Today’s marketing campaigns are carefully organized, targeted, and tracked. However, many marketers lack the confidence to know how to quantify the results of their work. What should you track? What insights are important and what are not? How to measure the return on investment (ROI) of content marketing efforts?
Today’s article will explain exactly that—how to measure the return on investment (ROI) of content marketing, what it is, how to track it, and how to achieve your set ROI goal. Let’s begin.
What Is Content Marketing ROI?
Content marketing ROI is a percentage that shows how much money you made compared to what you spent. Always remember to include in your overall investment when calculating your ROI rather than just the piece of content cost. This includes:
- Labors cost
- Advertising and software costs
- Any other finances for your content
Aligning Business Expenses with Your Content Marketing Costs
Measuring content marketing ROI and tracking business expenses are two quite similar financial practices, especially regarding how they assess the profitability and effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Here are some reasons why you need to align these two business aspects.
- Content marketing costs — Before determining the ROI of your content marketing efforts, you need to know how much you’re spending. This includes costs related to content creation (hiring writers, designers, or videographers), content distribution (paid advertising or social media promotion), and tools or platforms used for content management and analytics.
- Business expenses — These are the costs associated with running your business. They include everything from rent and utilities to employee salaries. When you track these expenses, you can allocate a portion of them to your content marketing efforts, especially if certain resources or staff members are dedicated to this area.
- Direct revenue — You can determine the revenue generated by tracking the conversions and sales that result directly from your content marketing efforts.
- Indirect revenue — Some content marketing efforts might lead to indirect sales, where a customer might not purchase immediately but does so later due to the influence of the content.
- Changing budgets — By tracking business expenses and understanding your content marketing ROI, you can make more informed decisions about budget allocation. If a content marketing strategy has a high ROI, it might be worth increasing investment in that area. Leveraging marketing mix modeling in this process can help you analyze the effectiveness of various content channels and campaigns, enabling a data-driven approach to optimize your marketing spend.
Decide What to Track
When you thoroughly build your content marketing campaign and have it in place, you need to know beforehand what you will track. You shouldn’t always measure something just because you can. Therefore, it’s crucial to:
- Determine your top measurement priorities and the support metrics data you need for these measurements.
- Set performance standards for your analyses.
- Determine the fundamental expenses associated with carrying out your content strategy so that you can determine the ROI.
You must choose which key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of your content. Additionally, you must ensure that your analytics platform has “tagged” the visitor activities corresponding to each indicator. You cannot trace something if it is not marked.
How to Measure the ROI of Content Marketing
Here’s a popular rule-of-thumb formula for calculating ROI for content marketing. To calculate the ROI percentage, you need to take away the return from investment and divide it with investment. As previously mentioned, this formula is for the overall investment, not for the price of a single piece of content.
However, you can measure the ROI of your content marketing in three different ways.
ROI of Your Website Content
Not every website visitor will turn into a buyer. Also, not every company has the aim to sell through their content. Some of them have the aim to raise their brand awareness with their blogs and published articles. Whatever your end goal is, your content should be interactive.
If you don’t know how to do it or are afraid to make a mistake, that’s okay. Go through each post that you make, while keeping your targeted audience in mind.
Would they want to read it? Is it interactive enough? Is it tailored to their needs and problems, and did you provide them with the solution?
Outgrown and Zembula are just two of the many great content-building tools that can help you with your content creation. This will help you with faster creation and publishing and even increase your conversion rate.
However, monitoring single blog conversions is insufficient whether you want to raise awareness or convert more leads.
Google Analytics is a must if you want to track your website content. This service will provide you with all the necessary insights you need. You can see how many clicks you have on each content, how long your visitors stay on a certain page, where they came from, and other helpful information. Thus, you can use these insights to determine the income of each blog.
ROI of SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is crucial to the success of content marketing. This means that your targeted audience should be able to find your content easily on search engines. However, effective SEO takes time and money, so you should always be able to demonstrate ROI.
You should be aware that search engines like Bing and Google often change and update their ranking criteria. This means that you should track the latest trends, build new strategies accordingly, and optimize your content. SEO is all about staying updated in order to have an efficient content marketing strategy. Again, you can use Google Analytics for this.
As an alternative, several tools and websites can help you in keeping track of your most common search keywords. The most popular and useful ones are Adherfs, Semrush, and SE Ranking.
With Google Analytics integration with Salesforce, you can further enhance your data by linking website activity directly to your sales pipeline, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of how your content contributes to revenue.
ROI of Your Social Media
Last but not least is measuring your social media ROI. Posting on social media allows you to engage with your audience and establish trust as well as raise brand awareness. Consider popular social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and so on.
According to your company’s sales and marketing goals, you will determine the metrics you should track. This can look like gaining a broader audience for your blog through your posts, landing more partnerships, or even finding a community of influencers that will promote your brand.
According to your end goal, make your posts as interesting and personalized as possible. Opt for carousels, single posts, reels, or even product videos, which can help you reach higher audience engagement.
When strategizing your content, consider incorporating pay per view options to maximize revenue and ensure a sustainable monetization model.
Product videos can significantly boost user engagement on your website. Visitors are more likely to stay longer if there’s a compelling video to watch. This increased dwell time can positively impact SEO rankings, increasing organic traffic and potential sales.
As you monitor this data over time, you can calculate your social media ROI using the same ROI calculation for website traffic. Don’t forget to include all expenditures, including the price of your independent consultants, social media listening tools, and any other charges.
Conclusion
Measuring the ROI of content marketing is very easy. It’s not something you should bypass but rather embrace in order to reach your goals. By aligning business expenses with content marketing costs and tracking key performance indicators, businesses can gain a broad view of their content’s effectiveness.
Whether it’s through quality social media content or SEO, measuring ROI ensures that every marketing dollar is well-spent. By doing this, you will contribute to the overarching business goals.
