Content marketing can be one of the best investments for your business. However, if you truly want to see results from your content marketing efforts, you need to understand how they’re helping your business grow.
Your content marketing return on investment, or ROI, is one of the most important numbers you need to know. Let’s take a look at why your content marketing ROI is important and a few different ways you can calculate your expected return.
Why You Need to Know Your Content ROI
Content is the backbone of your marketing. As the materials that educate, entertain and persuade your target audience to purchase your products or services, content fuels your search engine optimization strategy, social media promotion plan and more. This means you can’t afford to produce low-quality content.
High-quality content can help you connect with your target audience and build strong relationships with leads and customers. When you’re able to develop a lasting connection, you can convince shoppers to buy faster and more frequently. However, high-quality content isn’t always easy to create. In order to have a truly successful content marketing strategy, you need to invest appropriately in research and production.
Knowing your return on investment helps you make smarter decisions when it comes to content creation. When you understand what worked well, what your audience is looking for and what content they’re looking to engage with, you can create a strong content strategy that delivers high returns each and every time.
Calculating Your Content Marketing ROI
Knowing the return on your content marketing investment doesn’t need to be difficult. Here’s a step-by-step process you can follow to find your content marketing ROI.
1. Identify Your Goals
Before you can measure your return on your investment, you need to know what you’re trying to accomplish with your content marketing. While sales are an obvious goal to have, you may also want to acquire new leads, get more social media followers or have new individuals sign up for a newsletter or webinar.
Your first step in identifying your content marketing ROI is determining what you’d like to accomplish with the content you create.
2. Measure Your Investment
In order to get an accurate ROI, you want to pay close attention to every dollar you spend in relation to the content you create. While there are some obvious expenses, such as hiring a contractor to produce your content, there will be other costs that you may not consider.
Be sure to track each dollar you spend in relation to your content creation and promotion. This will give you the most accurate ROI possible.
3. Track Your Successes
Based on the goals you’ve established, you’ll want to track your relevant successes. If you’re hoping to acquire more sales, you’ll want to track each sale related to that content campaign you’re running.
For some pieces of content, this can be a bit challenging to track. If you’re creating evergreen pieces, you may need to track your successes over a longer period of time. However, you can find your ROI for different periods of time to help you understand how your content can consistently bring in new returns.
4. Use the Basic ROI Formula
Now that you have all the information you need, you’re ready to apply it to the basic ROI formula. This formula says you should subtract your investment from your return, then divide that number by your total investment. To make your ROI a percentage, you then multiply that number by 100.
This will help you clearly understand how your content marketing is helping you grow your business. Be sure to calculate ROI for different content types and campaigns you publish in order to see which are producing the greatest returns. Knowing this type of information will help you better understand what your audience is looking for, what they’re connecting with and how they likely they are to absorb information.
Ultimately, knowing your content ROI allow you to make smarter content decisions and grow your business more efficiently.