How do you prove your content marketing is worth the investment?

You should check two things. - You should check whether your direct, brand-organic and referral traffic is increasing. This data will say whether your content is bringing users to the platform - You should also check how the CR of these channels' incremental traffic changes. This will say whether your content is bringing in the right traffic.

Often marketing teams have to unlock budgets from Boards/C-suites who don't understand what they do every day. Softer metrics like brand awareness and engagement are great for marketers but the best way to unlock the budget above is to talk about business revenue and growth.

By clearly defining your content marketing goals, aligning them with overall business objectives, and using relevant metrics to track progress, you can effectively demonstrate the value and worth of your content marketing investment. Regularly analyze and report on these metrics to showcase the impact of your content marketing efforts on business growth and success. To demonstrate the value of your content marketing investment, it's crucial to define clear and measurable content marketing goals. By setting specific objectives, you can track progress, evaluate performance, and prove the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.

A key step in proving the worth of content marketing is to pivot reporting away from the same time constraints as sales reporting. It is true that content marketing must be tied to business revenue and growth; however, content marketing typically does not demonstrate its value in a single quarter or half, as sales activities do. Therefore, reporting needs to encompass a much longer time frame of 3-4 quarters.

If you don't know much about your customer and/or audience it will be hard to define your content marketing goals from the onset. Gathering as much data as you can from the past, and setting up new workflows to capture relevant customer information effectively going forward, is a must. If you haven't - start now!

Good content marketing is in alignment with sales, both on a message level as well as a systems level. This means that every content marketing effort must point down the pipeline and have a strategic purpose. With this purpose in mind (whether it be demand generation, lead generation, or sales), we can then design our reporting around that purpose.

To prove the value of your content marketing investment, it's essential to choose the right metrics that align with your goals and demonstrate the effectiveness of your efforts. Regularly track and analyze these metrics, and present them in reports or presentations to showcase the tangible results and benefits your content marketing brings to your organization. By choosing the appropriate content marketing metrics that align with your goals and demonstrate the impact of your efforts, you can effectively prove the worth of your content marketing investment.

When it comes to some of the digital marketing campaigns you will run, tracking, reporting and optimising towards softer conversions such as website traffic and email subscribers can be useful and help you fuel the top of your lead/sales funnel at a lower cost. However, bear in mind in order for you to keep spending on the activity you'll need to again link what you are doing to the overall business revenue and growth.

One key challenge in the digital marketing industry is attribution and so third-party tools are now a must for businesses that want to understand the value of their different digital marketing activities and how the touchpoints drive revenue. One tool I've personally heard a few clients mention is https://www.fospha.com/

Not only should you analyze your website data, but you also need to connect it with your CRM, so you see the complete picture of how your content is performing. With properly set up systems, you'll see not only what content drives clicks but you'll also see which pages or posts create leads or purchases.

Clearly defined KPI alignment between sales and marketing being documented in a CRM creates a powerful impact on Sales, Marketing, and the PNC/customer. Example: 1. Form Submitted online 2. Automation gives a personalized response on the page and email follow-up based on answers in the form. 3. Salesforce record is updated with information and the sales consultant is notified. 4. Results in the conversation between the sales consultant and customer/ potential new customer are better and more relevant to the area the customer or PNC is most interested in. Using this technology and integrating online and offline experiences for customers and potential new customers can make conversion rates soar!

I often find people at the top tend to have similar personality characteristics, they like short presentations that get to the point. Your headlines should summarise the key information you want to get across in the slide and they should not be too text heavy, visuals definitely work better than lots of bullet points, you want people listening to what you are saying rather than trying to read everything on a page. They can be less concerned about the finer details and more interested in the bottom-line results. If ever you are asked to just send a report and concerned the data could be misinterpreted rather than spend time trying to email caveats create a video of you talking through the report instead to get your key points across.

To prove the worth of your content marketing investment, track key metrics like website traffic, conversions, and engagement. Use analytics tools, set clear goals, and compare your performance against competitors. Calculate cost-effectiveness and align your content marketing with business objectives.

Don't overlook the valuable role that a PR agency can play in delivering a successful content marketing strategy. Selecting an industry specific agency and then managing them with agreed KPI's, that are aligned with your business goals, can really help boost your performance.

It’s important to note that content marketing isn’t always worth the investment. Content marketing is not a quick fix. It requires significant investment in terms of time, resources, and potentially money. Can your company afford to wait months – if not years – to see results? If not, focus on other channels first.

Adapt and adjust accordingly. Some market places are changing rapidly. When metrics reports seems unacceptable its sometimes the impact of a moving target rather than error of the plan.