Content marketing is an excellent source of revenue for businesses that operate online. It’s a method of connecting to customers and establishing connections that can lead to sales, conversions, and long-term loyalty. The ROI of content marketing (return on investment) it’s an essential tool for every team working on content marketing. In this post, you will get to know that how to measure content marketing success.
The good thing is that this doesn’t need to be costly. Even a modest budget will go a long way when you’re meticulous about your strategy for creating content. For instance, In the Semrush survey, 73% of respondents who spent between 10 and 70 percent of their total marketing budget on creating content said their efforts were highly successful.
What is the return on content? What is the best way to calculate it? This guide outlines some of the data on the ROI of content marketing and will help you determine how to measure the effectiveness of content marketing for your specific business.
What Is Content Marketing ROI?
Content marketing ROI refers to the amount you earn from your investment in your different goals in marketing content. It could range from brand awareness to site traffic to the acquisition of customers.
Typically ROI or return on investment refers to the amount you earn on your investment based on the amount you put into it. For instance, if you invest $100 in a stock which appreciates and is offered for sale at $105, your return will be 5percent.
In the case of measuring the ROI of content marketing, this isn’t easy due to the many ways to quantify it. It’s not simply about checking the bottom line but also the amount of money the content you’ve created.
It’s a test of the effectiveness of your strategy for marketing content to achieve the goals you’ve defined for it. In 2021 the survey found that top digital marketing experts had plans to invest more in content marketing because of its capacity to increase returns on investment.
Why Is Content Marketing ROI Important?
Deciding to invest in content marketing without knowing its return on investment is similar to investing money in a black hole. There may be some positive outcomes, but you’ll not be able to determine whether they’re worth the time and investment.
Knowing your content marketing’s ROI on investment is evident from the reality that the most-searched-for topical search for marketing content in 2020 on Google at the time of the year 2020 is “content marketing strategy.”
The calculation of ROI can help you determine if your strategy for marketing content is compelling and where you may make adjustments. It will also allow you to manage your resources better and make better choices about the best places to invest your time and funds.
In essence, knowing ROI can help you increase the efficiency of your marketing efforts. Additionally, it will allow you to modify your marketing strategies as needed.
How to Calculate the ROI of Content Marketing?
While the precise measure of returns on investments (ROI) may be a bit nebulous however the idea is quite simple:
You put money into X, and then you earn Y.
If Y is greater than the value X, you’ve got a positive ROI. If it’s less than X, you’ll have a negative ROI. The ROI is dependent on your specific goals. But, you can apply an established formula to calculate the ROI of your marketing campaign.
Return on Investment = (Return – Investment / Investment) x 100
In this calculation, it is calculated that the return is what you can earn from the goals you reached through your marketing content campaign. The amount of investment is the sum of money you put into the campaign, including the costs associated with making, publishing, and promoting your material.
Imagine you put $1,000 into an advertising campaign. In the process, you got leads worth $2000. Include these numbers in the formula to determine the ROI of your content marketing.
$2,000 (Return) – $1,000 (Investment) = $1,000
$1,000 / $1,000 = 1
1 x 100% = 100% (ROI)
Your investment returns 100 percent. Be aware that these are imaginary numbers that will show you how the formula functions.
Here’s a second illustration. Suppose you were to spend $10,000 on a content marketing program that brought in an income of $30,000. In this scenario, the return on investment would be 200 percent.
$30,000 – $10,000 = $20,000
$20,000 / $10,000 = 2
2 x 100% = 200% (ROI)
If you’re using an online ROI calculator, it’ll likely employ similar formulas. Although this may seem like a straightforward method to determine ROI it’s not the most effective method for two reasons:
It takes the entire cost of investment and does not take into consideration the price of one item of content.
In content marketing, money isn’t the only metric of success.
That’s where metrics for content marketing come into play. These metrics help you determine whether your content is worth it without relying solely on numbers.
Assessing and Evaluating Your Content Marketing ROI
You should determine the return on investment of your content marketing to ensure that the money you allocate to content is spent in a responsible manner and on the appropriate types of content. In addition, you must ensure whether your material is performing what it was created to do. That is to raise awareness about your brand, attract attention and increase sales.
As we’ve mentioned, getting the numbers of content marketing campaigns can be a long process. The time it takes to assess the impact of your content on your target audience due to the time lag is not unusual to observe low or negative numbers during the first phases of releasing new content.
However, if your ROI is still bringing in poor results (percentages below 1), Consider this a chance to alter your strategies. Review your content, your sources of distribution, and even your system.
How to Track Content Marketing ROI
Where do you find the information to add to your formula?
Google Analytics
You are likely comfortable using Google Analytics if you’re a business manager.
This no-cost and thorough analysis tool will provide the essential details about your target audience and help you evaluate, plan and assess the impact of your marketing. You can examine information across a variety of times or have real-time updates too.
Here’s a glimpse of this Google Analytics dashboard, where you’ll see the valuable information on the Google Analytics website.
The clear presentation of data can be easily viewed to determine how your content is doing.
Social-Media Built-in Analytic Tools
Use these tools to determine the engagement with your followers, reach, and even visitors. They can also provide comprehensive details about your followers and assist you in gaining more understanding of them.
- Facebook Page Insights
- Twitter Analytics
- LinkedIn Analytics
- Youtube Analytics
- Tracking Tools
Many tracking tools, like those, are priced however they also provide more detail than the other tools.
- Ahrefs
- Hotjar
- BuzzSumo
- SEMRush
- Kissmetrics
- Hubspot
These tools for tracking, as well as other similar tools, permit users to access an array of information that otherwise would be inaccessible to you. With tools for analysis like these available, You stand a more significant than adequate chance to enhance the quality of your marketing content and, consequently, your ROI on content.
Key Performance Indicators to Measure Content Marketing ROI
Instead of focusing on the financial impact of your ROI from content marketing, it is essential to think about various critical performance metrics (KPIs) that provide an overall picture of how your strategy is working. Here are a few KPIs to keep track of.
Check out this table by The Content Marketing Institute, which provides critical KPIs in content marketing and the metrics used to measure the results.
It’s quite a list. It’s not necessary to analyze all of these. It’s best to choose at least a couple of campaigns or content pieces that you would like to track.
Web Traffic
The primary measure for every website is the amount of traffic it receives. It is a measure of the number of people who have visited your website and is an excellent gauge of how your content is resonating with the people who visit your site.
You can monitor web traffic through Google Analytics or a similar tool. For instance, suppose you’re looking at 30 days worth of traffic. In this case, you could track how many unique user pages were viewed, the average site time, and bounce percentage.
Remember that web traffic does not only refer to the number of people who visit your blogs or articles. The number of people who view your videos is also considered web traffic. The majority of marketers agree that video content can help create leads.
In addition to videos, other types that contain visuals, like images, can also increase the number of visitors to websites. Blog posts with more than seven pictures receive four times the amount of visitors contrasted with posts that just contain text.
Backlinks
If your goal in marketing content is to increase traffic to your site, a different vital metric to think about is backlinks. If you get backlinks from websites that have high domain authority, it will bring more visitors to your site. The link does not only result in direct traffic but also the potential to boost the search results for your website’s content.
SEO
SEO (Search engine optimization ) is the process of increasing traffic to websites via search engines. It is necessary to ensure that your website’s content is ranked for specific keywords. Additional search engine tools help you find great content, including being featured in the “People Also Ask” sections or getting a “Featured Snippet,” or top-ranking nesting content with similar content.
Implementing a content marketing strategy with a focus on SEO involves both technical and on-page expertise. Keyword research and content briefs play an essential part in ensuring that your content is given the best chance of being ranked; however, the outcomes are worth the effort. The best written article could rank for multiple keywords in many cases, driving people to your site regularly. This may continue for months or even years after the original article.
While there isn’t a standard number to determine a high SEO ROI, it’s a good idea to look at the average around 300% or greater. Specific industries, like higher education and initiatives, IoT (Internet of Things), and financial services have SEO ROIs over 800 percent.
Your strategy for marketing your content should always incorporate SEO because it guarantees that your audience will quickly find your content via search engines.
Leads Generated
Another important metric you should track is the amount of leads you generate from your content marketing campaigns. The term “lead” refers to a prospective client who is interested in your service or service.
There must be calls to actions (CTAs) within your content to drive leads. CTAs could be a CTA could include a form to complete, a free trial sign-up, or any other thing that is designed to encourage the user to move on to complete the purchase. The quantity of leads that are generated can be monitored in Google Analytics or your CRM (Customer Relationship Management).
Sales
The objective for content marketing is to create sales. A Demand Gen study found that consumers consume between three and seven pieces of content prior to having to meet with a salesperson. 44% of consumers have at least three content pieces. So high-quality content will be correlated with the amount of sales you’re making.
Naturally, you cannot directly attribute sales to a specific piece of content. However, you can monitor the amount of sales that take place in a particular time period after someone has read your article.
As an example, suppose you’ve published an ebook on your site. You can include an CTA to buy the product at the conclusion in the text. In the following, you can monitor how many people purchase your product within the first 30 days after reading the e-book.
Google Analytics lets you check the pages of your site that have a significant impact on your earnings. Click on the Behavior tab in Google Analytics and then click on Site Content.
This All Pages section will show you which pages earn the highest amount of revenue. Click on Goal Set View to see what targets (such like sales) are being achieved through your content.
Cost Per Lead
Because content marketing takes time as well as effort, it’s crucial to know the cost to produce each lead. Cost per lead could range from as little as $100 to more than $1,000. It varies based on the sector.
To determine your costs per lead you must divide the total cost of your content marketing with the amount of leads that you generate.
For instance, if paid $500 for the blog post and you produced ten leads, your cost per lead is $50. This number can help you decide if your efforts to promote content are worth the cost.
How to Determine What KPIs to Measure Content ROI?
As I mentioned previously There are a variety of metrics you can employ to determine the ROI of your content marketing. But, you don’t need to utilize all of these metrics.
Instead, you should focus on the key metrics for your marketing campaign. For example The B2B Content Marketing Report from the Content Marketing Institute showed that businesses had different goals in terms of content marketing.
87% of the businesses sought to increase brand recognition, while 81% of them used it to build trust. Additionally, 79% utilized it to teach their audience and 75% of them used to generate leads, and 68% of them used it to create loyalty with their current clients and customers.
A different report revealed 70% of marketing professionals employ content marketing to create qualified leads. In the same study, 85 percent of the marketers stated that they assess the effectiveness of their content by the amount of organic traffic that they get to their website.
While 53% assessed the ROI using conversion rates, and 66% based upon lead generation. As you can see, the requirements for calculating the ROI of content marketing will vary based on the company.
Everything boils down your objectives and goals for your strategy of content marketing. Let’s take an example: you’re in the business-to business sector and you employ content marketing to create leads.
You should be focusing on conversion rates, organic traffic, conversion rate, and leads generation indicators. These are the factors which will allow you to determine whether your content marketing plan is efficient or not.
If you just seek to raise awareness of your brand or inform your public, you could focus on metrics like engagement on social media as well as web traffic and email subscribers.
The most important thing is to determine the metrics that are crucial to your business and to utilize them to assess the ROI of your content marketing.
Tips for Improving Your Content Marketing ROI
As is well-known the power of content marketing is that it can bring significant ROI if properly used. Here are some suggestions to improve your ROI from content marketing.
Outsource Content Creation Through Content Writing Services
If you’re not able to produce top-quality content on your own, it might be time to think about hiring a company to provide writing services for content. A high-quality content writing service can produce informative and well-written articles that will be relevant to your intended readers. In turn, it can increase the organic visitors to your site and increase the chances of conversion.
Think Quality Over Quantity
The quality of content should always prevail over quantity in the context of content marketing. There’s no need in producing low-quality content just to get it done. Hubspot recommends publishing an article on your site four times per week, for small businesses.
If you’re an organization with more employees you’ll be able to post on a daily basis. Large companies can even post several posts each day.
Make Use of Social Media Platforms
Social media is a potent marketing tool that helps you reach out to a wider number of people and boost your ROI. Share your content to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to get more leads.
It is also possible to make use of social media to establish relationships with prospective and current customers. For example, you could respond to questions and comments posted by customers through your online social profiles. It will show that you value the customers you serve and that are eager to communicate with them.
Free Content Marketing ROI Calculator
We now know what we’re looking to measure. We can determine how to quantify the ROI of content marketing.
To make it easier for you For your convenience, we’ve developed a basic ROI calculator in Excel format which you can download or save the spreadsheet to calculate your content strategy’s return on investment. Simply input the amount you’ve spent on your content and the average return you’ve earned, and our calculator will handle the remainder.
Increase Your Digital Marketing ROI with high-quality content
If you’re looking to boost your ROI on the digital market, it’s time to focus on content marketing as it can help generate leads, increase sales and help build brand awareness.Once you’ve learned how to evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing and measure it, you can utilize the measures described in this article to figure out whether your strategy for marketing content is working or not. The process of measuring your content marketing ROI regularly will allow you to detect any weaknesses in your strategy and make changes to your strategy quickly to increase chances of success.