How to measure content ROI

Content is the buzz word these days. You hear more and more people using content for achieving marketing & business objectives of the organization. Enough and more statistics confirm to its importance. For instance, 78% of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than ads (Lyfe Marketing) or after reading recommendations on a blog, 61% of online consumers in the U.S. decided to make a purchase (Content Marketing Institute). Such data points are endless. As a marketer, it is refreshing for me to see that more and more brands are realizing this and want to seize the opportunity. But unfortunately most organizations are unsure of how to calculate the worth of a piece of content.  This is a big dilemma since all things digital are measured to the last penny spent on it.  But the content agencies should not rejoice as until the performance is measurable, spends and risk appetite of brands will be limited.

This makes it crucial to be able to measure ROI for each blog that is created. I have asked many people and read many articles on how to measure ROI but haven’t found a satisfactory answer to this question. While some try measuring certain results generated from the blog, others see its value equivalent to the time cost of resources involved in its generation. Hence I tried creating a worth calculator for content which could be used by digital & brand marketers to measure the monetary value of each piece. But there are three things you need to keep in mind before you consider them. First, there is no single formula to measure effectiveness of content across industries or businesses. Secondly, it is easier to compare content types to know which is more effective rather than finding out the monetary benefit arising from each piece. And finally, there is no exact science to getting the ROI of a content piece; it will be at best indicative.

Let us first list down the key benefits that we derive from any content that goes online

1.     Increased Web Traffic

2.     Enhanced Brand Metrics

3.     Improvements in SEO

The ROI measurement for each of these would be different. Let us look at each of them in detail.

Increased Web Traffic: When blogs are published online – 3rd party websites or the corporate blog, the content discoverability is at the mercy of Google algorithms. This is not to say that the content quality, relevancy, and meta tags are not important, but after ticking of all these boxes, we are still dependent on Google. If the blog is third party, it will provide referral traffic and if it on company’s own blog then organic traffic. Now depending on what one wants to measure – marketing objectives like traffic, leads or downloads, or business objective of sales, one can calculate the result from the behavior of the traffic that visited the website. And since the cost of visit/lead/download/sale is already available with the business, it’s an easy multiplication of that by the result in you scenario. So for example, if we are tracking leads and say each lead costs INR 500 to the business and the content has generated 10 leads, then total ROI for from it is INR 5,000.

Enhanced Brand Metrics: Everybody wants to create brand awareness and recall but nobody really gives content its due in achieving this goal. And trust me, content does a great job of this. But the question often in the minds of marketers is that what is more effective – ads or content. Below table lists the pros and cons of each.

Read the complete article at https://marketingbyte.blog/2018/09/03/how-to-measure-content-roi/