Return on Investment (ROI) are words that appear golden to business owners if it reflects their company’s profit margin. Whether it is a film production company or digital marketing company, organizations work hard to create valuable products that can record a positive return on their investment of time and money. What does it mean that your content marketing is “working?” In general, this means it’s supporting your marketing and business goals.
What Is Content Marketing ROI?
Content marketing ROI is a percentage that shows how much revenue you gained from content marketing in comparison to what you spent.
ROI is claimed to be one of the foremost important measures of successful content marketing because it’s directly tied to revenue.
But money can’t be your only measure of a successful content marketing strategy, right? If you’re not getting page views, visitors aren’t engaging with your content, you’re not likely to earn any revenue from it.
Which are the metrics you need to measure your content marketing ROI?
Lead Quality
The quality of your leads will determine the number of paying customers you will get on board. The higher the quality of your leads, the more likely they are to become your customers. However, you must know your lead generation tactics thoroughly before measuring the quality of leads they bring. Some of the favored tactics include lead magnets and content upgrades. Let’s take a look at them in detail.
Lead magnets are incentives that marketers offer in exchange for their email address or other contact information. The incentives might be downloadable content, like a free PDF checklist, report, eBook, whitepaper, video, etc. It will compel customers to exchange their contact information over something valuable, which will increase their trust towards that brand.
Calculate what proportion you spent to supply the content.
Even if you produce your content in-house, there’s still a cost attached. Since you’re paying the content creator’s salary or work done by other departments.
And, don’t forget to include any external content assets you had to pay for, like images, video, audio or other outsourced work.
Sales
Next, you’re going to look at how many of these leads turn into sales, and what the value of those sales is. That’ll give you one of the key numbers in the content marketing ROI calculation we shared earlier.
If you’ve got qualified leads and are nurturing them with the right content at the right time, then some of those people should buy something.
You can get exact numbers on this in Google Analytics by navigating to Behavior » Site Content » All Pages if you’ve enabled eCommerce in Google Analytics
In this view, the Page Value column shows you the average value for a page that a user visited before landing on the goal page or completing an eCommerce transaction. This stat gives you a general idea of which pages on your site contribute more to your site’s revenue.
Web Traffic
Website traffic is the foundation of content marketing success; without traffic, there is no revenue. It sounds dramatic, right?
Dramatic, but true. If nobody is looking at your content, nobody is buying from your content. Besides just looking at your raw traffic numbers, you can also look at how your traffic is growing over time by comparing time periods as shown above.
It’s also a good idea to take a look at where your traffic is coming from; this is known as referral traffic. When you know the source of your traffic, you can figure out which part of your marketing strategy is driving traffic with the potential to convert and which parts are wasting your time.
We hope this blog has helped you learn the different tactics to measure your content marketing ROI and the tools to do it.