Putting a value on your content marketing isn’t always easy, which leaves many people (and companies) confused as to how to measure their return on investment. This guide will help you understand why measuring content marketing ROI is important for your business and show you how to measure your ROI.
Why Measuring Content Marketing ROI is Important?
For your content marketing efforts to be successful, you need to know if they’re actually working. You can find out if your content is resonating with the audience content by measuring the content marketing ROI.
But merely measuring your content marketing efforts is not enough. You must measure the right things, and you must apply a rigorous approach that is actionable. Many businesses and marketers are now focusing on generating traffic and lead rather than measuring the return on investment from their content marketing efforts. This is not only a mistake but could be severely damaging to your entire marketing campaign and even your business.
Effective Ways to Measure Your Content Marketing ROI
It is vital to know if your content marketing efforts are reaping any benefits and if it makes sense financially to continue the same marketing campaign. The only way to find whether a content marketing campaign is successful or not is to measure its ROI. There are many ways to measure the ROI of your content marketing efforts. Let’s see how to do it:
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Calculate the Amount Spent to Produce the Content
When you’re measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your content marketing efforts, the first thing to do is to calculate how much you spent to produce the content. This may include the cost of writers, designers and developers, as well as any other resources used to create the content. In case you hired additional resources to work on a content piece, add that cost as well.
Next, figure out how much each piece of content has been shared. This can be done by tracking the number of times it has been shared on your website or social channels. Finally, calculate the cost per impression (CPI) by dividing your total spend on producing the content by its reach (the number of impressions).
Find Out the Distribution Cost of Your Content
The distribution cost is the amount you spend on getting your content in front of people. This can include the amount paid for running pay-per-click ads, Facebook ads, getting email lists and sponsoring posts. It doesn't include the time and effort that goes into creating your content.
If you're not sure how much you're spending on distribution costs, start tracking them for a month or two. Then compare total costs against total leads and sales from those leads. Once you know how much it costs to get each lead, then you can calculate the ROI for each piece of content by dividing total revenue by total distribution cost (ROI = R / C).
Calculate the Sales Made Directly from Content
If you're using content marketing tips to promote a product or service, there's no better way to track your ROI than by tracking sales directly from your content. To get this data, all you need to do is set up an email follow-up sequence and ask your readers to opt in on the thank-you page after they purchase something. Then, use Google Analytics to track the specific keywords that brought people to your site — and how many of them purchased after reading your post.
When you know how much money you made directly from each piece of content, you can easily calculate your ROI and see where you should be spending more time creating good content and less time on other marketing activities like paid advertising and social media marketing.
Develop an Authority and Authoritativeness
Authority comes from how much trust people have in you. How do they come to trust you? By reading what you write or watching what you create — then deciding if they like what they see or hear.
Authoritativeness comes from how much value people get out of what they read or watch. If you consistently provide useful information that people can use in their lives (or businesses), then they will look at you as an authority on the subject matter.
This is the most common type of ROI measurement and is often referred to as "branding." The goal is to increase your authority and authoritativeness in your industry, which will help drive more traffic to your website and in turn lead to better conversion rates. This is measured by tracking things like:
- Social media followers and engagement (Facebook likes, retweets, etc.)
- Customer testimonials/reviews
- Search engine rankings
Bottom Line
Measuring ROI is an ongoing process, because the value of content marketing relies on complex interactions between the creation and publication of content, the promotion of that content, and the subsequent actions and behaviors of your audience.
Hope this guide helps you measure the ROI of your content marketing efforts. Do you use any other way of measuring content marketing ROI? Let us know in the comments below.
