You’ve heard a lot about the importance of content marketing. You know that it’s critical to the success of your marketing plan and that it can help move your customers through the sales funnel, often with little to no active support from your sales team. You may even know that today’s customers develop relationships with the brands they support based on high-level content marketing.
Many CMOs and CEOs, however, get stuck on one key point: how are they supposed to measure the success of their content marketing efforts? 52% of B2B marketers find measuring content marketing ROI to be one of the most difficult facets of their job. Measuring ROI is a complicated process, but with a few simple steps, you can improve your understanding of what your content marketing efforts are accomplishing for your business, putting you in a better position to focus on the strategies that will create the highest return on your investment.
How Far Does Your Reach Expand?
Don’t let the naysayers fool you. Keywords are just as important as they ever were.
While the face of content search is changing quickly, keywords–including long-tail keywords–remain highly important to your industry. Not only are those the words and phrases your customers will use to find you, they’re the key pieces of content that will determine how many customers you’re able to reach. Those same search terms can also help you better understand exactly how much of the market you’re able to reach. Examine the important keywords in your industry. How many of those keywords do you have a high search rank for? As your content marketing improves, you’ll also improve your ability to rank for those important keywords.
Tracking the Value in Sales
Content revenue – content cost = content ROI.
When you create a new content marketing strategy or plan, one of the fastest ways to determine your ROI is to take a look at the sales that it generates. Obviously, this isn’t a great strategy for a company that specializes in a wide range of small items, which can quickly generate more headaches than practical numbers when you’re looking at the return on your investment! On the other hand, if your company sells high-ticket items, it’s fairly easy to take a look at how your latest campaign is contributing to your sales. The simple equation offered by DeMers above–content revenue minus content cost–will give you a quick look at the overall return on your investment. How many sales were you able to bring in due to your latest campaign? What were they worth? Once you subtract the cost of that content, you’ll have a solid look at what return was generated on that investment.
Social Media
Social media deserves its own category. It is practically another world, after all.
Your social media marketing efforts are a critical part of your content marketing success–but how are you supposed to determine whether or not they’re actually accomplishing your overall goals? Are your posts, contests, and interactions with your customers really accomplishing anything, or are they simply another time-consuming task for your marketing team? If you want to check your social media marketing success, make sure you’re measuring these key elements.
Your follower growth: How many followers did you have in the early days of your social media account? Check those followers again, especially after a big social media campaign. Are your numbers increasing? Fast growth can be a sign of a highly successful campaign. On the other hand, if your follower numbers are dropping, chances are, you’re no longer providing the types of content that your customers want to see. Make sure you’re getting followers who are genuinely interested in your business: you might, for example, see a strong jump in followers as you’re conducting a contest that requires liking your business in order to participate, but many of those followers will jump ship once the contest is over. Keep in mind that followers who don’t like, share, or comment on your content won’t view the content you’re posting for long–and false likes, or likes that come from overseas accounts, can ultimately harm your social credibility.
Post-interaction: When you create a new post, how much do your followers interact with it? Are they diving in, commenting, liking, and sharing your content? If your social media followers are content to leave your posts alone, you likely aren’t creating the types of content they want to see. On the other hand, if you’re seeing lots of shares, you’re expanding your reach substantially: every share puts your content in front of users that you might not be able to reach on your own.
The Worth of Organic Traffic
Content marketing is a lot like working out. You’re not going to see a payoff in a week, but if you commit to doing it regularly over time, you’ll see amazing results.
There are plenty of ways to measure the site traffic you receive from, for example, a single new blog or video post. If you’re looking to simply better understand the return on your overall investment, however, Scott Severson posits a method that will allow you to more easily put an actual number to what your content has earned: measure your organic traffic over what you would have paid for the same traffic via a paid ad. Severson’s method involves several key steps:
- Check the organic traffic for your post and determine how many visits it’s brought to your site over a specific time frame
- Run a Google AdWords Keyword Planner estimate to determine the approximate cost of a PPC campaign over that same time frame
- Multiply your organic visits by the amount of that estimate.
While this isn’t a perfect view of what your content is worth, it’s a solid number to start with. Severson is careful to note that the value of your content isn’t just about site traffic. It’s also about increased time on your website, better lead nurturing, and more. However, if you want a quick number that you can throw out for how much your content is worth, this is one great strategy for finding it.
Checking AdWords ROI
One problem many marketers face is the chicken-or-the-egg dilemma of content marketing: You know you need a strong content marketing strategy, but you can’t get the budget to support the strategy until you’ve proven it works — the ROI.
Google AdWords is a solid way to increase the reach of your campaign. It will help raise your search engine presence and ensure that you’re on that important first page of Google’s results, even if it’s just for the customers that your campaign is able to reach. It’s also one of the strategies that’s hardest to get many companies to fund since it’s difficult to offer a projection for what that ad will accomplish. Often, it’s necessary to take a leap of faith in order to get a better look at what Google Adwords will be able to accomplish for you. Once you’ve run that first campaign, calculate:
The cost of the campaign. This is an easy, up-front number.
The traffic generated by the campaign. How many clicks did the campaign bring to your website?
The worth of those clicks. How many of those clicks went on to become customers? What was the worth of their purchases? While this won’t tell you the lifetime value of your new customers, it will give you a good look at the immediate results of your campaign.
The worth of your clicks and the traffic generated by your campaign, minus the cost of the campaign, will give you the immediate return on your investment for the AdWords campaign as a whole. In many cases, that amount can be substantially higher than you thought it would be, making AdWords a highly worthwhile investment–especially for businesses that are struggling to raise their search engine rankings and increase their organic reach.
Measuring the return on your investment for content marketing is a complicated process–and in many cases, it’s impossible to fully understand the worth of those campaigns. You might not, for example, be able to see the long-term value of customers who have been brought into your company through your content marketing efforts or to estimate the full value of things like the time your sales team will save in customer interactions by making that information readily available to your customers instead. You can, however, use these equations to better understand the worth of your content marketing efforts, making it easier to assign the budget that those efforts truly deserve.
Need more help with your marketing efforts? Ready to take your social media or content strategy to the next level? Contact me today to learn more about how I can help generate higher returns on your content marketing investments.
Kenneth Hitchner is a communications strategist who protects and promotes brands. He is currently the director of public relations and social media at Creative Marketing Alliance and CMA Association Management. In prior assignments, he served as the spokesman for NJ Transit, the deputy press secretary for a Governor of New Jersey and the chief content officer for a nonprofit the put downsized, college-educated professionals back into the workplace during the Great Recession of 2008.