Content Marketing ROI

Updated January 13, 2023

Ways to Demonstrate Value to Leadership

Typically leadership wants to know content marketing ROI as part of its investment of resources. Before you screenshot the latest Analytics report, think about your audience. A group of executives or managers isn’t likely to be impressed with a day-by-day blow of site traffic or your epic story about the quest for the keyword of gold. Instead, executives want to know whether content is doing its job.

Know the Purpose of Your Content

It’s important for everyone in an organization to be on the same page about content marketing goals. Executives may expect sales to immediately pick up as a result of content marketing. However content creators target user engagement to increase future results. Content must engage users before a business will see a return; management needs to understand that building an audience and content foundation audience takes time.  Content purpose can be varied, including:

• Demonstrate a brand’s voice and personality
• Attract new clients
• Up-sell existing clients
• Build loyalty and trust
• Establish authority of valuable and relevant content

Reporting Content Marketing ROI

No one metric can effectively measure content marketing ROI. There are several pieces of information in Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools that help measure your content’s effectiveness.  We track these data points over time:

• Consumption – how many people consumed your content. This can be measured in page views, length on a page or site, number of downloads (e.g. white papers). For further insight, consider recording website visits (through software like ClickTale) as it can provide insight on how easy your site is to navigate and your visitors’ behavior.

• Sharing Metrics – how frequently do visitors share your content with others (e.g., Facebook likes, tweets).

• Lead Generation – how do visitors who consume content turn into leads? It’s critical that you set up your online sales funnel and corresponding goals in Google Analytics to measure this effectively.

• Sales – how does content influence a lead into a customer? At the CRM level you can track which piece of content (e.g., nurturing emails) converted a prospect and it’s related dollar metric.

Content Marketing ROI Reports should cover overall web traffic, sales, leads, customer loyalty, and cross selling. Compare post-content data with sales data prior to a content marketing launch. That way you can show leadership that content is performing.  The Content Marketing Institute has resources if you’re looking for tips in presenting to the C-level.

Requesting Resources for New Content Strategies

Don’t try to talk management into a dozen content strategies at one time. Not only will this confuse reports and content marketing ROI discussions, but you’ll also be less likely to succeed when running multiple campaigns. Get executives comfortable with performance on one campaign. Then, present a new idea and request for resources. If you’ve proven that content marketing can deliver financial-based returns for the company, management will be happy to take the next step.

How do you measure Content Marketing ROI?

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