Martin Keen, host of the IBM Technology YouTube channel hit one million subscribers, but what’s the business value? You can have millions of subscribers, but if there’s no business value, it’s hard to justify funding. So, how does IBM track it?
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Measuring mindshare and ROI on content strategy
Keen is a Master Inventor at IBM and works with a team to produce videos for IBM. The videos are fascinating but because IBM’s channel doesn’t focus sell product, what’s the business case? Keen says the channel’s fast growth comes from their relentless audience focus, and this strategy is certainly ideal when considering how to grow your podcast or video but it does have to show ROI too.
Keen explains that the team still tracks conversions in meaningful ways. “When you go back to the business and tell them we’ve generated X number of million views, it sounds good, but then the question is always, ‘So what?’”
While IBM does include CTAs and buttons to guide viewers toward IBM’s products or services, t’s not a center focus therefore they have to find other clever ways to measure impact. Therefore, Keen and IBM looks at mindshare and how they’re able to influence the larger public conversation. “It’s very difficult to measure” Keen says, but they have a few tricks up their sleeve.
Tracking Mindshare
One major indicator is topic authority and search demand. “When we put out a video on a new topic, we can see how many people are thinking to go to the IBM technology channel to learn about that topic,” Keen explains.
When IBM publishes a new video, they’re very careful to analyze their website traffic before and after to determine if that topic drove any kind of inbound traffic through search engines. If they create a video on a topic about LLMs, for example, and see a rise in search engine traffic to IBM’s website around that topic. “If we see that we put out a video on that topic and it is driving traffic, we can sort of imply from that, that we are driving some of that, that voice. We are measuring it that way.” said Keen.
Many content marketers rely on clicks or direct connections, but that’s too narrow a view.
IBM also measures their mindshare and influence by watching their video rankings. When IBM videos start ranking highly in search results for key industry topics, it suggests that IBM is seen as an authoritative source. “If you’ve watched five or six IBM videos about large language models, even if they didn’t talk about the IBM large language model, IBM is now part of that conversation,” he explains.
Keen emphasizes that while mindshare is a bit harder to quantify and takes a wider strategic plan, it’s invaluable to their brand. Being present in important discussions shapes audience perception and drive business results over time.
“Initially, a lot of the views started to come through search and that’s when we knew we were onto something because it was these search terms that were making the difference in driving people to the channel.”
Their audience-first focus has been instrumental in building mass-scale relationships. “We’re trying to create this, this, uh, relationship with the audience.”
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