunding so that they could develop the software in peace for a few months. Then the New York Times picked up the topic, and the young developers were showered with money. This made it one of the most successful Kickstarter projects to date. Salzberg's conclusion (which I paraphrase): If you want to be successful with a crowdfunding campaign, it's a good idea to get on the front page of the New York Times . Advice that is as original as it is worthless, because something like that cannot be planned.
Apart from that, hardly anyone talks about diaspora anymore. Other social networks, on the other hand, have become popular successes. You simply don't know in advance whether you are planning the next Facebook or Snapchat or whether your own project will become a flash in the pan; and that doesn't always depend on the quality of the concept. That's why bank data it would be premature to create a recipe for success based on certain characteristics. The same applies to successful content: certain conditions must be met. But certain effects simply cannot be planned. Nevertheless, there are factors that help to consolidate the success of your own content marketing, including in terms of access numbers, and to learn from particular successes.
Identify individual factors
The one influencer with a large reach who takes up a topic at the right time and spreads it further: such coincidences as a success factor cannot be planned.
But in order to find out what else could be behind the sudden success, good monitoring is essential. Your own website statistics are just the beginning. The complex structure of your own and other people's accounts around it also plays a big role. The contributions to the blog parade of the same name in MonitoringMatcher provide a lot of valuable content on key figures .
The quantitative analysis must be complemented by a qualitative one: Which headline formats work best? Which article images are particularly popular? The more articles there are to compare, the easier it is to determine what works well and what doesn't. This is a lot of work, and it has to be done constantly and not just in fits and starts when there is a big click success or, conversely, when the number of hits drops dramatically.
But much of it is – both good and bad news! – a question of tools. Good texts or high-quality videos are created based on experience and expertise, not just from the results of a qualitative evaluation.