How to define value of content when it’s hard to define

I have worn a bunch of hats in my career, which all had different problems to solve. One of the problems I constantly try to solve is how to get better at defining value. When I think about ‘value’ I think numbers, something tangible. I am not afraid to say that numbers and I have had a rocky relationship ever since I was a teenager.

I remember my mum retuning home after the dreaded parent teacher evening when I was in year 11, and the feedback my maths teacher gave her I’ll never forget. ‘James has a great time in class, but isn’t great at maths’. You might be asking why this is relevant, but I’ll get to it.

To define value, you need to begin with the problem. When working in product this what you spend most of your life thinking about. Which problem will be prioritised over everything else by driving the most value?

in 2019 we moved the Digital team at BT into a product model, working in squads and tribes. I was given the assignment to run the TV and Sport content tribe which consisted of three product owners, two product designers, about 10 content designers and 10 back-end developers. This team was responsible for creating the content experience for millions of TV and Sport fans globally. With BT having the exclusive rights for the Champions League football, and a new TV proposition on the way, it was the place to showcase this award-winning content. Diving into the assignment I realised there were a few problems which needed to be addressed:

1.      The way value was measured was called ‘engagement’ which consisted mostly of video streams, clicks on content and traffic.

2.      The site had 3rd party advertising plastered all over it, with brands which did not have an affinity with BT. While the revenue from this was nice to have, the adverse effect was user dissatisfaction.

3.      Call to action to buy BT Sport across the site were static, and often confusing as it wasn’t always clear if you were clicking on content or advertising. Not only that they were incredibly labour intensive to create and maintain.

4.      Content designers were experts in creating content but didn’t understand the value their efforts drove.

Then there was the business problem which was a by-product of the above problems, and the hardest to solve.

The perception of executives was that the value of content didn’t justify the money spent on funding. There wasn’t a clear customer or commercial benefit to continuously improve the content experience compared to other areas with clearly defined value.

Coming from an ecommerce background my immediate thinking was: how can we drive more commercial value through content in a way which will drive a positive customer reaction? This isn’t an easy thing to do – as visitors to the site are notorious for banner blindness and/or generally find them intrusive.

During this time, the team was in the final stages of re-platforming the CMS which would give the content designers an enhanced experience, increasing speed to publish as well as giving us deeper analytics and insight when creating and publishing content. But what would we do with this improved level of capability?

As a newly defined tribe, we cast the net wide and invited everyone involved in TV and sport at BT into a workshop to define what we want this product to be – and what possibilities where were in the future.

Our vision is to become the #1 destination for TV and sport content, driving business value though brilliant content experiences.

We couldn’t ignore the insight which was loud and clear - that the advertising across the site was driving poor customer satisfaction. Something had to be done – but how could we show that by removing this revenue generating channel we could drive value in another way?

Following what I call ‘Day 0’ we rallied together with finance to understand what commercial value we could attribute to the traffic which was being driven naturally to site. Was it possible to turn ‘engagement’ into ‘retainment’. Are people who engage with the content experiences more likely to stay BT customers and be advocates of our products and services? What if we were able to drive more SEO value, and richer experiences could we be sure that this would further increase this measure?

Turns out it did! Customers who engaged with content were three times more likely to remain customers, and spent more too! This far outweighed the revenue driven by the advertising so we pivoted the new site design away from supporting 3rd party advertising and prioritized the content consumption experience.

Being able to measure Customer Lifetime Value from content really helped elevate the team’s thinking around how the work they were doing would contribute to the bigger picture. The content creators now felt more connected to the initiatives that were prioritised on business and customer value. Most importantly, being able to demonstrate value gave this product the credibility with the executives by speaking their language and regularly updating them throughout the process.

But we didn’t stop there. With all the 30% year-on-year increase in SEO traffic how could we drive further value but maintain the customer satisfaction we had worked so hard to claw back?

The team started by trialling some contextual messaging (rather than salesy-looking banners) serving to customers based on the existing package landing them into the relevant sales journeys, A/B testing button call to actions to maximise click though and merchandising banner assets on sales pages for relevant events with consistent designs. We have seen an incredible 83% increase in sales year-on-year since the relaunch and most importantly didn’t negatively impact the customer experience, in fact it enhanced it!

I’m really proud of the squad’s achievements. As a team we have overcome some huge obstacles that were previously insurmountable. The squad has really embraced a different way of approaching a product and seen amazing results. Professionally this has been an ‘ah ha!’ moment on how to use numbers to my advantage, using them to tell a story with passion. I have always used ‘web analytics’ to understand performance – but in this case it was more than that. The way we approached the problem understanding which metrics we need to move to win over the hearts and minds of our senior stakeholders. After all these years I have finally enjoyed numbers but I’m still not good at them.

I’m interested in other people’s thoughts on this topic. Please reach out to me either via DM or Email at jamesengelbertblog@gmail.com