Content marketing supports all of your inbound strategies in business, which means that success can be measured in a variety of ways. Before you can measure the ROI of a marketing strategy, you need to know which KPIs and KPIs indicate success.
Here are seven standard and effective methods to measure the ROI of your content marketing strategy.
In essence, it all boils down to the effectivity and the ability to attribute sales to particular content marketing campaigns and metrics such as traffic volume to revenue growth.
1: Revenue
Revenue is an essential KPI in calculating the ROI of a marketing strategy in any marketing scheme. The simple formula for calculating the return on investment is as follows:
It’s easy to attribute sales and other revenue drivers to the tail end of the content the customer viewed before purchasing, but that doesn’t help you calculate the value of the content they’ve interacted with over the years. First steps in the consumer journey. have had to deal with.
That’s why it’s crucial to avoid the last-click attribution model. We will talk more about this a little later.
2: Leads
Another method to measure the value of your pre-purchase content marketing campaigns before the purchase is to track the number of leads they acquire. Depending on the type of campaign you’re running, and what stage of the customer journey you’re targeting, tips can range from someone clicking through to your website, search or social, to someone answering the phone to ask for a quote.
Some leads are more valuable than others, and again, attribution is critical.
This time around, however, there are two main things you should attribute leads to – the content that captures them and any future sales they lead to, the latter of which is vitally important.
If you know, 10% of campaign X leads are buying your most costly product, and you can calculate a reliable ROI. Most importantly, you can optimize this campaign to increase the volume of leads or the percentage of leads making the purchase.
You can measure and take track leads in Google Analytics using event metering, which allows you to measure interactions such as clicks on CTA buttons, clicks on video play, and form interaction. You can find more valuable information in our how-to guide on tracking leads in Google Analytics.
3: Specificity and Conversions
With event measurement set up in Google Analytics, you can now create and track goals for particular actions. It allows you to measure virtually any type of conversion on your website and optimize them to increase conversion rates.
By default, Google Analytics uses the last-click attribution model, which attributes only the final page/source before conversion. By switching to other attribution models, you can assign a value to the first interaction, a discount equal to all businesses (linear) or based on actuality (time decay).
An overview of the 6 most crucial attribution models
For a more detailed look at attribution models, see our article on the explanation of marketing attribution models. Once you’re done, you can also find out why we use our proprietary data-driven attribution model (DDA) to calculate campaign value accurately.
4: Organic boosting of traffic
Traffic is the most common and widely used KPI of any content marketing campaign and also one of the basic to measure. If you want quick and straightforward feedback on the success of a piece of content, pageviews are an excellent metric to watch over time, just like we’ve done before.
If 5% of page views result in a purchase, you’re considering 5,000 sales for 100,000 page views. This gives you an optimization benchmark to increase organic traffic so that instead of generating 100,000 pageviews in a year, you reach 150,000 and +2,500 additional sales over the same period.
5: Social engagement
Natural search isn’t the only place where your content is generating valuable traffic, and search rankings aren’t the only measure of content quality. Assuming you have the audience to start with, quality content should get significant social media engagement, bringing likes, views, shares, new subscribers, and web page visits.
Social engagement must lead to more attention on your content, and ultimately, more traffic that clicks on your website. You can use custom URLs to track the campaigns and posts get the most traffic, and then attribute those visits to conversions and revenue.
6: Search ranking
Supposed the content marketing campaign ages, your ranking for specific keywords on Google and other search engines. A higher ranking should translate to more visitors and opportunities to increase ROI in your content. With a strategy like SEO, the bulk of the investment is in creating and optimizing content, and results should generally develop and grow in a short period of time.
As your ranking grows and improves,
7: Cost-per-acquisition
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is a measurement that is a must and always closely tracks ROI in marketing reports. This indicates how much (on average) you spend on content marketing to bring in each new customer, and it’s a key component to calculate and optimize your return on investment accurately.
Cost per acquisition is a measure of your investment in content marketing versus attracting a new customer. By lowering your CPA and tracking sales volumes, you can increase ROI by reducing expenses while ensuring sales don’t suffer through your more effective content marketing strategy.
Conversely, you can increase your investments while still using CPA and sales volumes to ensure you get the higher returns you expect. You should get a higher return on your content with little or no investment. This is why SEO remains such an essential strategy for digital brands: because long-term ROI is unmatched by other methods, even if the results aren’t instantaneous.
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