6 critical wins that come from tracking research content use

Creating high-quality Market Intelligence is an expensive business, so it’s important you extract the maximum value possible from your research and analysis – that means direct financial return through sales, but equally important is gathering data about use of that content.

If you’re creating research, but have no tracking capability, you’re throwing away vital information. Without knowing your target audience, how do you operate? In this post, we’ll look at what’s to gain from understanding how content is used. There are scores of great wins, but here are the six we think are most critical:

1. Understand how often content is viewed

Knowing how often content is viewed is as important as knowing who views. It might just be a select few, but if they’re going back frequently, the value to them is likely to be high. What else can you offer them? Something of value they might not have previously come across?

2. Find out how your content is used

Do customers just read research or put it to use? If you can establish when content is exported into Excel or PPT, you’ll know when the customer is using it to make a critical point or decision. That’s valuable information that could give you a sign of where markets are going.

3. Understand what’s popular

There’s no point spending 90% of your time creating content read by 10% of your audience. Knowing what’s popular can help you set priorities. Equally, knowing which sections of a report are viewed or used can help you know what parts of a topic the customer is most interested in. Understanding this helps determine where your resources should be focused.

4. Create future research that’s increasingly relevant

Instead of just looking at an individual’s use of content, what about looking at customer usage trends across your whole portfolio? Gain both the micro and macro view to determine which are the hot topics and to help identify future research targets.

5. Renegotiate/renew from a position of power

When the time comes to renew a subscription or renegotiate access rights, not only will usage information help you supply the right mix of content to your customer, it’s a vital piece of information for you to prove your value to them. Often, the person that pays the bills is not the person who uses the service, and you might have to convince them of your worth.

6. Make sales of additional content easier

If you understand how customers use content, that’s critical for your cross/up-sell. What about offering a deal to broaden their licensed content with related material or offering a bolt-on of content in a related topic or category?