Do you know if your content marketing is working? Can you show evidence of this? What is the ROI of your content marketing? Why are you making content in the first place?
To be successful in content marketing, you need to have clear goals and strategies. Your plan should be documented, and you should measure your results to ensure your efforts are working.
Although many businesses have a content marketing strategy, the majority do not think that their strategy is excellent.
If you want your content marketing strategy to be successful, you need to make sure that your audience research, content scheduling, and content repurposing are all aligned correctly. Once you manage to get everything aligned, the results will begin to show. But where will they show? And how will you track them?
Many businesses have trouble understanding that content marketing seldom results in large-scale conversions.
At the end of the day, content marketing plays a big role in the final outcome (whether it’s a new sale or lead). However, there are other metrics that are just as important in helping you understand how your CM efforts are benefiting your business. These metrics can give you a clearer picture of what’s going on.
The most important thing you can do to improve your content marketing strategy is to use the right metrics. With the help of data analytics, you can identify your best and worst performing content, so you know what areas need improvement. Once you have a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t, you can rinse and repeat the process until you achieve success.
What Is Content Marketing ROI?
The ROI of your content marketing campaign is the amount of revenue you generated from it, compared to what you spent.
ROI is important for measuring the success of content marketing because it is directly connected to revenue.
Although content marketing success cannot only be defined by money, it is still an important factor. If a content marketing strategy is not bringing in pageviews, shares, and engaged visitors, then it is unlikely to generate any revenue.
To understand your content marketing ROI, it is important to consider which content marketing metrics are relevant. This article will look at 7 important metrics.
This formula will help you determine how much your content marketing is earning you.
What are Your Objectives and KPIs for Content Marketing?
Before you can determine which marketing metrics will be most useful to track, everyone on your marketing team (as well as your client, if you work for an agency) needs to be aware of the objectives and key performance indicators for every content campaign.
The “how do you measure content marketing ROI?” question is different from the question of how to identify your primary objectives and KPIs. Identification of objectives and KPIs is essential to determine which metrics to use to track your content marketing.
After you’ve built the business case and convinced your business or client of the potential ROI, you might need to start at a more basic level by explaining content marketing.
What is your organization’s ultimate goal? Once you know that, you can begin to work backward to identify the specific objectives and KPIs that will help you measure your success in achieving that goal.
Know Your Brand’s Higher Purpose
I know this may not sound like an answer to the question, but please bear with me.
The objectives and KPIs for your content marketing cannot be set without a deep understanding of why your business exists.
In his Ted Talk, “Start with Why – How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” Simon Sinek profoundly explains the idea that people are more likely to buy into a product or service if they know the motives behind it. He states, “People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.” Knowing the “why” makes the “what” more significant to consumers.
Your business needs to first understand its higher purpose before it can define objectives and key performance indicators. Its top-level objective should be based on the business purpose and marketing goals overall.
Increase Your “Share of Conversation”
I have previously discussed the share of conversation (or share of voice). The concept is based on the belief that marketing is a conversation. It encompasses any form of quantifiable brand awareness, such as online mentions, website traffic, and PPC.
This metric helps you understand how popular your brand is relative to your competition.
A more powerful way to join relevant discussions online is to start up a conversation. The goal is to lead the discussion.
The main reason content marketing is so important is because it allows you to increase your brand’s share of conversation.
What your brand should be talking about can be determined once you understand its greater purpose.
Conversation share is a goal that focuses on the customer. This goal makes you think about providing value to your target audience by creating content on topics that they are interested in.
This can be done by measuring the “share of conversation” which is the percentage of brand mentions around the topic you want to be associated with. To do this, first measure the percentage of that conversation your business has, then work on growing that number.
How to Measure Content Marketing ROI
There’s a simple, 4-step content marketing formula to weigh the cost of your content against the revenue you earn from it. Here’s how you work it out:
Calculate How Much You Spent to Produce the Content
Even if you make your content within your company, there is still a cost because you have to pay the salary of the person who made it or the cost of the work done by other departments.
In addition to the hours you spent working on a project, don’t forget to include the cost of any external content assets, like images, video, audio, or other outsourced work.
Figure Out What It Cost You to Distribute the Content
Make sure to also account for any internal costs, such as money spent on paid promotions and ads placed on social media or other channels.
You’ll need to factor in the cost of any special tools or software required for content creation or distribution when budgeting for your content marketing efforts.
You will know the cost of producing your content once you have added up all the expenses from Step 1 and Step 2.
Work Out the Dollar Amount for What You Got in Return
If your content is doing its job, it will produce leads that convert into sales.
In some cases, it is easy to see how the content leads to revenue, such as when readers click on a call to action to purchase something after reading a piece of content.
Sometimes, it takes longer for the process to show results, and the relationship between content and sales is not as direct. We will look at some of these less obvious content marketing metrics later in this guide.
If you want to know how much money you made from a piece of content, simply add up all the sales that resulted from it.
Calculate Your Content Marketing ROI
The typical ROI formula for content marketing is “Return on Investment = (Return – Investment) / Investment.”
To determine if investing in content marketing is productive, compare the costs of content creation to the revenue it generates. If the sales generated exceed the expense of creating the content, then the marketing strategy is effective.
Now that you understand how content marketing can lead to ROI, we’re going to explore some of the key metrics that can help you understand and report that ROI even better.
We have already discussed that content marketing success is not always about money. We will also look at some less tangible metrics below.
Before you can start using Google Analytics to track your website’s traffic, you need to set it up on your site. If you’re using WordPress, there are some great plugins that can help you do this.
Content Marketing Metrics That Matter
Below, we will take an in-depth look at how to measure 7 key content marketing metrics: lead quality, sales, web traffic, onsite engagement, social media engagement, SEO success, and exposure and authority.
It’s not necessary to keep track of every metric.
So, Which Content Marketing Metrics Should You Track?
Instead of trying to track all of the content marketing metrics all the time, you may find it easier and more rewarding to choose a few metrics to track depending on your goals. For example:
If you are writing a long article to attract links to your website and improve your search engine ranking, set realistic goals for the results you want to achieve. Be sure to track new backlinks to that post and your website, as well as monitor your search engine ranking after you have published the article.
If you plan to launch a social media campaign to increase awareness of a new product, track metrics such as media mentions and social media engagement to gauge its success.
In order to determine your content marketing ROI, it is beneficial to plan ahead, set clear goals, and select only a few important metrics to track.
Does Your Content Have the Potential to Earn Money?
We’ll be looking at two metrics to help us determine how much money our content can make. To do this, we’ll need to look at how many leads and sales it generates.
Content marketing is a way to generate leads by creating great content that will attract an audience.
There are a lot of ways to measure lead quality. For example, if you’ve just created an epic blog post with a lead magnet or content upgrade, you can tell it’s working to attract quality leads if:
When people read your blog post and download your lead magnet, it shows that they could be interested in doing business with you.
Your visitors may be interested in other resources that are part of your marketing or sales plan.
Visitors contact your sales team to ask pre-sales questions.
These actions mean that your content is bringing in potential customers who are likely to make a purchase.
If you want to know whether the people visiting your website are qualified, one way to do that is to see if they visit important pages on your site, like the pricing page. You can do this by setting up goals in Google Analytics.
Once you have set your analytics goals, you can go to “Conversions” and then “Goals” to see which pieces of content help turn people into leads.
The Need for Balance
Figuring out how users behave is not easy. There is no one perfect solution. But if you have a plan for what you want to do, you will make progress. It is important to keep adopting new ways of measuring why people share certain things online if you want to be successful in the digital world.
Although it is easy to improve these metrics by focusing on one area, many publishers resort to cheating.
There are a number of ways to increase the reach and engagement of your content. You can buy reach, create slideshows with multiple pages, or force visitors to click through to a conversion action. You can also refuse to add links that send visitors off your page, even when citing research or another person’s idea.
You can…but should you?
Almost every time these approaches are used, the user’s experience is worsened, and your company’s value is lessened or even ruined.
Look at balancing the importance of every metric so you’re rewarding the right behavior. When conducting tests of content marketing designs, content types, or topics, take a holistic look at every area to ensure you aren’t sacrificing too much of the overall picture.
Strategy + Quality + Consistency = Content Marketing Success
We can help you develop a content strategy that will help you hit your targets and track your progress with KPIs.
Our team will produce quality, optimized content for you to regularly publish on your website. We will also promote your content to increase its visibility and track your Return on Investment (ROI) so that you can see how it is performing.