In both B2C and B2B marketing, about a third of the marketing budget is spent on content. Content marketing typically generates three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs as much as 62 percent less. You know other marketers are. For example, a blog post that gets shared across social media channels and plenty of comments on site, but isn’t getting a lot of action in the lead-capture department probably needs some CTA work. Which pieces of your content are getting the most lead generation action? You need to generate 100 leads to cover your content marketing investment. How much in sales is your content marketing leading to? You can easily track your sales conversion rate in the same way as your lead generation conversations: Number of sales/number of visitors x 100 The ROI of Your Content All of these metrics are useful but what about the overall return on investment of your content marketing budget. Your ROI, conversion rates, and consumption metrics can also be used to hone in on the individual blog posts, CTAs, and other pieces of the puzzle that impact your numbers the most, and which are barely inching your audience along the sales funnel. Keep measuring your content ROI and other KPIs so you know where to shed what isn’t working and what to replace your low-performing content with.
In both B2C and B2B marketing, about a third of the marketing budget is spent on content. Many successful brands invest even more. These numbers are predicted to keep going up. By 2019, experts believe we’re looking at a $300 billion dollar industry, which means dollars spent on content marketing will have doubled in less than four years.
Increasing the amount you spend on content isn’t exactly a bold initiative. Today, it’s actually your safest bet. Content marketing typically generates three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs as much as 62 percent less. The question is, are you getting a good return on your time and money spent on content? You know other marketers are. That’s why the industry continues to blossom. Content works.
But, how well is it working for you? Here’s how to measure your content marketing ROI.
Waiting for Your ROI
Analyzing the ROI of your online content is a little different than when you measure the ROI of a banner ad or a Facebook advertising campaign, or a one-off piece of off-line content like your event marketing. This is because, once you publish your content, it may take several weeks or even months for search engines – and your audience – to discover it. Unless you have already built up your blog readership or podcast listeners, factor in a time lag when measuring your content marketing ROI.
Identifying Your Consumption Metrics
You can use Google Analytics, your free web-based resource, or any other paid analytic tool such as KISSMetrics, GoSquared, Woopra, or Clicky to measure important KPIs to gauge the value of your website’s content.
First look at consumption. Is your content reaching your audience as much as you want it to? Are these numbers increasing over time?
- Total visits
- Unique visits
Are people staying on your web pages long enough to gain value and to be motivated down your sales funnel?
- Bounce rate – anything below 70 percent is respectable, below 40 percent is ideal
- Time-on-site – 30 to 45 seconds is the minimum benchmark, otherwise, your content probably isn’t hitting the mark with your visitors
Look at how your individual blog posts are doing. Which ones are getting the most visitors? Which aren’t performing well? Are there any trends that are making some of your content more interesting to your site visitors – better images, longer posts, more statistics, more story?
Is Your Content Motivating Action?
Is your content engaging? Tools like HootSuite, Buzzsumo and Buffer reveal what other sites may be sharing your content and where you may be getting your backlinks. Look at…
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