5 Smart Ways to Help Determine the ROI of Your Federated Search Project
What is Federated Search?
Federated Search is the process of collecting content from multiple third-party sources and presenting it in a single, unified view. It is used to curate content from a variety of places like news websites, blogs, learning management platforms, industry publications, and social media.
Once your aggregated content is indexed, you can layer search functionality on top of it, known as Federated Search, or you could also make that data accessible through any number of channels like chatbots, dynamic lists, content alerts, email subscriptions, directories and more.
Why Aggregating Content is Vital for Associations
The number one complaint we hear from associations like yours is that the valuable content that your team has worked hard on, that only your association provides, is hard to find, creating a less than desirable user experience, but more importantly, not showing your organization in the most positive light.
Here are some key benefits to content aggregation:
Positions you as the go-to destination for your industry.
Creates a single source of your best content for your members.
Improves online member engagement.
Increases website traffic.
Keeping these benefits in mind, there are also some very tangible ways to track ROI for your content aggregation investment.
Keep reading for more.
Federated Search pulls all your third-party data into a single results page.
5 Ways to Validate Your ROI for Your Investment in Content Aggregation
1. Non-Dues Revenue
There are a number of things that associations can do to generate non-dues revenue from content aggregation, such as:
Offering paid premium content and services to members.
Partnering with third-party vendors to offer sponsored content.
Offering advertising opportunities to partners within the federated content ecosystem.
2. Reduced staff time
Content aggregation can help reduce staff time by automating the process of collecting and curating content. It can also greatly minimize the need to create duplicate content that can arise when all your data lives in different places.
These efficiencies can allow your team to focus on other tasks with confidence, knowing your federated search platform has it covered.
3. Leverage existing investments
Federated search is the great connector. It allows the data from your AMS, LMS, online community (and more) to be seamlessly assembled into a single knowledge base.
But, more importantly, it increases the value of your existing investment in those tools by pulling out the content that was once standalone and difficult to access into a highly usable, easily promotable, and easy to repurpose source of information.
4. Beat the competition
Sometimes the competition isn’t who you think it is. There are the obvious players like other organizations that also have offerings for your members, but don’t count out Google.com or even simply the status quo as prime competitors, too.
In the end, you’re in a battle for your members’ attention, so if you’re providing the right content at the right time, you may just be slaying competitors you didn’t know were at your door in the first place.
5. Reduce costs of other marketing investments
A federated search platform allows you to not only bring all your content into a single platform, but it allows you to use that platform in lieu of other systems you may be using today.
It’s possible to:
Send emails to your members based on their content preferences.
Offer real-time recommendations on similar content from your knowledge base.
Translate existing content into other languages.
Pull text from static images using OCR technology into your search index.
Incorporate federated search analytics directly into your instance of GA4.
What Else Can Content Aggregation Do for You?
Outside of the tangible ROI factors we’ve mentioned above, there are other nuanced benefits you’ll get from being the go-to information source for your industry.
Authority
Creating a single knowledge hub for your organization’s content doesn’t just create efficiencies for your staff and better engagement with your members, it makes you a standing authority in your industry, the trusted source. And that priceless.
Brand Awareness
Becoming THE place for content with your constituents will create a buzz within your community that will outweigh any direct marketing you’re doing to recruit members.
Happy Team
Beyond saving your team some time, aggregating your third-party content and making it easy to find reduces call to HQ asking where content lives on your website and brings some pride in ownership with staff knowing they are leverage the best tech available.
So, now what?
It’s not difficult to see the advantages of content aggregation. It’s a member engagement advantage that our association clients can’t believe they ever lived without. Most of them wish they’d implemented it sooner.
If you think aggregating your third-party content is your next strategic move, let’s chat on how we can help.