How can businesses measure the ROI of content marketing?
Forty two percent of B2B marketers are challenged when it comes to measuring content marketing return on investment (ROI), needing a better way to track performance. Business leaders are pushing for measurable strategies that help them reach their target audience, which means marketers need to provide meaningful and precise ROI for content marketing strategies, along with budget spending.
Let's start at the beginning, focusing on what is ROI in content marketing? Modern customers have a desire for digital experiences, but content marketing is what drives your business forward, providing you with results. But how do you make it worth the investment?
If you are investing in content marketing, you need to know its generating revenue for your business. These days, increasing website traffic and engagement is not enough to justify spending. For ecommerce businesses, in particular, it's essential to know your content marketing is boosting conversions, which is why reporting on certain metrics that measure performance is more important than ever before.
Content marketing ROI measures the impact of campaigns centring around target content delivery and performance, including blogs, social media campaigns, and emailed newsletters. It includes qualitative and quantitative results, such as customer loyalty, lead generation, brand awareness, and more.
Content marketing ROI is the ration of how much revenue you earn from content marketing activities, when compared to your investment amount. For a basic formula you can subtract the total investment from the return, divide it by the investment, and the results is shown in a percentage. The total investment is not the cost of one piece of content, but all the overhead costs including the creation, distribution, and reuse of the content.
This formula is relatively straightforward, but it does take some thought and planning, ensuring you have an accurate picture of the ROI of your content marketing. You will need to ensure the following:
An overall metric can be useful for assessing impact, but you may want a more detailed view of now certain content assets are motivating an action. When you track user behaviour and effectiveness across different channels, you are able to identify what content offers the best value. When it comes to blogs and website content, you need to capture the path of each session. Say your visitor starts with an article or blog post, clicking to download an asset, such as a case study or webinar, those details attribute credit to the original post that engaged the user, even if the conversion doesn't happen immediately.
With the right analytical tools in place, you can gain a clear picture of your website visitors, traffic, and referrals, along with page views, number of times they visit your website, or visit a specific landing page. You can also measure click through rates, conversion rates, and bounce rates on different content types.
This information is useful in making data driven content creation decisions, along with identifying what areas benefit from investment. It shows you where you need to make improvements.
Are you unsure on how your content marketing is doing? Do you need to understand your content marketing ROI? Let the Genie Crawl team help you today, ensuring your content marketing is a worthwhile investment that achieves results.
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