Content Marketing Tips from Experts at First Round Capital and Andreessen Horowitz

Today we have Camille Ricketts from First Round and so much Oxy from a16z, and we have a ton of questions about content, content marketing, editorial from Twitter, so I think we're just gonna jump right into them.

Okay, good, cool. So, Adore Chung, partner at YC, asked two questions. The first of which is: how do you measure the effectiveness of your content?

"Sonal, you're asking me first? Oh my god! I'm gonna give you guys a cop-out answer, which is—because I think content measurement is one of the hardest things that has not been solved. I've been looking for tools and things for years. You know, in media you have obvious things like page views and time on site, but I think the number one question is you have to really tie it to what you're trying to do. I know that sounds like a really obvious thing, but actually, people don't stop to pause and ask themselves: what are we trying to measure and why? Like, how does it fit our strategy and our goal?"

"And then, also what you measure is what you're actually going to bother changing, because why measure something if you're really not gonna do anything about it? Things that I value most are things like time on site, engagement, and uptake, much more than page views. But of course, it is kind of a nice high when you get a lot of people reading something."

"To sort of make that more specific: what is like a good time on site that you're looking for? Do you base it on the word count of an article or a video? What do you do?"

"Yeah, you know, it's not an arbitrary number for sure because I have a—I actually have a big pet peeve around word lengths. I hate when people get into religious debates around length—like short is good, long is bad, or people only do this—and I hate all those rules. Do you guys have word counts on your staffer?"

"We don't have word counts. What we write is extremely long! Yes, we can! A lot of people saying, 'Why are you doing that?'"

"Yeah, it really depends on the content you're trying to share."

"So exactly! That's what I hate as a religious debate around it because that's exactly it: what is the amount of length that you actually need to convey the point? It's more about information density to me, like how many insights are you conveying—not like per square foot, but you know what I mean? Are you really packing it in or are you just meandering for no reason?"

"And so, the length—to go back to your point about the measurement—there isn't an actual number because it depends on the length. You know, a 4,000-word piece is gonna take ten minutes to read. But you get a sense! And I know that seems like a cop-out, but you do get a sense like this is a piece that has high engagement, like a lot of people are actually really staying with it. They're not just flipping in and out."

"And I don't know the tools you guys use, but I still use Chartbeat, even though we don't have to use Chartbeat because you don't get that kind of traffic like you do in media. But it does kind of tell you where people drop off, and I think that data literally informs how I think about writing and editing and how I think about being an editor. Mmm.. because you really pay attention at keeping people hooked for every turn—at least in the first third of a piece—before they're committed."

"So are you mixing it up with like pull quotes, like images? What do you guys do?"

"We're definitely good at that."

"Okay, because you guys have a really beautifully designed site. I really like the look, and I genuinely like the look and feel of what you guys do."

"Yeah! When we redesigned the site, we really wanted to focus on readability, because we do write quite long. So how can you keep someone reading, really engaged? The types of things that we found to be most effective are subheads, obviously, in order to give people sort of trail markers in a piece that they can literally skip ahead to the content that they might be looking for in particular. But then also pull quotes that keep them feeling the voiceover of the person that we're featuring, because that's a huge part of the appeal."