Content marketing is a powerful way to attract and engage your audience, but how do you know if your efforts are paying off? Measuring your content performance and return on investment (ROI) is essential to optimize your strategy and justify your budget. In this article, we'll show you what are the best tools and metrics to track your content ROI and how to use them effectively.
Before you start measuring your content ROI, you need to define your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each piece of content. What are you trying to achieve with your content? Is it to increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive sales, or something else? Depending on your goals, you'll need to choose the right KPIs to track your progress and success. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might use metrics like impressions, reach, and social shares. If your goal is to generate leads, you might use metrics like conversions, click-through rates, and cost per lead.
It's also important to clearly define the signpost metrics for every step of the funnel that leads to your core goal. This will be critical in understanding the areas that are doing well, as well as the ones that require optimization.
One thing that most people forget to consider when they think about the ROI of content is the money you can save by creating great content. Think about it like this: if your content can reach X number of people, think about how much it would cost to get the same reach through paid advertising. By putting effort into producing high-quality content, you can save money in the long run while still reaching your target audience.
Once you have your goals and KPIs, it's time to select the tools and platforms that will help you collect and analyze your data. There are a variety of options available, depending on your needs and budget. Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool that allows you to track and report on website traffic, behavior, and conversions. It can be used to measure content performance across different channels, segments, and campaigns. Google Search Console is another free tool that helps you monitor and optimize your website's visibility and performance on Google search. It can be used to measure organic ranking, impressions, clicks, and keywords. HubSpot is a paid and comprehensive platform that offers features and tools for content marketing, CRM, email marketing, and analytics. It can be used to create, manage, and measure content across the entire buyer's journey, from awareness to advocacy. SEMrush is a paid and versatile platform that offers features and tools for SEO, content marketing, social media, and competitive analysis. It can be used to research, create, and optimize content for search engines and audiences.
Regardless of the tool you choose, to truly understand the ROI of your content, it's essential that you measure content traffic, traffic sources (such as external channels, internal pages from your website, and search queries), time spent viewing your content, external links to your content, and content bounce rates at minimum. Without these metrics, it's impossible to get a wholistic view of your content's performance to determine your ROI.
To calculate your content ROI, you must first determine your content revenue and cost. Content revenue is the amount of money generated directly or indirectly from your content, and can be calculated using attribution models, customer lifetime value, or average order value. Content cost is the amount of money spent on creating, distributing, and promoting your content, including direct and indirect costs such as content production, distribution, promotion, and maintenance. Finally, you can calculate your content ROI using the formula: (Content Revenue - Content Cost) / Content Cost x 100. For example, if your content revenue is $10,000 and your content cost is $2,000, your content ROI is 400%.
I highly recommend setting up a robust attribution system to avoid the dangerous game of misinterpreting your content's ROI. It's crucial to understand the true origin of your conversions and not solely rely on attribution models that may attribute results to the wrong channels. One way to improve this process is by incorporating a "how did you hear about us" section on your forms, listening to sales calls to track the origin of conversions, and conducting interviews with buyers and customers to gain valuable insights. By doing so, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are accurately reflected, and you can make better-informed decisions to optimize your ROI.
Once you have calculated your content ROI, it is essential to analyze the results and insights to gain an understanding of what is working and what is not, as well as how to improve your content strategy and performance. To do this, you should ask yourself questions such as: what content types, topics, formats, and channels are generating the most ROI? Are you meeting or exceeding your content goals and KPIs, or are you falling short? Are you reaching and converting the most content segments, personas, and stages of the buyer's journey? What content opportunities, gaps, and challenges are you facing and how can you address them? By asking yourself these questions, you can gain a better understanding of your content ROI and how to improve it.
Once you have evaluated your results and insights, you must optimize your content strategy and performance. This requires making decisions and taking action based on data to increase your content ROI and reach your objectives. To do this, you should repurpose, update, and amplify your successful content to broaden its reach and value, revise, remove, or replace your unsuccessful content to improve its quality and relevance, experiment with new content ideas, formats, and channels to draw in and engage your audience, and monitor, measure, and report on your content ROI regularly to monitor your progress and success.