Developing a strategy, building an audience and creating engaging content can mean very little if you are unable to measure your inbound content marketing ROI.
To effectively compare content marketing to other marketing disciplines, such as advertising, inbound marketing tactics, and marketing strategy, it is crucial to evaluate its efficacy using specific metrics, including content marketing metrics and ROI of content marketing. Measuring the return on investment of content marketing allows for a fair comparison with other marketing efforts and enables it to compete for a share of the marketing budget spending.
The 3 key elements of content marketing ROI
Content marketing’s return on investment is a basic equation, but this is determined by three key elements:
- How much your content costs to make
- Your content utilisation. Some content will be more effective than others, with certain channels more beneficial for your commercial aims
- The business value of your content marketing outcomes
When measuring content marketing ROI, be realistic. Your content needs to be high-quality, value-led, relevant and easy to share. It needs to add value and build engagement. If it isn’t, , it just isn’t worthwhile.
- Read more about inbound marketing strategies
Developing ‘cut-through’ content
Incisive Edge talk about ‘cut-through content’ as a way of breaking through the clutter and rising above the noise.
To achieve this, you will require measures to be put in place to ensure you are monitoring and undertaking best practice. Checks can include surveying your audience and conducting usability tests.
- Can the content you are creating really deliver the conversions you are expecting?
- What are the objectives you really need your content to achieve?
Repeat sales or shorter buying cycles should be a priority, as these reduce the cost of customer acquisition. Once you determine your needs, you can set benchmarks to measure your content marketing efforts.
Calculating the ROI of inbound content marketing
Calculating ROI for qualified lead generation is straightforward when you have the right tracking for origination and attribution in place. However, depending on your market-place and objectives, in order to validate the true power of your inbound content marketing program, you may need to think beyond revenue creation and measure content marketing ROI as well as calculate content marketing ROI.
When implementing a successful inbound marketing strategy, it's essential to have a well-defined target audience in mind. This will ensure that your content strategy is tailored to their needs and preferences, ultimately leading to better engagement and conversion rates.
Additionally, a strong content strategy can help you save costs by reducing the need for expensive outbound marketing tactics like advertising. To measure the impact of your efforts, it's important to check your cookie pool or database against a matched sample, and analyse website analytics and sales pipeline data. By tracking these metrics, you can assess the effectiveness of your inbound marketing strategy and make data-driven decisions to improve it.
Quantify the value of your inbound content marketing
There are a number of ways you can look to quantify value creation if you don’t have attributable sales results.
1. Calculate savings versus the equivocal budget that would be required for search engine marketing if your content is improving your natural search results.
2. Organic results are an annuity, especially if self-generated, whereas paid search and display consumes budget every time there is a click.
3. Calculate media savings in terms of CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) if you are running your content across your owned media, rather than across earned social media channels.
4. Calculate your third party savings if you are mining data from your content engagements.
If you are enhancing brand and reputation through Digital PR (DPR) and building your corporate digital footprint, then you will be reducing expenditure that could have been committed elsewhere; PR, advertising, PPC. This applies even in terms of running your own inbound recruitment campaign where you can save on professional fees by attracting the right candidates to you.
Google Trends is a useful tool for measuring your marketing. Rather than measuring engagement, it is better to measure something that directly impacts on your revenue generation.
Google Trends measures search volume over time and can help you measure the size of your market.
Considering your market size, instead of just your market share, can be an effective way to grow your revenue. By focusing on expanding your reach to more potential customers through a solid content marketing strategy, you can increase your market size and overall revenue. Using tools like Google Analytics can help you track and analyze the effectiveness of your strategy, allowing you to optimize it for even better results. Additionally, in a niche market, it's often easier and more cost-effective to attract new customers than to persuade existing ones to switch to your brand, unless you can offer a more compelling price point.
Positioning for content marketing
To effectively position your inbound marketing efforts and maximize their impact, it is crucial to create content that not only increases the size and appeal of the overall market but also strengthens your position as a key stakeholder. This strategy will ultimately lead to increased revenues. Education and onboarding play vital roles in content marketing for software products, along with measuring inbound marketing ROI, leveraging social media platforms, and optimizing digital marketing campaigns.
Calculating ROI for business-to-business (B2B) marketers is more difficult than for business-to-consumer (B2C), given the number of people involved in the decision and length of the sales cycle. There are however two key ways to do so.
Firstly, measuring content relevance.
Knowing which of your resources a prospect uses to make a decision will help you enter into a meaningful dialogue with them.
A good metric for measuring marketing is knowing how many and which content resources prospects engage with during the buying process. Similarly, a strong metric for sales improvement is recording how many less interventions your sales team require to close a deal, on account of prospects having progressed deeper into the funnel and having engaged with your content.
Secondly, the reach and quality of your content.
By engaging more contacts across the prospect account there will be increased opportunities for your salespeople to achieve meaningful conversations.
Content should be tailored to your ‘buyer personas’ which include not just decision makers in the process but also influencers in the sales matrix.
Appropriate content designed to engage at different levels within the prospect company helps to improve the understanding of what each party is interested in.
A good metric for measuring marketing is the number of new, marketing qualified leads generated, that sales can pursue.
Conclusion
Adopting new inbound marketing strategies and leveraging social media platforms doesn't necessarily require a complete overhaul of your existing marketing efforts. You can still use your current marketing metrics to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing and inbound marketing strategies. In fact, using social media platforms to promote your inbound marketing content can amplify your reach and engagement. By integrating your inbound marketing and social media marketing efforts, you can create a cohesive and effective marketing strategy that generates measurable results.
Rather, introduce your calculations of content marketing ROI into what you are already doing. In that way everyone else in the business will also understand what you are trying to achieve.
You have an internal sales job within your company to explain the power of content marketing and how it translates into positive return on investment. Does your programme centre on driving more qualified sales leads, improving retention or saving costs across other traditional areas of marketing expenditure? Does it enhance your brand or reduce your recruitment expenditure?
Set clear objectives and share these across your organisation. Measure outcomes and celebrate your content marketing success.
