One of the most beneficial features of Advanced Content® is accountability.

Digital Media

Traffic is great, but just as in our content efforts in traditional media, we’re more interested in what gets through to the right audience and how they respond. Some examples of recent analytics:

  • The experienced editors at Advanced Content create video content for highly targeted audiences that maintain high engagement in through-plays for long-form content while satisfying platform algorithms (3 minutes plus), as well as shorter, reel-ready cuts for further leveraging.
  • While readers spend ~40 seconds on average with a typical blog post, Advanced Content creates written pieces that average more than 4 minutes for one of our clients’ websites, with some pieces averaging 12 minutes-plus over the life of the piece.
  • An email campaign using Advanced Content pieces garnered six times more engagement (open rates, click-throughs) than white papers and advertising messaging in other tests, with a click-to-open rate of more than 50%.
  • Advanced Content has the highest engagement rate of anything posted to one of our clients’ Facebook fan pages.
  • A bi-monthly email newsletter featuring Advanced Content routinely doubles industry averages for open rates and click-throughs, and often triples industry averages for click-to-open rates.
  • Our 2021 social media Advanced Content program for a client won first place in the industry’s leading marketing and communication awards program. The judges called the year-long content creation and leveraging plan “a playbook for digital content marketing.” If you’d like to review the program with us and discuss how it can apply to your business, contact us for more information.

Content marketers can’t be distracted by “vanity metrics.” In today’s digital marketplace, you will get the audience you purchase. That audience will choose to engage with and/or share what you publish, and this we can say definitively: no one shares an ad. You need engaging, relatable, actionable content to engage an audience and compel them to share it with their peers, building on your investment.

We’d love to take a deeper dive and demonstrate how you can know this content works for your goals before it’s even published, and remain accountable after it’s published. Contact us for more information.

Traditional Media

Readership research is a key element of the accountability of Advanced Content. Red Barn Media Group uses research methodology developed by media effects experts at University of Alabama—the same employed by the world’s largest media companies.

Samples of the reader population receive a survey for each issue, either through direct mail or electronically, asking questions regarding the articles they read as well as other questions based on readership and marketing scales (attitudes toward the content, message and source credibility, purchase intent).

Readers are asked how much of each article they read: “All,” “Most,” “Half,” “Less Than Half,” “None.” We assign a numerical score for each of these intervals, and readership for each piece is scored on a 0-100 scale. In our extensive magazine experience, the most common scores were in the 40s and 50s, with 60s being cause for celebration. Scores in the 70s were very rare and almost never approached 80. (Download a sample direct mail survey for FarmLife magazine here.)

By way of a benchmark, our traditional media effort for AGCO Corporation, FarmLife magazine, averages an overall readership score near 70! And that engagement nurtures leads from customers and prospects—FarmLife has driven thousands of sales leads to AGCO’s dealer network.

The most common misconception about these readership scores is that a score of 60 means “60% of the audience read the story.” In fact, a score of 60 means that, on average, the entire audience read around 60% of the story. This is a more accurate gauge of readership than simply asking whether a reader read the story or not; we are interested in how much of the Advanced Content message is getting through; it is more pertinent to know how much of the article the audience reads, not how much of the audience reads the article. This also sheds some light on why scores in the 70s are so rare. In order to have a score that high, a great deal of the audience must respond that they read “All” of the article.