You’ve probably heard the term “ROI” or “return on investment” before, but how does this relate to content marketing? Well, just like any form of marketing, there are costs and benefits associated with the content that your brand publishes. The ROI of content marketing tracks how much value those efforts offer your business, by comparing these figures.
This is an important metric to track, because the ROI can help improve and refine your content strategy, to make it as effective as possible. It also goes a long way to help measure success and can show you what is working overall for your organization. Additionally, understanding the ROI of content marketing is important to know as it is a crucial measurable to indicate the areas that are worthwhile for your brand to continue to put efforts into.
Once you understand why you should be paying attention to the ROI of your content marketing, you might wonder where to begin. Well, to start, it’s important to know that there isn’t just one way to measure the return on investment that your content offers. In fact, there are actually dozens of metrics that you can use to assess the content’s impact on your revenue. However, not all of these performance indicators are going to be relevant to your business.
Preparing to Measure the ROI of Content Marketing
Before you’re able to track the efficacy of your content, you’ll first need to start off by setting a clear goal for your business. This could be almost anything that can be done better, such as:
- Growing brand awareness
- Establishing credibility in your industry
- Increasing overall conversions
- Boosting web traffic
- Getting more followers on social media
- Growing your email newsletter’s subscriber list
There are dozens of other potential ambitions that can be set and used to benchmark the success of your content marketing efforts, however, they’re all going to be dependent on your specific brand and the areas in which it can improve.
Setting a Goal That is Specific and Measurable
When setting your goal, it’s really important that you also make sure that it is both measurable and specific. This means that it’s not enough to just say that you want to receive more sales. You’ll have to refine your aims to include ‘how much’ and ‘how long’ figures. For instance, you could set a goal that your business will increase sales by 10% in 8 months’ time.
It’s also crucial that you make your goals attainable in a reasonable amount of time. However, what is possible for your brand is really going to depend on the current state of your business and how much you’re willing to put into achieving this goal.
What Types of Returns Can I See From Content Marketing?
Every potential way that you can track a change in engagement with your site or brand can be a metric to view your ROI, from click-through rate to conversions. But they’re not all going to be useful at any given time. That’s why it’s important to set a goal for business. Once that has been established, you can use it to make the way you track your content’s ROI really specific.
Why Do Those Returns Matter?
The returns that you track and analyze are really important because they offer valuable insight into the efficacy of your marketing strategy. That’s why you’ll really want to break down the numbers that you are assessing into the smallest parts so that you can refine your strategy as you go along.
For instance, if you see that videos are the form of content that gets the most engagement, but how-to articles aren’t really getting many hits, you can know which kind of content to create more of going forward. This helps you reshape your current efforts into a strategy that offers the most bang for your buck. You can also make these changes in real-time, as you gain information.
Why Pay Attention to the ROI of Content Marketing?
The ROI of your content is a crucial figure to pay attention to because it can help convince your brand to continue to create content. Since it isn’t always easy to see the immediate value of content creation, you may need to develop these hard numbers to show members of your team that developing content is still a worthwhile investment. After all, the value is there, content can be majorly beneficial to your business – you just have to pay attention to ROI to support and prove this claim.
How To Measure the ROI of Content Marketing
You’re almost ready to start tracking any positive returns on investment from your content marketing strategy. However, you have to know your baseline, the current state of affairs, before you’re able to tell if there is a change.
From there, it’s just a matter of determining how much you are spending to create content and how much revenue you are receiving in return. Just remember that you should use the most detailed information available. Break it down into which channels and modes of content are working best for you. You can even go further from there too – if it’s videos that reign supreme, track what type of videos viewers like best, what length people respond well to, etc.
Why Choose Content Marketing?
Now you know how to measure your content’s ROI, but you may still be wondering why you should create content, to begin with. Why not focus your efforts on running an ad campaign, for instance?
Well, a good marketing strategy is going to have all the bases covered, but content creation should definitely get a fair share of the budget. However, that can be a hard sell sometimes, because content marketing is going to have more subtle benefits than paid advertising, as it is generally going to be more focused on helping the customer than driving sales. Though that’s not to say that it won’t help raise these figures, because if done right it certainly will.
The pros of content marketing are a little broader than just profits because it can help impact the overall attitude that the public has towards your brand. When people are more aware of your business and its reputation is strong, they’re also more likely to trust you and make a purchase.
That’s why it’s so crucial that you measure the ROI of your content marketing, so you can illustrate the long-term impacts that your strategy has had on the business as a whole.
A few sample ways that content marketing can positively impact your business include:
- Boosting brand perception
- Widening your reach by increasing awareness of your brand
- Increasing customer acquisition
- Establishing credibility and authority for your business
- Impacting what products are considered and ultimately purchased
- Strengthening customer loyalty and retention
And it does all this, and more, while being more cost-effective than alternatives, like advertising.
How Can Content Marketing Help My Business?
You may wonder how exactly content marketing is able to accomplish all of this. It seems like a big impact for some videos or blog posts to make on your business overall.
The overall benefit of content marketing is that it establishes your brand as a thought leader. Potential customers will come across your content and see that you are contributing to the overall knowledge of your industry. Your business will be considered to offer expert insight, and people will come to trust the things you have to say.
Furthermore, while content can definitely be geared towards promoting your products or services, it’s less “in your face” than traditional advertising. People respond to content marketing because it doesn’t seem like it’s just trying to sell, sell, sell. It’s a way to show that your brand is authentically interested in more than just getting more sales, you also want to help people make informed and good purchases.
All of this helps to build trust in your brand. Not only does this kind of positive perception ultimately lead to more customers, but it also helps create more loyal customers. The people who are drawn in by your content are going to be more likely to be repeat customers.
These loyal customers may refer friends to your brand as well, or they’ll share your content on social media. That’s another great thing about content marketing – it really goes a long way to boosting awareness, because it is so easy for readers to send their friends an interesting article that they read or retweet a post you’ve made. And the more people you reach, the more potential customers you have.
Wrapping Up
Content marketing is a crucial component of any well-rounded marketing strategy. It goes a very long way to improving the perception that the public has of your brand and can help reach new customers and cultivate relationships with existing ones.
In order to get the most out of your content marketing strategy, it is critical to understand the ROI you are currently getting from your efforts. Setting benchmarks and identifying the measurables that are most important to your organizational goals is where you will want to begin.
You may be thinking that this all sounds great and even necessary, but you simply don’t have the resources, team, or time to have this much involvement in content marketing efforts. That’s why we built the Breezy Content Machine!
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