Long gone are the days when we produced content, slapped it on a website, and hoped for the best. Now, campaigns are planned strategically, audiences targeted, and results tracked to make sure that what you’re doing is actually working.
Of course, it is essential to review how your content marketing is impacting your bottom line so that you can make data-driven decisions going forward. And to do this effectively, you need to ensure that you’re measuring the results of the content you’re publishing.
It can be challenging to prove to key stakeholders just how successful an investment in content marketing can be, and many marketers struggle when it comes to proving results. In fact, a recent study found that a whopping 65% of marketers cannot quantitatively demonstrate the impact of their marketing (source: The CMO Survey).
65% of marketers can’t quantitatively demonstrate the impact of their marketing
So how do we solve this problem? In this short article, we explore how you can prove ROI for your content marketing efforts.
What is content marketing ROI?
Let’s start with the basics. ROI (or Return On Investment) is a calculation showing the revenue that your business has made compared with what you have spent on content marketing. However, it can often be a challenge to work this out accurately because money spent on content doesn’t always translate quickly and easily into revenue.
As we know, we play the long game with our content marketing strategy. Unlike some types of marketing, such as pay-per-click (PPC) ads or social media advertising, it can be hard to determine how much revenue has come through content marketing alone.
Of course content can drive traffic, reach, and engagement, but at the end of the day, we also (in most cases) need our content to create sales.
How to calculate ROI as a percentage
To work out your ROI for content marketing, you’ll need to do a simple sum. Firstly, work out your return minus your investment. Then divide this number by investment and times by 100.
This will leave you with a percentage. The higher the percentage, the better the return. As a benchmark, a good ROI for marketing is around 500% (source: WebStrategies). However, if you spend less on producing content than your sales total, then you’re winning!
However, it gets slightly more complicated than this when we start to think about how to measure both costs and revenue, but we’ll go into more detail on this shortly.
Reasons to measure your content marketing ROI
The first and foremost reason to measure the results of any marketing efforts is so that you know where to invest your cash. If content marketing is performing well for you, you’ll want to increase your spend in this area to hopefully keep and improve that performance.
Measuring ROI is also a great way to prove the success of content marketing to your team or manager. Many business decisions are made on what brings money into the company, so this will help when you need approval for marketing activities.
Costs to include in your ROI calculation
When you work out your ROI, everything needs to be included. This number should be the total investment, not just the cost of producing the content.
Remember to include any costs for staff or agencies, advertising spend, software or tools, and anything else you may have spent to produce that content.
Don’t forget to include the costs for any graphic design or video production.
Which metrics should you measure?
At first, it may take a little time to pinpoint the exact metrics that you need to measure to determine the success of your content marketing efforts. However, this will be time well spent, as you can then use this as a blueprint for measuring future campaigns.
Measuring like-for-like metrics will help you to benchmark content and campaigns against each other and help you to see what works and what doesn’t.
The metrics that you measure will depend on what sort of content marketing you’re doing.
Metrics for measuring ROI for website content
Tracking conversions from a single piece of website content might be seen as pretty straightforward. After all, you can see in Google Analytics how much revenue a page has generated. This is especially true if there is a specific call to action on that page to buy something.
If you add up all of the sales that resulted from this piece of content, you’ll get your return which you can pop into your ROI calculation. Google Analytics (GA) has a Page Value column in its Site Content section which shows the average value for a content page.
Of course, nothing is as simple as it might seem at first glance. Where it gets tricky is that often pieces of content don’t work independently of each other.
For example, you may have an informative blog post that brings a lot of organic traffic to your site but doesn’t necessarily convert immediately. Someone may return a few weeks later through PPC or a social media ad and buy something through your website.
Whether you’re talking B2B or B2C, customer journeys are never straightforward, and it’s thought that a customer needs an average of around eight touchpoints before conversion (source: Hubspot).
This can also be tracked through GA using Assisted Conversions. This measures the number of conversions that a channel was a touchpoint for over the customer journey.
Aside from revenue and assisted revenue, other metrics can support the overall picture. Set goals in GA to determine the number of pages viewed in each session, how long the visitor stays on your site, and any other events triggered during their visit.
How to set benchmarks
By now, you’ll start to see numbers coming in, but how will you know if these numbers are effective or not? Remember that success is relative, so you should set benchmarks against previous campaigns or competitors to see what success looks like.
You can set benchmarks for what is usual for your business so that you can start to see how certain pieces of content improve this. An example of these benchmarks might be the amount of organic traffic which converts to a sale.
Remember to track the success of content over time. Some blog posts or landing pages may become more or less relevant, and the sales they generate may increase or decrease.
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