7 huge losses if you fail to track how your research content is used

If you’re creating expensive research then only making it available to customers via an emailed or downloadable document, there’s no real way to accurately know what happens next – in today’s customer-centric economy, this isn’t good.

Equally, if you provide a subscription that allows a customer access to your portfolio without you trying to understand how and why they use your content, you’re practically throwing away valuable information that could be critical to the future direction of your organisation.

So, what information could you be missing out on and why is that bad for business?

1. Who is viewing the content?

If an admin assistant bought a report then immediately passed it to the Insights Director, do you really want to try and engage the assistant in future? How do you think they’ll respond to marketing and sales? Perhaps not as well as the person who’s consuming your report. But how would you know that?

2. How many people view it?

Is it just the individual who bought it, their whole team, or also people working in another business? If you don’t know, then you have no idea about your potential market. How many separate accounts, license holders, or one-off purchases are you missing out on?

3. How many times is it viewed?

Imagine you sell the same person two pieces of content, but you don’t know that they looked at one piece just once and the other more than 100 times. Without this information, you’d assume they’re equally interested in both subjects. Think how different your sales and marketing approach could be if you knew, in detail, how many people looked at which report?

4. Which sections are interesting, which aren’t?

If you sell someone a report about meat sales and they only read sections related to pork products, how would you know they have no interest in beef, chicken, or lamb? You wouldn’t. As a result, your sale of future content to them will be less precise.

5. How do you make your content relevant?

Without usage data, it will be difficult to create personalised content bundles for customers as you won’t know what they’re interested in. Also, if you can’t gather usage data to find out how content is used by the entire userbase, it will be difficult to know what subjects the audience is interested in and then set an appropriate strategy for future research production.

6. How do you renew subscriptions?

Let’s see: you have no real information on how often your content was used, nor by how many people, and you don’t have figures for all the people in a single organisation that read your expensively-produced research – nor the breadth of topics these people were reading. Can you still make a convincing case for maintaining the same fees? Can you justify a suggestion to expand the account license to include new content, new topics, and new categories that might be of interest?

7. How do you sell additional content?

The answer is: you can still sell it, but you won’t have any information to back up your claims or to ensure it’s relevant to the person you’re selling it to. Now, just imagine approaching the same call knowing their three major topic interests, and armed with an offer for additional content in this area at a cutdown price. Those are two very different scenarios.