Is there value in content marketing? Definitely. As long as you have a strategy in place that helps increase your bottom line.
As the marketing industry continues to evolve, so will marketers’ approach to content marketing measurement. Today, there are all kinds of challenges that you’ll need to overcome, including multi-channel attribution, cross-device tracking on desktop and mobile platforms, and AI-driven marketing.
In this blog, Nicole Garcia, Senior Digital Marketing Manager will explain how to scale your strategy using a tactical content marketing plan that improves your ROI.
What You’ll Learn:
- What is Content Marketing ROI?
- Calculating Your Content Marketing ROI
- Key Factors in Determining Your Content Marketing ROI
- Content Marketing Measurement Best Practices
What is Content Marketing ROI?
ROI is the return on investment, a ratio between your company’s income and investments. So, it makes sense that content marketing ROI is the revenue gained from content marketing as a percentage of the amount spent.
To calculate your content marketing ROI, take the revenue from your content, subtract your content marketing spend, and divide it by the spend.
The higher your ROI, the better.
Keep in mind that certain trends in the marketing industry are impacting your ability to measure the ROI of content marketing. For instance, multi-channel attribution is crucial to understand if you want to determine where your leads are coming from. AI analytics tools can also help you more effectively determine the cost-effectiveness of your campaigns and help with optimization.
Additionally, you must determine which devices are generating the most traffic, leads, and ROI, with insights into mobile and desktop users. This aspect is particularly important as around 63% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices.
Consider other content marketing ROI statistics, too: According to a CMI study, the average content marketing ROI is $2.77 for every dollar spent, which is an impressive figure. Also, content marketing generates more than three times as many leads as outbound marketing while costing 62% less.
Calculating Your Content Marketing ROI
When it comes to content marketing, calculating your ROI can be difficult. The return on marketing investment formula alone won’t be enough. However, it is necessary to make sure your efforts are growing your brand.
By evaluating your content consistently, you’ll be able to learn a few things:
- Where you can invest more money
- Where you should cut back on spending
- Which tactics are working in your strategy
- When you need to pivot
- What content topics and formats your audience responds well to
As I previously mentioned, the formula to calculate your content marketing ROI is taking the revenue gained from content marketing efforts as a percentage of the amount you spent.
1. Double-Check Your Tracking
- Make sure you have goals and events set up in Google Analytics
- Use unique landing pages and thank you pages for each campaign
- Pay attention to UTMs and other tracking parameters to break down metrics by source, medium, campaign, content type, etc.
2. Determine Conversion Values
- Assign values to each conversion
- Use your sales team to determine which conversions are most valuable
- Rely on Google Analytics and Search Console data to help you get a holistic view of links you’re tracking and ads you’re running, and campaign-specific landing pages to understand your overall content performance
3. Gather All Costs
- Costs of content production (tools, copywriting, editing, graphic design work, etc.)
- Costs of content distribution (social media tools, paid media ad campaigns, analytics tools, etc.).
Key Factors in Determining Your Content Marketing ROI
1. Set Your Content Marketing Goals
What is a good return on marketing investment for content strategies? The answer to that depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
Whether trying to measure B2C or B2B content marketing ROI, you need to have clear goals in place to help define your success. Goals will depend on factors like the scope of your strategy, content types, and the audience you want to target.
Taking these and other elements into consideration, here are some goals to help measure content marketing efforts:
Boosted Brand Awareness:
One big goal could be to increase brand awareness by using various types of content to establish a relationship with new audiences, leading to recognition and trust.
Engagement:
Another goal might be to attract more shares, likes, comments, and other forms of engagement from audiences, making memorable interactions.
More High-Quality Leads:
You may also want to boost lead generation efforts to attract more high-quality leads through compelling landing pages and calls to action (CTAs).
Improved SEO:
Of course, a big goal when measuring content marketing is often to get higher search engine rankings with everything from main web pages to blog posts.
Increased Customer Retention and Loyalty:
Public announcements, customer testimonials and reviews, promotions, and other content could help keep customers coming back to you.
Educating Customers:
Tutorials, topical blog posts, FAQ pages, webinars, and more could inform customers about your company and offerings, along with other industry-related topics.
Sales Enablement:
You might use product details, case studies, and other types of content to move people from marketing-qualified to sales-qualified leads.
Optimizing Conversion Rate:
In many cases, the main goal of content marketing is conversion rate optimization, which aims to keep the customer journey smooth to turn more people into leads and customers.
All of these and other goals could help in figuring out how to determine ROI in marketing.
2. A/B Testing
Use A/B testing to try out two variations of a content piece, determining which performs better based on conversions and other metrics. Only one element would be different, helping you decide which designs or copy will perform best.
3. Audience Segmentation
Segment audiences based on certain demographics, behaviors, and other data, to help you personalize content and develop direct connections with each potential customer. In the process, you should develop unique audience personas that represent each audience segment.
4. Proper Techstack
Many platforms like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Semrush could provide you with accurate and in-depth analytics. Specifically, Semrush can help you with planning your content strategy, with tools from topic and keyword research solutions to competitor analysis.
5. Allocate Your Budget and Resources
Certain critical top-of-funnel content might be underperforming because they’re not getting the kind of exposure it needs, in which case you might channel more funds to boost performance. Doing so could then maximize its exposure and attract more leads who move down the sales funnel with subsequent content pieces.
Content Marketing Measurement Best Practices
To help you maximize content marketing ROI and continually optimize your content for better performance, here are some key best practices:
Multi-Touch Attribution
Historically, last-click attribution was commonly used for measuring content marketing return on investment, but that is highly inefficient as it gives full attribution to the final interaction with a lead before converting. Instead, multi-touch attribution looks at all of the touchpoints along the customer journey that led to conversion.
Also, AI-powered predictive analytics can anticipate how content marketing will perform based on collected historical data and user behaviors. In turn, you can pivot your content strategy accordingly to further boost content marketing ROI.
Tracking Key Metrics
To help you make those data-driven decisions, you need to be collecting the right data based on your goals.
Some critical content metrics could include:
- Engagement Metrics: You may want to track various engagement metrics like page views, time on page, bounce rate, social shares and comments, and click-through rate.
- Conversion Rate: Conversion rate could detail the percentage of visitors to your site who complete a particular action, from completing a lead form to making a purchase.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): This metric anticipates the total revenue that a specific customer generates over time.
Wrapping It Up
Remember, calculating your content marketing ROI won’t always be easy. And it definitely won’t be perfect.
However, it is essential for your bottom line to continue to make a profit.
Even though scaling your content marketing strategy can be daunting, you’ve got all the steps you need to take to build a results-based team, hone in on content that works best for your business, and maximize your ROI.
