Tech Profile: Squeeze by Sequentia

What is Squeeze, and how did you and your team get started in this field?

Squeeze is a content marketing measurement platform. In other words, it helps marketers understand how their content is or isn’t leading to business results like list opt-ins, leads and sales. We originally created Squeeze for our clients to help measure the results of content and community programs we were running for them. Once we realized there was a broader need for this type of measurement, we decided to make Squeeze available as a stand-alone product for anyone.

What trends and changes in the market led you to realize that Squeeze would fill a void? Describe the void.

If you ask any marketer today about his/her biggest challenge, one of the top three answers will invariably be measuring the results of their social and digital marketing activities. While some analytics tools exist to measure the website metrics, email statistics and social mentions, there is nothing out there that maps the entire customer path online from tweet to sale. We also saw that marketers were unable to get a lot of the data they needed in real time — they needed to go to IT or an analyst, and the data was often sent in big Excel spreadsheets that were hard to interpret.

What insights can Squeeze provide marketers about the performance of their content and social channels? How should the marketing/advertising industry use Squeeze to create better end-results for its clients’ content and marketing strategies?

Squeeze tells marketers which content and which channels generate the most conversions for their business — whether it’s an opt-in for a newsletter or a tweet leading to a blog post leading to a purchase. Agency marketing professionals can use Squeeze to track the performance of their clients’ campaigns and identify what content, themes, time of day and day of week will give the best results. These insights can be used to optimize current campaigns or plan future campaigns.

What features of Squeeze allow marketers to view the performance of their campaigns holistically? Why is this important?

Squeeze features that are essential for marketers include:

• Conversion tracking
• Content theme measurement (e.g. skincare is more popular than lipstick)
• Time of day and day of week performance measurement
• Campaign performance tracking

Do you think the creation of wholly original content is best for marketing, or do customers value a mix of original content and curated content relevant to them? Are online media in general trending more toward content curation?

Customers enjoy any content that will entertain or inform them, whether it’s wholly original or curated. The trend toward content curation is largely the result of the increasing appetite for content from consumer and business buyers and the challenge for organizations to keep up through wholly original content only.

How do you see content marketing evolving in the next three to five years?

We see a few changes in content marketing in the next three to five years, including the following:

Focus on quality, not quantity. As marketers begin to more easily measure the impact of their content, they will focus their content marketing efforts on creating content that drives business results, rather than creating content for the sake of publishing it (i.e., the 80/20 rule — that 20 percent of your content will drive 80 percent of your results.)

New and varied content formats. The continued penetration of smartphones, tablets and yet-to-be-invented devices will result in the delivery of content experiences optimized for new consumer digital habits.

Jen Evans is the co-founder and CEO of Sequentia. She has an extensive background in B2B marketing, including 13 years of content marketing and CRM/BI. Jen is the current chair of ITAC (Information Technology Association of Canada) and was the chair of the 2012 CMA Social Media Conference.