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Industry-wide studies on consumer behavior from the Cohley Insights team.
Brands need content. Now more than ever before.
However, the question of quantity, and does quantity matter when creating content, remains consistently asked as brands worldwide are digitizing and expanding their content marketing strategies.
Is quantity important? Yes. The thing is, it’s not just about how many videos you can publish or articles you can write. Testing your content is just as important as pushing it live for your audience to see.
It seems that nearly every day brings a new platform, a new campaign, a new trend - and brands need to make sure that they’re creating enough content to keep up with the content-consumption demand.
Keep reading to see why not only quantity matters, but why testing your content remains the most crucial aspect to your content strategy. We’ll cover:
The internet has changed the way we all interact with content. It’s made content accessible whenever we want and available at mass-scale. It’s made brands easier to find and engage with - and we’ve created algorithms that can predict what types of content will perform well. And when. And for how long.
Artificial intelligence is sometimes used to bolster our idea-bank when it comes to content creation, and can be an incredibly useful tool. But, like anything, it has its downsides. When we rely too closely on AI without testing our content, it comes with the risk of putting us out of touch with our audience. It’s not always quick to pick up on social and cultural shifts; like when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the content needed was very different from previous months.
Even though machine learning can do a lot - it doesn’t replace testing. Each audience is unique, and as your brand (and your audience) grows and matures, content needs will inevitably change.
When it comes to testing your content - you may not have the resources (or the time) to dive deeply into a fully-fledged testing effort across all platforms on which you have a presence. It can be time-consuming.
However, even with limited time and resources - social media testing remains structurable and measurable, especially if you’re testing on your highest value channel.
Data is the only thing that will give you the insights as to which content can help you scale. Understanding your content analytics will help give any future content an edge, and narrowing your focus to one platform for a specific type of content can show you what works (and what works well), helping you to increase your content marketing conversion rate.
Testing one platform helps you understand what works well per platform. What works well on one platform might not work on others and it should always be tested to see what works best!
A good example of this strategy is a study run by Facebook in recent years. At one point Facebook analyzed all their advertisers, trying to pinpoint what set apart the top performers from the advertisers that weren’t as successful. They then aggregated data on what the main attributes of these high performing advertisers were, and compared them to average advertisers - the main difference being that high performing advertisers create 11x more ads and content to test.
But the question is - how many platforms (and how much content) should you really be testing? Some of the largest shocks of many brands worldwide is when they realize just how much content they need to create and how much they need to test. Testing your content shouldn’t just be limited to one channel alone.
Testing your content on multiple channels can provide you with key insights including what types of content your audience interacts with, engages with and converts from. This includes testing diverse assets at a large scale. We know that not everything is going to work, but having a long-term testing strategy ensures that you can hone your assets to make them work more often than not.
Testing your content on a mass-scale, and pushing out more content as a result, can help you understand what your brand looks like from an outsider’s perspective as well as how your brand is perceived by your audience. Depending on your results, you may want to make small tweaks to your content strategy. Some brands that find they resemble their competitors to similarly end up doing a full content strategy revamp with the help of content creation platforms. Often, brands that take a deep look into their content data and analytics find that with strategic content creation, their brand perception is changed for the better.
CordaRoy’s is a fantastic example of this. This brand was testing multiple creative assets across various platforms and found that when they used images with dogs, they gained significantly more traction and engagement. The increase was so noticable, that CordaRoy’s took this data to their product and merchandising team, and created the CordaRoy’s pet bed.
The Instagram profile for CordaRoy’s is still a shining testament to the insight, with more than half of a sampling of their images having dogs in them:
Check out their cute pet beds page below:
Cordaroys is just one example of a brand that utilized their data to make smarter content decisions. The thing is, only data can tell you what’s going to help your business.
Whether you can test across one platform (ie. what works best on instagram) or you test across multiple platforms - it’s important to note that what works on instagram might not work on email, or another social platform with a different audience. Knowing this, you can create a content strategy that put’s your brand’s best foot forward, and increase your KPIs at the same time.
Take Rhone as a good example of a brand doing a significant amount of testing with the content they create. Rhone is a brand that has experienced rapid growth - growing their market share and success hand in hand, as their fitness-focused but office-ready apparel finds itself in high demand.
As with any success story - strong success almost always comes with heightened expectations. Rhone knew that they needed to continue to keep a leg up on their competition, as well as continuing to differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded space. How did they do it? Smart content marketing. And testing their content made all the difference.
Chief Marketing Officer, Adam Bridegan, spoke to the importance of collecting data and spending (even limited) resources on using your data to inform your content.
“For us, we knew there was a problem, in the sense that yes, we were creating really good content, but we weren’t customizing that content at the scale that we needed to reach different audiences and bring additional customers into our funnel.” - Adam Bridegan, CMO at Rhone
After taking a deep dive into their content and through a rigorous testing process, they came to the realization that their previous content actually aligned very much in line to their competitors’. Which, if you’re looking to differentiate your brand, can cause a real problem.
Cohley helped connect the brand to influencers across multiple platforms that came at content creation from a different perspective, and Bridegan said that it’s made all the difference. Prior to working with Cohley, Rhone was testing roughly 10-15 pieces of content per week, usually by way of Facebook ads. Now, they have access to a massive content library and the marketing team is now testing upwards of 50 pieces of content per day. Switching their focus from budget-based to testing has allowed for the brand to scale their presence on Facebook, and even allowed for their expansion to new platforms and new audiences.
We know that your content is important to you. We also know that your data is what’s going to give you the best insights to how your business is performing. That’s why we base our content engineering service on data-based results, not gut feelings.
Our goal is to facilitate content testing. One way we do that, is by creating as much content as possible to test what works and what doesn’t for every brand we work with. We help you test diverse assets at a large scale. We know that not everything is going to work, but having a long-term testing strategy ensures that we can focus on the assets that connect with your audience, hitting the mark more often than not.
The old way of creating, sourcing and testing content and assets is on the outs. You have to be able to ramp up your creation and testing capabilities with multiple platforms and an eager-to-consume-content audience. The new way is to create diversity in content and continuously test, re-test and dive into your analytics to see what is working for you. We want to make our brands look like a 500 person marketing team, even if it’s only two people.