Why brands, agencies need to be consistent with content analysis

To cement a brand’s positioning in a market with differentiated content, the content piece has to be analysed in-depth, in terms of relevancy, clarity and much more.

To ensure that the main objective of producing content to hit the chord with the audience is fulfilled, content analysis has become an important aspect. But how well brands or agencies have understood this? Moreover, should content be analysed on each of the stages in the content cycle, given each stage: development, execution and distribution do project multiple issues that are needed to be fixed?

BuzzInContent talked to experts at brands and agencies to find out if there is a gap or lack of understanding between them in analysing content in each of the stages. Can a failure of a campaign be attributed to the absence of analysis? And, on what all parameters is the process is being executed? Brands also discuss how the role of analysing content is carried out.

Shradha Agarwal

Content needs to be checked, first in terms of relevancy and then clarity. It is equally essential for each stage of SEO optimisation as well. It is very important today to analyse content at each stage of the campaign as any drop in the KPI can be corrected if creative or content is changed on time. It is carried out by clearly identifying the KPIs and tracking the sentiments of users on the content piece through social listening tools, said Shradha Agarwal, COO of Grapes Digital.

Today, all of the biggest platforms in the world are extremely driven by data. By analysis to be able to make sure that the content that they're developing is engaging, drawing the attention of the viewers, sort of helping them deliver the right message. A lot of such platforms like Netflix have decided to focus on analysing the content across all stages. A high volume of the content that they have created has been backed by data, to a large extent, and the key metrics that they have identified for that data is something that they have studied very closely before they look at before releasing a new show, or a series.

Advait Gupt

“Traditionally, most of the analysis used to happen at the last stage, which is the distribution stage. But increasingly, as higher volume of both quantitative and qualitative analysis is happening on content, it is happening at the earlier stages like development and execution stage as well,” said Advait Gupt, Founder of Supari Studios.

The content is analysed at every stage to gauge the consumers’ interaction with it, hence determining if the communication is successful or not, said Rishi Sharma, AVP and Head Digital Marketing, LIVA, P&F Business, Grasim Industries.

Content analysis pre and post distribution is equally important. Pre-analysis helps in analysing the grounds needed to be made so that the content creates maximum impact on target groups. Post-analysis helps in comparing the assumed and actual impact it has created.

Sameer Makani

“As we move in to a more tech-driven era, content is analysed and tweaked by each one right from the copy team to design team and from the execution team to the managerial team. It is analysed on the basis of different parameters ranging from virality to share-ability, which purely depends on how brands want to position their content and what objective content focuses on,” said Sameer Makani, Co-founder and Managing Director, Makani Creatives.

Girish Bindal

Girish Bindal, Head of Content, Elara Technologies, explaining how housing.com conducts the analysis on the basis of conversation, consumption and conviction, said, “Every form of content has usability, every form of content should be measured in a way it helps you reach your end goal. Each segment has a different method and parameters.”

Depending on what stage you're at within the content cycle, methods and procedures do differ. “The earlier stage is typically more qualitative and moves into more quantitative parameters as you sort of move closer towards the distribution stage at the later stages of the content cycle. At the initial stages, our methodology is design thinking, which is based around the sort of analysing insights and leads, whereas later stages are typically far more data-driven. So, more analytics role and analytics people looking at not only crunching but also visualising the data,” Gupt said.

Sai Sangeeta Israni

Content is the most important factor in any SEO activity as well. There are many tools in the market that offer to analyse the website content for SEO and copyright challenges. “Content optimisation may be carried out for multiple purposes, which can be prioritised based on the type of page we are optimising. For example, an information page should have reader-friendly content while it is optimised for appropriate key-word density and fairly seamless presentation. Whereas, the static page used for advertising and lead generation purpose must have direct content, which is full of the call to action, and keywords. Content Analysis Tools will automatically detect issues related to readability, grammar and key-word placements,” said Sai Sangeeta Israni, GM Marketing, Spykar Lifestyles.

Agarwal compiled the four stages of analysis on the basis of Grapes Digital’s past campaign performances: Content Bucket Analysis, which includes competition mapping, category mapping, and topicality. Campaign Objective, Brand Personality Mapping (is the communication mapping the personality traits of the brand) and Call to Action.

But, who is responsible for the job of content analysis?

Does the job and role of analysing content is handled by the whole team or is it a one-person job? Is the agency solely assigned for this role, or is it a team effort of the brand and agency, together? Israni said it’s a joint effort of the agency and the brand to analyse content.

Gupt said the role depends on the scale and the nature of the content. He said, “In the earlier stages of the content cycle, the role is carried out by more strategy and planning related jobs. At the middle stages, there is more execution, creative production-related role. And the last stage of analysis is typically more data-driven roles and so, experts are assigned accordingly.”

Prashant Puri

Talking about how the agency carries out such job roles, Prashant Puri, Co-Founder and CEO of AdLift and Agarwal said that mostly the SEO team will carry out the analysis and recommend actions. However, when readability is a concern, often content writing teams are involved from an early stage. Also, client servicing along with social and the creative teams comprising art and copy are the key stakeholders for the analysis of content in an agency.

Do campaigns fail if there is no analysis done?

A campaign is a mix of content and media mix, and the timing. If all are in place, the campaign will be successful. Hence, content analysis is a key aspect to ensure a successful campaign is delivered. Discussing various other reasons for the failure of the campaigns, all the experts agreed how to a great extent the lack of analysing the content can be attributed to the failure of the campaigns. For this, brand and agencies need to be in sync while analysing any piece of content. With an agency in place, brands only need to accept the recommendations and either the agency or the brand’s in-house content teams will plug the gaps.

Gupt said there is still a gap in understanding the importance of content analysis among agencies and brands. “The gap is there because the entire landscape is evolving rapidly. There's no question of the intent, but the ability. Both on the brand and the content creator side, all stakeholders are trying to sort of build a better sense of how engagement is evolving online. The gap is sort of starting to get bridged. As we move forward, we will just keep increasing more sophisticated tools that will help us make better decisions on the content we create and how we analyse it.”

Echoing the same view, Makani said the gap in content analysis between brands and the creator was visible a few years ago since the approach was different. However, now it is well streamlined.