Chapter 8 - How to measure content marketing ROI?

Content marketing is an important term used in the online marketing dictionary; it is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online valuable information such as videos, blogs, social media posts, etc.

Those who are into online business and marketing already know from the content marketing statistics that how much wonder the content can bring in the strategies.

In our Free beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing, we have been talking about what is content marketing, why content marketing is important for all types of businesses, and how it can help to generate leads.

For the same, how you should work on your content marketing strategies, and how you can identify the target audience for your marketing strategy?

Along with that, we have discussed how you can use different types of content marketing tools to generate informative content and what are the ideal way to use Call-to-Actions for your content marketing strategy

Once you get a master’s in these, the time comes when you need to measure how content marketing tactics help your business. But there are many who don’t know how to measure content marketing ROI.

Do you know, what are the most important content marketing metrics that you should track for your business success?

In this chapter of our beginner’s guide to content marketing, we will be answering all these questions to clear your doubts.

Here we go!

What Is Content Marketing ROI?

Content Marketing ROI is the success percentage of your content marketing strategies that states how much revenue you have gained from your marketing strategies in comparison to what you have spent.

For many businesses, it is the major aspect to define their business success; however, money is not the ultimate metric to define your marketing success. For example, for many sites, the ROI can be in the form of the number of followers, or for some it can be the number of ebook downloads.

Various metrics matter in your content marketing success. That is why it is important to understand which metric really matters to measure content marketing ROI.

As we know, the purpose to generate various kinds of content is to convert visitors into actual customers. The same can be encouraged by a content marketing funnel which is a system that helps to convert as many leads into customers.

As content marketing has many non-monetary benefits that can prove your content is actually working; like

Building brand awareness
Building trust
Increasing engagement
Building relationships
Improving visibility in search engines
Building and improving customer loyalty
Becoming a thought leader in your industry

Measuring content marketing ROI is a difficult challenge to cater to because of these non-tangible factors. But there are many ways to measure these metrics as well. The fact is that no one won’t invest in content marketing if it’s not result-oriented or not generating positive results for the business.

So, how do you measure content marketing ROI?

Here are the most common content marketing metrics that you can use to measure your success:

Brand Awareness

As per the stats, 74% of CEOs say maintaining and increasing brand awareness is always a top priority for them.

No wonder, the first goal of any content marketing strategy is to increase brand awareness. However, it’s difficult to prove its worth to return on investment (ROI).

Although tough to measure and tie directly to revenue, you can track your progress by looking at:

Social shares and following
Blog views
Direct website traffic
Returning website visitors
Views and shares from partnership audiences

Audience Engagement

Once you accomplish building brand awareness, the next step you make to engage your audience with informational as well as problem-solving content.

While brand awareness helps you to make your audience aware of your brand and get familiar with your product & services; it also helps them to understand your brand better.

Whenever your audience engages, you can make an analysis of what they like or what they don’t; their biggest challenges, and what they want to know from you.

There are many ways to find out like:

Social media shares, likes, and comments
Comments on blogs
CTA (click-through rates)
Landing page conversion rates
Heat maps and clicks patterns
Website bounce rate
Time spent on page
Website page views

Drive Website Traffic

Building brand awareness and maintaining audience engagement are long-time process that simultaneously goes along with website traffic. Great content – engaging content definitely drive traffic to your posts or website and build your brand image.

In content marketing goals, increasing website traffic is more focused on pushing traffic into the top level of the marketing funnel which ultimately helps to restore the ROI.

To see whether your content is effective at driving traffic to your website, look at the following metrics:

Unique visits (overview and breakdown by channel)
Onsite engagement (bounce rate, time on page)
Keyword rankings
New vs. returning visitors

Increasing blog traffic is another content marketing goal that is part of gaining web traffic. To track the progress toward this goal, all you need is to measure:

Blog visits per month
Keyword rankings
Social shares
New vs. returning visitors
Engagement metrics (bounce rate, time on page)
CTA (click-through rates)

Lead Generation

Around 85% of marketers around the world believe that lead generation is the ultimate goal for any business success to measure ROI.

No wonder, they try their heart and soul to convert their audience and generate the lead accordingly. To measure how well your content is working for lead generation, you’ll want to track these metrics:

CTA (click-through rates)
Landing page conversion rates
Conversion rates of leads to customers
Leads generated per month

Search Engine Visibility

As we already have read before in the beginner’s guide to content marketing, SEO plays a big role in generating the right traffic for your website. Getting your content ranked on top of the first page of the Google search engine is always a dream goal for any content marketer.

To track your content progress as per SEO strategy, be sure to look at your keyword rankings at least once per quarter, but we suggest pulling reports once per month.

Other metrics that you need to track along with SEO:

Website traffic from organic search
Unique website visits
Topic clusters

For the same, you can use various SEO tools and generate your content according to the latest Google SEO updates.

Sales

Ultimately, fighting for all the great marketing goals and tracking them each month or quarterly; few marketers/businessmen understand the language of Sales only.
Content marketing is a valuable tool for moving leads through the inbound marketing funnel and turning visitors into leads and leads into customers.
To track your success in using the content for sales, monitor these metrics:

Lead to customer conversion rate (overall and by content piece)
Sales conversion rates
Length of your sales cycle
Contract size
Cost per lead

Retention and Upsells

Last but not least, retain your audience and upsell them again. This is the most difficult but mandatory goal of content marketing to improve retention and drive upsell.

But creating for your personas shouldn’t end just because someone becomes a customer. Instead, now is the time for you to delight your customers and make them “Happy Customer Forever”.

When your customer is happy with your product or services, there are 100 percent chance he/she would recommend your business to other people. This is the time when we can’t ignore our happy customers. They are likely to trust you, would love to make more purchases, and drive more revenue through upsells.

Here are a few metrics to track toward this goal:

Customer retention rate
Percentage of repeat customers
Revenue from upsells

Is there any formula to calculate content marketing ROI?

Let’s take a simple calculative way to measure the content marketing ROI from Convince and Convert:

“Return minus investment, divided by investment, expressed as a percentage”.

For example,

If someone has spent $500 on creating a piece of content, and receiving leads worth $2000, then your ROI is 300%:

How?

$2000-$500 = $1500
$1500/$500 = 3
3 x 100% = 300%

Conclusion:

Although it’s difficult to show how content marketing is performing and generating ROI, these metrics can give you a better sense of performance and how your content is helping with the goals.

By putting the right content with the right tactics, you will be able to generate more traffic, lead, and sales to please your businesses or bosses.

Therefore, content marketing is worth an investment.