Every marketer thinks they should do content marketing. But, to track content marketing success, you need to do more than look at site visits, keyword rankings or CTR. Sure, these are all good, but to prove the case for content, you need to prove return on investment, and this means revenue generated from content. But,
Every marketer thinks they should do content marketing.
But, to track content marketing success, you need to do more than look at site visits, keyword rankings or CTR.
Sure, these are all good, but to prove the case for content, you need to prove return on investment, and this means revenue generated from content.
But, despite nearly 90% of marketers saying they have a documented content strategy, many fail to assess the actual return they get from their efforts.
Content marketing ROI should be determined by how many paying customers (revenue) your content brings in.
Whether that’s through onsite blogs, videos, social media posts or landing pages, the ultimate return on investment of any content spend should be new business.
It’s a simple formula to assess the return on your content marketing (or any marketing).
It’s just:
Say your content marketing delivers £5,000 in new business, and you spent £1,500 to get that new business.
That’s £5,000 minus £1,500, which equals £3,500.
So you take that £3,500 and divide it by £1,500 (2.3) and multiply it by 100 = 233% return on your initial investment.
And if that return is ongoing (through monthly subscriptions), your return will be even higher based on the lifetime value of a customer against the initial £1,500 investment.
Content is a big investment.
Customer research. Market research. Idea generation. Creation. Editing. Distribution. Measurement.
This is a lot of work to do, and it’s ongoing over a long period. If you’ve never done content marketing before, it can take time for customers to start to notice your content, and you to start seeing any engagement.
So being able to provide a commercial ROI of your content is more likely to get you the budget you need, rather than “it’ll get more traffic to our website”.
Saying that, while commercial results are the end goal of content marketing, there are some signals you can use that show your content is starting to have an effect before you see any monetary returns.
The goal of most content marketing is to get potential customers to your website so you can convert them (whether that’s them making a purchase or enquiring about a demo, etc)
If your content is generating unique website visitors, it’s a good sign that you’re on the right track to bringing the right audience to your business. If it doesn’t lead to sales, it can guide you that you’re not targeting the right audience, so it’s still valuable data.
Time on page is how long someone stays on the page after landing on it. Bounce rate is any user who leaves a page without doing anything.
If users stay on your page for a long time, it’s a good sign that they’re engaged with the page and the content. You can use tools like HotJar to measure how users look at and engage with your page to see how you could improve the design or content to get more conversions.
On the other hand, if pages have a high bounce rate, it could be a sign that the content isn’t engaging, or that the information you’re presenting isn’t what people expected to find.
For example, your page is a blog, but users are expecting a product page.
Traffic sources show you where your website traffic is coming from and can help you focus more on the channels that are working (or, more importantly) stop putting resource into channels that aren’t working.
For example, you might be generating increasing traffic from organic search engine optimisation but aren’t getting anything from PPC.
This could be a sign that you should divert budget from paid to organic search to get better results from the same budget.
Conversion rates are the number of people who take the action you want them to take on your website.
This might be buying something if you’re an eCommerce business, or making an enquiry or booking a demo in B2B.
Conversion rates tell you whether you’re pages are doing the job you need.
If you’re not getting conversions, it could be that your Calls To Action aren’t in the right places on the page, or that you need to change your CTAs.
Poor conversion rates (along with low engagement and high bounce rates) could also be a sign that you’re attracting the wrong people with your content and that you need to review your strategy.
A content strategy helps you to stay focused on the topics and questions your customers are asking, stopping you from just creating content at random.
With a strategy focused on real customers’ pain points (using buyer personas) and targeted at different stages of the buyer journey, you’ll be more likely to see a return from that investment, compared to creating content and social media posts based on trends.
Content marketing is in a strange place right now. So many are jumping on the bandwagon that AI can create content 100x quicker than any writer. And they might be right. And if you’re happy with “just good enough” for your company, then AI might be for you.
But remember, AI generated content based on the standard “create a blog about X topic” is just going to pump out generic, copyscraped words not targeted at your customers.
Instead, use skilled writers who understand your brand voice and how to talk to your customers to create content that hits those pain points and attracts customers with original, engaging views.
Templates are great for speeding up content creation by standardising the layout or certain elements of your content.
Blog templates and social media templates, for example, help everyone understand how to structure content and what needs to be included.
This is much easier than writing 2000 words and then trying to figure out how to squeeze it onto a page in a way that looks good.
Similarly, it can speed up content creation for social media, so you don’t have to create new visual elements for every post.
Similarly, automating scheduling and posting can save time because you can bulk schedule social posts over a few weeks or months, so you don’t have to spend time doing it every day.
Content marketing has a bit of an obsession with constantly creating new stuff.
But that’s difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.
Instead, you might be better focusing on evergreen content (content that is always relevant) and repurposing content it into other assets.
For example, a 4,000 word pillar page could be turned into a downloadable ebook, broken up into four separate blogs, turned into 40 social media posts, or even turned into 2-3 videos.
And none of the new content will require research time before you’re just repurposing what you’ve already got.
By looking at content as something you can break up and distribute in smaller parts, you’ll speed up the creation process and increase the volume of content you have without putting in loads more effort or investment.
If you’re not seeing the results from your content marketing efforts, get in touch for a free content audit.
Our content marketing agency experts can help get to the bottom of your existing campaigns and help you generate a better content ROI by focusing campaigns on your customers at every stage of the buyer journey.
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