Learn Content Marketing ROI to Increase Brand Promotion and Lead Generation Efforts
Content marketing is something a lot of websites throw themselves into without considering what/how to measure success by. In fact, at least 25 percent of B2C brands using content marketing aren’t tracing any sort of ROI on it.
For every brand, how they define the success of their content marketing could be different. Qualified lead generation, opt-ins, page views, or social shares are all possible places to start. What’s most important is you need an ROI. Otherwise, you’ll never know whether your content goals are being met – you’ll just be guessing.
The 7 most popular KPIs for content marketing are website traffic, sales and revenues, lead conversions, SEO rank, time on site, customer feedback, and subscriber growth. Consider choosing one or a few of these to monitor. Be aware that content marketing is a strategy which takes months to generate an excellent return on. Thereby, the start of any content campaign is going to have a negative return. Over time though, an intelligent strategy will begin to pay off eventually resulting in the gain from your investment exceeding the cost of your investment.
With ROI, there are a lot of metrics you could monitor as the short-term and long-term impact of any content marketing has the potential to show in a variety of areas. For example, maybe your revenues are not soaring the way you hoped but you’ve noticed your brand awareness, leads, SEO, and traffic increased. ROI can present sometimes in unexpected ways so be aware and open to looking across different areas of your digital marketing campaign for any increase or decrease without explanation.
An excellent first place to start with content marketing ROI metrics are in consumption. In some companies, as much as 70 percent of content is either never utilized or isn’t used very well. That’s investment down the drain with little to no chance of a return. Thankfully, once you get your content out there, it’s out there to stay as long as you leave it. This means you may not get an instantaneous return but maybe over the year to come, a piece of content generates all the return you could want and more.
Consumption metrics – and whether they are trending up or down – are an indication of where your content’s headed. Look at page views, time on page, downloads, unique visitors, keyword rankings, click-throughs on social media or email, and/or open rate if you’ve sent it out in an email.
Retention metrics are another place to look, to see if your customers are returning for more. Percentage of returns, your bounce rate, number of blog subscribers, number of social media followers, and CTAs are all important. Sharing metrics can also be important to establishing a pattern of return on investment, with shares, retweets, likes, and follows indicative of this. Lastly, sales and revenues are most important to a lot of brands – percentage of sales opportunities influenced, value of said opportunities, and percentage of sales won.
The most frustrating thing about doing content digital marketing is that it takes time. That said, ‘taking time’ just happens to be its’ most blessed component as it builds momentum. Within six months, you can take your brand to having little website traffic to really building it into something special, spurring revenues, leads, conversions, and more. Just remember to ensure the trend on your metrics are moving in the right direction! Feel free to join us today!
