Without any doubt, content is regarded as king in digital marketing. Despite knowing the significance of content marketing, research indicates that 53% of organizational goals are not related to the content at all.
Whether businesses realize this or not, this can turn out to be a major drawback for them. But merely creating content is not going to take you anywhere, you also need to measure whether your content marketing efforts are paying off or not.
Very few businesses and marketers know how to measure the return on investment of content marketing. For many, it’s still a mystery. Thankfully, some metrics are used so that you can measure the success of your content marketing.
Here’s an insight into how to measure the success of content marketing.
Content Marketing ROI
Content marketing ROI refers to the profits gained from content marketing in accordance with the amount spent on it.
Most businesses only focus on creating high-quality content and engaging content but in doing so, they forget that they have to measure the success of the content marketing efforts. The main purpose of the key metrics in marketing is to drive revenue.
Just because your content marketing campaign is driving traffic, engagement, and awareness, it does not mean that you are going well. Instead of this, you need to take note of the money and effort that went into it as this will help you decide if it is worth it or not.
Tips To Measure The Content Marketing ROI
No doubt that there is a clear-cut formula to measure the content marketing ROI but there are marketers who miss out on crucial things when calculating the ROI. Consequently, here are some tips to help you measure the content marketing ROI.
Right tracking
The first tip to measure the content marketing ROI is to have the right tracking in place. You need to attribute returns of specific content types and channels to measure the content marketing ROI.
For this, you can use tactics like landing pages and thank you pages specific to content and campaigns, goals & events in Google Analytics. Besides this, there are other tracking parameters as well to help you analyze performance by content types and campaigns.
These tactics will help you to see which offers are getting the most conversions and also the channels which are driving the most traffic to those offers.
Define conversions
Defining and valuing your conversions is also important. Sometimes, businesses tend to have multiple marketing campaigns where they do not aim at conversions directly. But it is crucial to assign a monetary value to the conversions.
You can easily define and value your conversions by making use of your sales team and analytics data. In addition to this, you can also use CRM and automation software along with the tracked links and campaign-specific landing pages.
Doing so will get you an accurate picture of your content marketing performance. Care should be taken while using the CRM that shows you the different pieces of content with which a user interacted.
Content marketing metrics
Knowing the content marketing metrics is also a significant step in measuring content marketing ROI. It will help you in knowing if you are on the right track or not. Moreover, you can also come to know if you need to optimize or improve your content or not.
Some key metrics to focus on for measuring your content marketing ROI are SEO, social media, PPC, and email metrics. The SEO metrics include page views, impressions, clicks, click-through rate, impressions, bounce rate, domain authority, and organic conversions.
In the case of social media marketing, you can measure the reach, impressions, engagement, conversion, or click-through rate. Likewise, there are PPC metrics which include cost per click, click-through rate, conversion rate, and view-through conversions.
As far as email marketing is concerned, it includes clicks, open rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, subscribers, and unsubscribers.
Compile all costs
The next crucial content marketing ROI tip is to compile all costs. It is an obvious thing to take into account your costs but marketers often forget this. Fortunately, you can take the help of a lot of content marketing tools.
When calculating the content marketing costs, you need to include the keyword research tools, AI copywriting tools, CMS, and designing the images. But this is not all. You also need to include the cost of content distribution and optimization like paid campaigns, content generators, social media managers, and analytics tools.
The tools can assist you in getting a rough estimate of the content marketing costs and accordingly, you can determine your ROI.
Significance Of Content Marketing ROI
Merely crafting a content marketing strategy is not enough, you also need to measure and have visibility into content marketing ROI. Here’s why content marketing ROI is significant.
Attracts customers
The prominent benefit of content marketing ROI is that it helps to attract customers toward your products or services. You can convince potential buyers to use your services by tying content to the revenue.
The modern-day buyer knows better than to be merely impressed by traffic when it comes to B2B marketing. The buyers are more interested in knowing how content marketing fits into the bottom line metrics.
Secure buy-ins
The next benefit of content marketing ROI is secure buy-ins from stakeholders. Content marketing involves not only writing expenses but many other kinds of expenses like writer’s salaries, tools cost, and others.
Consequently, try to convince the stakeholders to keep the money flowing into content marketing when they gather to discuss business updates.
Final Thoughts
Missing out on the details or committing some mistakes while calculating content marketing is easy. But you can avoid making those mistakes by following the tips mentioned above and accurately calculating the content marketing ROI.