Digital Publishing
2 mins read

Engagement metrics still viewed as less important than traditional brand measures

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

A new survey from the World Media Group (a strategic alliance of world-leading media brands and publishers*) shows that marketers are still not using engagement metrics as their primary KPIs. The survey questioned key influencers across advertisers, agencies, media brands and consultants.

Whilst the survey found that 49% of all respondents believe ‘brand engagement’ is content’s key strength (rising to 60% for advertisers), marketers across the board are not yet focused on evaluating content campaigns against engagement metrics and are still favouring more traditional brand measures as KPIs.

Twenty-six percent of respondents cite increased brand awareness as the main KPI they used to measure their most recent campaign, followed by measuring shifts in brand perception (25%). The first engagement metric comes in third with ‘time spent with content’ being used by 20% of respondents as their main KPI.

Despite this, content-driven marketing is set to continue its ascendancy, with 78% of respondents (and 85% of agencies) believing it will grow over the next two years. Indeed, 45% of respondents said that >50% of the campaigns they work on are now content-driven.

Other key findings of the survey:

  • Seventy-one percent of respondents scored the story as the most important factor when creating a content-led campaign, followed by authenticity (62%) and creative execution (38%).
  • 66% of respondents said that matching the environment/platform to the audience is the single biggest contributor to a campaign’s success once a story had been created. 
  • The strongest trend for content over the next 12 months is the use of short-form videos, with 69% of respondents predicting they will be using them more.
  • Looking at other trends, 58% predict the use of more editorial style content and 56% expect to increase their use of social media posts.
  • When asked for the content marketing trend that most excites them, VR (virtual reality)/AR (augmented reality) received the highest number of mentions, followed by audio/podcast/voice-related content.

*World Media Group is a strategic alliance of the world’s leading media brands, incorporating The Atlantic, Bloomberg MediaGroup, The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, National Geographic, Reuters, The NewYork Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post