Many marketers often find it difficult to build a business case for content marketing internally. Unless there are cold hard stats to show whether the cost and effort equal reward, it is very difficult to generate excitement from senior managers and business owners for directing budget towards content. You need to learn how to measure content marketing ROI.
We know that people are scouring the internet for information. They are looking for information that helps them solve problems but also entertains. Content that doesn’t hit both those buttons will quickly be ignored! That’s why we, as marketers, need to take a step back when evaluating the content our business produces. We shouldn’t produce content for content’s sake. It has to fulfil a purpose. (This is where content sometimes becomes political in a business, content may have come from a variety of people within the business who are very proud of what they have produced, even if it leaves the reader falling asleep in seconds. It is the marketer’s job to control this situation, even if it risks upsetting a few people.)
So how do you measure the ROI of content marketing?
1. Find out the cost?
You can’t measure content marketing ROI unless you know it’s cost. If your content is produced in-house that’s a little more difficult to do. You will need to find out how much time it is taking to produce and allocate a cost to this based on the team members hourly rate. If your design team is getting involved, that should be taken into account and obviously the time and costs associated with marketing your content.
If you outsource your content production, it is much easier to allocate a cost based on your supplier’s monthly invoices.
2. Measure performance
With modern analytics methods, it should be easy to measure the performance of your content but your metrics should be closely aligned to your business case. If your end goal is lead generation, you shouldn’t just be reporting on clicks, shares and page views. Conversion is what counts and you should be tracking your content metrics all the way through the conversion funnel.
There are all sorts of metrics you can use to measure your content performance:
- Engagement: Bounce rate, time on page, page views: Find out how engaged readers are by how they are responding to each content piece.
- Conversions: Whether you are looking for leads, direct sales or newsletter sign ups, these are all metrics you should be reporting on when measuring your content performance.
- Use multi-channel search funnels: Use the Multi channels search funnels report in Google analytics to find out how your content is influencing the performance of other channels. Visitors may originally come to your site from content but may purchase at a later date by coming back to the site through an AdWords ad. In this case, the sale would be allocated to AdWords when content actually played a key role at the beginning of the sales funnel. You should attribute revenue to the content accordingly and build this into your ROI calculation.
3. Create a business case
To create a business case for expanding the budget allocated to content, use the metrics discussed above. Compare these metrics to the ROI of other marketing channels. Is it performing well enough for you to continue with your strategy? If the answer is yes, then it should be easy to obtain further investment. If no, then perhaps you need to go back to the drawing board with your strategy, make some changes and test again.
Use it, don’t lose it
It’s important to make sure your content is actually used. It’s amazing how often time and money are spent on producing excellent content for it to then be underutilised, just slapped up on a blog and forgotten about. If you have invested in it, use it. Share it across social media, incorporate into email marketing campaign, optimise for SEO, create AdWords campaigns around it, print it and include in DM campaigns, repurpose it for videos. The list is endless. If the content isn’t used, the ROI will be £0 and it will be impossible to generate a business case for a content marketing strategy.
