5 Best Ways To Measure The ROI of Your Content Marketing

As a small business owner you value your time and money a great deal. These two resources are incredibly scarce these days, so you do your very best to justify every single investment that you make in an attempt to take your company a step up.

You don’t have to be an experienced copywriter to realize that content is king. All your competitors are gradually becoming more familiar with the new rules of the blogosphere, that wonderful, congested and somewhat noisy space where everybody has something to brag about.

The other players are making tremendous efforts to update their website content to please both readers and search engines. They are also tackling the ever-growing influence of major social media platforms by bombarding their followers with more than enough servings of fresh, palatable content.

At the end of the day, you have one pressing question on your mind: where can all these initiatives get you? In other words, how can you actually measure the return on investment delivered by your ongoing content marketing efforts?

Assessing the ROI of Your Content Marketing: Mission Impossible?

Estimating the return on investment provided by your website or blog can be quite challenging, especially when you don’t know what metrics you should take into consideration to form an opinion on this matter. People who are constantly calculating their content marketing ROI often use terms such as “time on site”, “quality of leads” and “lead source”; some of them strive to monetize their web content directly and get results fast, while the others use their content to bond with different audiences that can support their monetization goals in the long run through different methods.

According to Mashable, as a rule of thumb, returns on investment will usually reach new records while one continues to craft and publish stellar content on a regular basis. After all, in most cases a successful content marketing is based on a bold trial-and-error process. Moreover, any content marketing initiative requires patience and consistency. As Darren Rowse from Problogger indicates, building blogs has a lot of things in common with the process of building muscles: in order to grow both blogs and muscles, you need to put them at work regularly.

5 Methods to Estimate Your Content Marketing ROI

So how exactly could you put the right price tag on your pieces of content with minimal effort? Estimating the overall returns provided by your content can be quite challenging; even so, the following five foolproof methods to estimate returns will replace your questions and doubts with certainties.

1. Rely on Consumption Metrics. Google Analytics and several other handy programs will give you the chance to check out consumption metrics, which basically show you how your content is consumed by your readers. By evaluating different KPI metrics, such as downloads, time on site, bounce rate and cost-per-visitor you can determine the overall effectiveness of your content pieces and identify the path that a visitor follow to land on your page. Different website metrics can become valid indicators of your content’s performance. Once your website is ready to measure them, you just have to analyze the data that these metrics provide on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis.

Assuming that you’ve invested quite a lot in a plethora of content pieces designed to make readers land on your website, how do you actually know whether or know you’re making the first steps towards recovering your investment? In this case, you start by measuring on-site engagement; more specifically, you focus on the traffic generated by each content piece and take a closer look at important metrics such as pages per visit, time on site and bounce rate. Do the visitors attracted through content marketing strategies actually stay on your website longer than the ones who have discover your pages through other methods? Do they bounce off your website faster than the rest? Furthermore, once they consume one of your content pieces, do they start digging for more? Accurate answers to all these questions will enable you to find out whether or not traffic triggered through content marketing strategies is more valuable than traffic coming from different other sources.

2. Keep an Eye on Subscriptions and Lead Generation. According to an article published by The Sales Lion, entitled “My Blog Made over 2 Million Dollars in Sales: How’s that for ROI?” marketers can calculate the ROI triggered by their content strategies only by asking visitors to fill out a form on their website. After a cookie gets attached to the IP address of your guests, the webmaster will be able to monitor the behavior of this new lead on his website. Numerous business owners apply this strategy to attract and cultivate new leads. Most of them offer freebies that usually come in the form of eBooks. Once the visitors land on the page where they can download the free eBook, they stumble across a form that they have to fill out before getting their hands on the free guide. In this stage, some of the most effective content marketing ROI tools currently available on the market, like the one introduced by HubSpot, for instance, lets you find out everything you need to know about the guest who has just filled out your form. This is how you can determine the overall number of page views and even discover the key phrase that your lead has typed in search engines to find you and your online business.

3. Monitor Social Interactions. How much can you trust sharing metrics when it comes to counting the cents that your content marketing efforts have put in your piggybank? According to Content Marketing Institute, it can be very difficult to assign an exact dollar value to social points such as of a “+1″, a like or share. Nonetheless, instead of using this type of social interactions to calculate the ROI of your content marketing initiatives, you can rely on social profiles to obtain useful data to evaluate the quality of your customer service and client relationship management and assess the current level of customer engagement. In this context, it becomes obvious that sharing metrics should not be ignored, especially since they offer valuable information related to your relationship with your audience and several other prominent aspects; but at the same time they should not be overvalued, especially when it comes to doing the math and estimating returns.

4. Thought Leadership. Successful content marketing tactics can help you reaffirm yourself as an expert in your industry. You can reach this superior level by crafting and distributing premium content consistently. Ample coverage by media outlets and a spike in mentions are the first signs suggesting that you being perceived as a high-authority source in your field of activity. If other important players on your niche start asking you to establish some kind of partnership, if you get invited to speak at prestigious industry events or if more and more third parties quote your writing, all this means that you have succeeded in building credibility and trust and you’ve managed to reach expert status. The bad news is that you quantify this otherwise incredibly strong metric. On the other hand, after converting yourself into an esteemed industry expert, your content will keep gaining followers, traffic, leads and subscriptions, opening the doors to a plethora of much more accurate methods to calculate the return on investment delivered by your content marketing.

5. Sales Metrics. While sharing metrics can be somewhat misleading when it comes to putting price tags on your content pieces, cold hard numbers can help you get one step closer to that warm, fuzzy feeling what you experience in your stomach while counting dollar bills. Sales metrics are the most tangible piece of the complex ROI puzzle that you wish to solve at once. Your CRM system reports sales-close rates that you can use to determine whether or not your content marketing can be listed as a smart investment. Make sure that your current system can actually track the path that your guests follow from the moment that they fill out your lead-capturing form; then simply transfer this information to your sales software. This type of data is always very helpful because it points towards the content pieces that have actually helped you close a sale. For instance, sales metrics can help you realize that your audience is craving for more how-to-articles or white papers. This is what you’re good at and this is what they expect from you in the long run.

Are you looking for a cheat sheet that you could use to calculate the ROI associated with your ongoing content marketing tactics before being dragged to a meeting where you would have to justify your expenses? Truth be told, there are quite a few Content Marketing Calculators out there, like the one introduced by Idio, for instance. SumAll Reports also enables you to get clarity on social, by delivering presentation-ready, multi-platform PDFs to your inbox on a weekly basis. Used by approximately 320,000 businesses of all sizes, this platform can let you (and your boss) know just how engaging your content actually is on several social networking websites, including Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. In addition, through its Analytics Cloud, Salesforce enables users to monitor any type of content-related data; moreover, developers can use this feature to create and offer custom analytics tailored to the specific needs of one’s business.

Last but not least, detailed metrics provided by Hubspot can help you determine how your campaigns are actually performing. Hubspot can be used to track and monitor a wide selection of elements, including social messages, keywords, landing pages and emails. The HubSpot CRM gives you everything you could ever need to control your web content across multiple channels and evaluate your marketing performance from one dashboard.

Remember: Explore Every Tool in the Online Toolbox to Measure Your Success

Clearly, these days, marketers can rely on a plethora of free and almost free online tools to justify the time, money and effort that they have invested in a content strategy.

These aids always come in handy and can also point you in the right direction, towards better content marketing tactics, a better understanding of the needs of your audience and a simpler way to boost profit margins and stay one step ahead of your main competitors at any given point in time.