Semalt Explains How To Measure Content Marketing ROI Right
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It is no secret that in the last two years, content teams have been pumping out more content than ever due to the shift in how businesses interact with their customers.
Content marketing, like any other marketing strategy, is a never-ending process. When you put out new content, such as articles and video case studies, you want them to do better than they did the last time you published them.
According to a recent CMO survey, 65% of marketers can't statistically show the impact of their marketing. How can you tell what's worth your money and what's not if you don't know how much income your content generates? One of the most efficient ways to accomplish this is to track the progress of your efforts over time.
At Semalt, we are not just your content provider and SEO plug. We also prove the worth of our content by reporting on ROI. Do contact us to talk more.
Let's see what ROI is and how it can be measured.
What Is ROI?
ROI stands for "return on investment." In content marketing, ROI is the amount of money (profit) made from content marketing in relation to the amount of money spent. Most people might say there's more to content marketing than figuring out how much money it generates.
It's partly true because all of the marketing metrics are aimed at the same thing: making money. A content marketing campaign fails if it doesn't bring in more money, even if it raises awareness, gets people involved, and brings in more traffic.
To see if your hard work has paid off, you need to know how much money and time went into the promotion. If you do, you will know what is worth replicating and making bigger.
How To Calculate Content Marketing ROI
Calculating content marketing ROI is done mathematically. It is calculated by subtracting the total investment from the total income made and then dividing it by the investment.
Total Income - Total Investment divided by Total Investments, then multiplied by 100 to calculate Content Marketing ROI.
Let's assume your total monthly investment is $8,000 and your total income is $12,000. ($12,000 - $8,000) = $4,000 / $8,000 = 2 ✕ 100% = 200%
So, ROI = 200%. When using this formula, the most important thing to remember is the total investment, not just the cost of a piece of content.
How To Measure ROI IN Content Marketing
Even though there is a clear formula for content marketing ROI, many people need to pay more attention to important factors. To get the most accurate picture of how your content marketing is doing, ensure to make use of the tips given below.
1. Set up the right tracking
To get the most out of content marketing ROI calculations, you'll want to be able to attribute returns to individual content categories and distribution channels. To begin with, you'll need to set up proper tracking. What this means is that you should be adopting methods such as:
- Customize landing pages and thank you pages for the content and campaign.
- Goals and events in Google Analytics.
- Using UTMs or other tracking criteria, you may examine results across channels, campaigns, and forms of content.
Using these methods, you may determine which offers lead to the most sales and which channels or blog articles are most responsible for directing visitors to those offers.
2. Define and put a price on your conversions
Most businesses have several marketing campaigns, some of which do not directly result in sales. Regardless, it would be best if you still decided on a value in money to give to that transaction.
For instance, assuming a locked content download generates an average of 50 leads a month and 10 of these leads convert into paying customers, you can use this information to give value to leads from that campaign and even traffic to the landing page.
You will need to leverage your sales team and analytics data from Google Analytics and Search Console to gain the most accurate picture of your content success. Still, typically you'll employ a CRM and automation software paired with tracked links and campaign-specific landing pages.
You should be aware that a CRM can also display the various pieces of content users engage with during their buying journey.
3. Select the right metrics
Choosing the right metrics can be difficult, especially when you have a lot of data. You must know what metrics to track so you can put a monetary value on your conversions and figure out the return on investment (ROI) for each piece of content and campaign.
To determine whether your content marketing is going in the right direction and if anything needs to be fixed or changed.
Depending on what your goals are, here are some key metrics to keep an eye on:
- Social media metrics
- SEO metrics
- Email metrics
- PPC metrics
4. Add up ALL of your expenses
Even though this seems obvious, it's where many content marketers go wrong. There are a lot of tools you can use for content marketing that you need to put into consideration.
Here are things you should consider.
- Costs of making content
This is what you spend to produce or generate content. It involves paying freelance writers and also covers the price of:
- AI copywriting tools
- Keywords research tools
- Image design
- Uploading and editing content
- Costs of getting content out and optimization
There are paid, earned, and owned ways to share content. Facebook, Reddit, and Quora are just a few examples of the many free options out there; you might also be using:
- Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer for social media.
- Paid campaigns
- Social media content generators
- Tools for social listening, such as Mention
- Social media manager or community manager
- Tools for analytics (aside from Google Analytics, which is free)
With your tools, you can make rough estimates. For example, you pay $200 monthly for a tool to help you optimize your content, and you write ten posts monthly. It costs you $20 to optimize each article.
5. Set Objectives
Remember that success is different for everyone. You must know how you are doing at any given time to see if you are getting better or still losing. Set benchmarks to see how subscribers, sales, and social mentions change over time.
Importance Of Calculating Content Marketing ROI
For any content marketing strategy to work, you need to be able to see how much money you're making back. Let's look into why it is important to calculate content marketing ROI.
1. Find out where to invest your money
If you can track sales to a specific channel or content, you can spend your money on what matters most. Besides, content marketing works in different ways for everyone. You might be doing well with your blog, but your competitors might be doing great on social media.
When you look at your data to figure out your content marketing's return on investment, you can see:
- What content keeps people interested and leads them to buy?
- Where you can save money.
- Where there's a need to change plans or tactics
2. Get customers interested in your services
If you want more clients for your marketing agency, it will be easier to persuade potential customers to use your services if you link content to revenue.
When it comes to B2B marketing, the modern buyer is not impressed by just how much traffic a website gets but by how much revenue is generated within a time frame. We increased sales by 80% in x months is more interesting than we made over x pageviews in x months.
3. Get buy-in from stakeholders
Content marketing has a lot of benefits, but it costs money to do it. There are enough costs to go around, from the writers' pay to the tools they use and other costs.
When stakeholders talk about business updates, getting them to keep putting money into content marketing is easier if you can show them that it's making the business more money.
Traffic and sessions are important, but they can't keep the business going alone.
How to improve your content marketing ROI
After putting in a lot of work to figure out how to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of your content marketing, it is time to start planning how you can improve your strategy and tactics to increase your ROI. Here are some things you could do:
- Focus on making content that will always be useful to your audience. Don't think about what you want from them, but what they want from you.
- Ensure you update your content often so that search engines will continue to crawl and index your site. And make sure you send Google your sitemap in the right way.
- Always keep your content promoted and your engagement rates in check. This may seem like a no-brainer, but with all the content development tasks that need to be completed each week, it's amazing how frequently it's overlooked.
Bottom-line
No one said measuring the ROI of content marketing would be easy, but it is possible if you use the right strategies.
It's easy to miss important details and make things more complicated than they need to be, which is why Semalt is the man for the job.
Do you need help measuring your content marketing return on investment (ROI)? Then Semalt is here for you. We don't just create content to drive traffic; we also make sure it generates revenue for our clients.
With Semalt, rest assured that we will deliver. Call us today and watch us lift the burdens off your shoulders.