Creating interesting content that produces results requires strategy, time and resources. As leaders in the content marketing space, we understand the KPIs and requirements of clients in leading sectors around the world. Content marketing is the best way to engage with clients and generate leads, but even brands that write articles and have a presence on social media don’t always have a clear idea of whether their content circulation is effective. In this article we’re looking at how to prove content marketing ROI.
38% of brands have a content marketing plan, but it is not recorded. This is a mistake because 71% of B2B customers say they read a company’s blog material before making a buying decision. So, investing in content distribution and tracking its performance is a wise decision any business can make. Here are the best ways to prove your content marketing ROI.
What Is Content Marketing ROI?
The ROI of content marketing is often closely related to organisational revenue. It employs several content indicators to provide marketers with a comprehensive view of whether or not their content is having an impact. The ROI of content marketing is calculated by comparing the revenue to the amount spent on content creation and promotion.
How to calculate ROI for social media
The most basic social media ROI formula appears as follows.
- Investment: The total cost of your social media marketing efforts
- Profit: The money you earned from your social media marketing efforts
- Profit / Investment x 100 = social media ROI%
Use this formula to calculate ROI for paid social media campaigns that are tracked.
For example:
- Investment: I spent 2,000 euros ($2,363.48) on a Facebook ad campaign.
- Profit: From that campaign, I got 10 customers who spent in total 7,000 euros ($8272.18).
- Profit/Investment x 100 = 350% ROI … or I could say I earned 5,000 euros ($5,908.70) profit after the cost of my ads.
For service-based brands, we tend to focus more on LTV (also known as lifetime value). That’s because there isn’t a one-off purchase but rather many years of payments. For example, a client paying $5,000 a month over 10 years has an LTV of $600,000.
Things do get more complex when you’re talking about organic social media or social media with a less tangible value.
However, income is not the primary metric for determining content marketing performance. Customer satisfaction, brand reputation, and customer engagement are a few more characteristics that contribute to ROI measurement when studied independently. As a result, to assess the overall efficacy of your campaign, you need to consider all of these aspects.
Content marketing includes PR, infographics, blogs, webinars, email campaigns, podcasts, social media postings, and SEO optimisation. Its goal is to educate its audience and, as a result, establish trust.
Furthermore, engaging content automatically increases brand equity. Creating new material on a regular basis will keep your audience interested and help you stay competitive in their eyes. It will also boost your exposure to potential consumers, allowing you to develop social value and get your brand available on the market.
Content marketing also aids in the development of customer loyalty. After attracting high-quality qualified leads, you must generate content that is useful to your readers. Consistent interaction with your client base will increase trust and loyalty, making them more inclined to make future purchases. It also increases consumers’ chances of making recommendations and suggesting you to their friends, increasing your ROI.
Six Ways To Prove Your Content Marketing ROI
ROI in content marketing isn’t just about dollars and cents. It consists of numerous objectives that businesses want to achieve. Because content is at the core of all inbound tactics, its influence may be quantified in a variety of ways other than the usual marketing ROI formula. Here are the best methods for calculating and proving your company’s content marketing ROI.
#1 SITE TRAFFIC
The number one way to calculate or prove content marketing ROI is to evaluate your site traffic. You can use Google Analytics to track the number of visits to your website and, more precisely, the amount of organic traffic you receive. This is the backbone for your content marketing success. Prospects can’t move further on your website funnel to make a purchase if they aren’t browsing and reading your web content.
#2 THE QUALITY OF LEADS
Another approach to assess the value of your content initiatives is to monitor the leads they generate. A lead may be someone checking your page in the SERP, reacting on your social media post or buying something online. Based on the phase of the customer journey your content is targeting. Not all prospects, however, are created equal. As a result, it’s critical to evaluate them depending on the sort of material that drew them in and the potential sale. This attribution might assist you in identifying the top-contributing leads. For example, if 20% of leads from a certain content campaign are predicted to purchase your most successful product, you can compute a realistic ROI for that strategy.
Consider your various content delivery methods, such as blogs, social media, videos, and webinars. You might be surprised to learn which method generates the most leads for your business. According to 73% of content marketers, webinars produce the most leads, while 68% believe that videos outperform Google Ads in terms of ROI.
Set up event measurement in Google Analytics’ Events reporting to monitor leads. This practice will assist you in tracking lead-specific events like as CTA clicks, video clicks, form actions, and other activities.
#3 THE CONVERSIONS
If you’re not converting enough traffic, it’s an indication that your efforts aren’t effective. You should keep records of how many prospects sign up for your newsletter or email lists, schedule a demo, and purchase your product. Users may establish and track objectives for specific activities in Google Analytics. As a result, you can track every form of conversion for your company and improve your content efforts to increase conversions (completion of a goal). Simply stated, conversions may be attributed to a piece of content that prospects engage with prior to taking any form of action. To track sign-ups, simply divide number of organic visits by the number of non-spam form fills over time. To calculate your total conversions, enter your data into the following formula:
Conversion rate = Number of conversions ÷ Total visitors X 100
#4 CLICK-THROUGH-RATE (CTR)
Your website may be receiving visitors, but are they taking action and connecting with your content? To discover how many users engage with your CTAs, monitor your click-through rate (CTR) and use the method below to compute the CTR.
CTR = clicks ÷ impressions
#5 YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT
Fans will share and spread positive word of mouth if they like your content on social media and find it interesting and useful, whether it’s influencer partnerships on Instagram or live Interactive sessions on LinkedIn. Evaluate your social media engagement statistics by measuring traffic across all your social channels using Google Analytics; these metrics include engagements such as likes, comments, and social media interactions and shares. Social media engagement can also be monitored using a host of professional management tools. Contentworks Agency provides clients with detailed monthly reports on their social media engagement, top posts and content ROI.
#6 YOUR ONSITE ENGAGEMENT
Tracking onsite engagement metrics will provide you with information on how many users are actively engaged with your site. Consider tracking:
- The amount of page views that you receive
- How many people click on a call to action on your web page?
- How many people visit your website or page and then leave? (AKA, your bounce rate)
A high bounce rate might suggest that your content isn’t resonating with your target audience. If your text has been adequately optimised and CTAs are suited to your customer categories, visitors should be engaging via CTAs or connecting with other site sections. This measure may be used to detect visitor pain spots on certain pages and enhance the content on those pages. A high bounce can also be because your advet or post image and content does not match the landing page. Customers need to see consistency in their online journey or they will exit fast. Use this formulate to calculate and prove your bounce rate:
Bounce rate = single-page sessions ÷ total number of sessions
Monitoring and measuring content marketing ROI may not sound like much fun but the process is an essential component of any content marketing plan. Measuring ROI enables marketers to recognise and display the results of their content initiatives, securing the funding they deserve.
Remember that the success of your content marketing relies on your ability to appropriately analyse and measure critical KPIs. If you’re looking for professional social media management for your brand, talk to the Contentworks Agency team. We are experienced in creating winning content that meets your KPIs and improves your ROI. Loved reading about content marketing ROI? hit share.