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 a number of followers or for some it can be a 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 kind 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
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 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 a 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 that 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
- 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 the 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 beginner’s guide to content marketing, SEO plays a big role in generating the right traffic for your website. Getting your content rank on top of the first page 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
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, retaining your audience and upselling them again. This is the most difficult but mandatory goal of content marketing to improve retention and driving 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 a “Happy Customer Forever”. When your customer is happy with your product or services, there are 100 percent chances 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
