The Most Important Marketing KPI You’re Not Measuring: Cost Per Content

Kasim: 00:00:11

All right, we are back and we are talking about the most

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important KPI you're not tracking.

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All right, Qasim, spill the beans.

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What is it?

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So I was having a conversation,

with the gentleman that runs Do

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you know Brandon Turner, Ralph?

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Beardy Brandon?

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I do.

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I love Brandon.

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I love Brandon too.

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He's one of my favorite people.

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I think he's one of the most adept

social media marketers I've ever known.

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And he's not even known as

a social media marketer.

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He's a real estate guy, but he's made,

His visibility, which is important in

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real estate, especially when you're doing

syndication, comes from social media.

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And he's phenomenal at

it on every channel.

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His podcast is great.

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His YouTube is great.

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His Instagram is great.

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His Twitter is great.

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The gentleman that runs his new

podcast, for the Better Life Tribe,

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his name is Alex Scott Felice.

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And I was talking to Alex about,

the KPIs for his media team.

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And I was pointing him

towards the usual suspects.

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Things like, number of followers,

growth, watch time, et cetera.

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And Alex is no, dude, I think I'm

going to go after cost per content.

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And it instantly floored me and pissed

me off that I hadn't thought of this.

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So first shout out to Alex, cause he's

the one that introduced the concept

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to me, but in the age of short form

video, fast media, where, people are,

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they call it doom scrolling, right?

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People are going through Instagram just

sitting there for hours on end watching.

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seven, 10, 15 second videos.

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So somebody who's watching 10 second

videos for hours on end, how many

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thousands of videos are they scrolling

through every day, week, month, year?

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and what that means, it

puts us in a position is.

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marketers in having to be able to keep

up with the insatiable appetite that

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is everybody's need for media, which

means that it's a quantitative game.

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And because it's a quantitative game,

you have to have a quantitative KPI and

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cost per content is the quantitative KPI.

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Now, does that mean that you

don't have qualitative concerns?

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Obviously not.

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You have to produce

content, quality content.

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It's a prerequisite, but that's an axiom.

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So it's like, all right, great.

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Good for you.

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Yes.

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Quality has to be there.

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Obviously, let's make that the axiom

that we build on top of as long as your

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content is good enough and we've all seen

things go viral where you're like, those

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C plus, as long as your content is good

enough, you need to be taking the content

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you're producing and turning it into.

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As many repurposed tidbits

as you possibly can.

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if you're a CMO or director of marketing,

this is your new most important KPI when

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it comes to media creation, and Ralph,

you and I are good examples of this.

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We're bad at it, by the

way, you and I suck at that.

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We shoot an hour long podcast and

it results in one piece of media.

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And I know that's changed now because

you've got the team and it's because,

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in the beginning you didn't own

it, but now that you own it, that

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one hour piece of media could be.

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And I'm not being hyperbolic here.

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It could be hundreds of pieces of content.

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Cause if you think about all the little

shorts that you could pull out for

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Instagram, repurpose those for Tik

TOK, repurpose those for Snapchat,

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repurchase the Facebook, Lauren Petrulo

just started working on our Pinterest

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and then that can get pulled out and

the transcription becomes a blog.

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And, the audio clips get snipped

up and if you want to put them on,

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whatever, make those downloadable,

like repurposing content.

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Is it complete, absolute,

total prerequisite.

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And the way to know whether

or not you're doing it is to

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begin tracking cost per content.

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So that's my sales pitch.

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that's more or less what I

think people should be doing.

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I love the metric because it

now puts it into KPI terms.

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I think that our listener can now.

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Measure cause like, so we have

a measurement for everything.

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I'm sure just like you do.

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And if you're running a company,

you need to have measurements.

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Cause what gets measured gets

managed and what gets managed gets

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measured, hopefully, vice versa.

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The point is that we were struggling

with, all right, what is it?

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That number of shorts?

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Is it number of longs?

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Is it number of mids,

is it like, what is it?

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Is it engagement?

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Is it likes, how many

views forget all that?

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It's just volume at this point.

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And I think so many people get caught

up and I know like internally and

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especially externally to teams.

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And when one team that we just

had a call was met about is.

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They were very concerned about,

Oh, the quality has to be there.

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It has to be very high brand.

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It has to be this and that.

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And my point to them was it's not

necessarily always about brand.

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It's about volume and testing

and seeing what resonates

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because it's gone in an instant.

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and the algorithm is going

to do the job for you.

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You're going to produce a hundred shorts

and 98 are never going to get seen.

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And one is going to have medium

visibility and one's going to go viral.

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So you can either sit around with

your whiteboard and your brand

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guidelines and your team and try to

ideate which one's going to go viral.

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And you'll fail every single time,

by the way, or produce the hundred.

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And the benefit you have is if

it's not good, no one will see it.

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You're relying on algorithmic

placement of media based off of.

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Indications of interest.

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So as people watch it, stay, listen,

comment, whatever, that allows the

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network to identify what the quality

content is based off of peer review.

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It's more or less a voting system.

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It's a meritocratic environment.

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So everybody's need for high

production value and brand guidelines,

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this is what's killing you.

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I'm talking to my CMOs and

my director of marketing.

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And by the way, this, we're going

to get real dangerous here, Ralph.

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Okay, ready?

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The people in those roles, Mr.

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or Mrs.

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CMO, the skill set that you came

to the job with, the education

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that you came to the job with, is

diametrically opposed to what you need

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now because of this new environment.

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Because the CMO used to be the

champion of the brand guideline, right?

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Like the CMO used to be the one that

said, Hey, we have to maintain continuity.

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Messaging is the most important.

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We need to make sure that,

they were the brakes.

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They were the brakes, and

now they need to be the gas.

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You have to pump this content out

there with the understanding that if

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it's not good, nobody will see it.

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And if it's great, and then you

can chase those rabbits down holes.

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So I'm not trying to completely

throw quality content or the concept

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of quality content out the window.

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What I'm saying is, that's the

axiom, and now you need to take

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your quality content and repurpose

it a thousand different ways.