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Posted by Sanket Patel
October 25, 2017
Content creation has not just been a small campaign of the business. It had taken place in the marketing strategy for nearly 76% of B2C marketers. The question is that how many of them consider the significance of measuring the performance of the content marketing against predetermined goals?
In this cut-throat competition, quality of the content rules over its quantity in terms of getting a return on the resources and efforts implied. It plays a massive role in the company’s splurge, which is estimated to reach over $300 billion in 2019. This means money spent on the content marketing will increase by two times within a time span of fewer than 4 years.
To sustain the preeminent position in the digital market, it becomes critical to improving content marketing strategy by weighing its performance. By this means, you come to know the efficacy of the efforts and resources you implied on the content. Calculating ROI of the content marketing can help you the most to learn where it performed efficiently.
Which factors are responsible for making the content successful? Is it the information, presentation, loads of backlinks, visual appeal, social platforms, or any other aspect? All of the above factors can be defined by measuring content ROI. Although many marketers consider it to be onerous, let me inform that it is not.
After some studying and digging the market’s condition, we have come with all new belief. As a consequence, we figured out that ‘Measuring ROI of content marketing is as simple as analyzing conversion rates.’ All you require is a spreadsheet, Google Analytics, and some simple computation.
Let us understand how ROI can be measured in the simplest way.
In a simple language, calculating ROI is determining, how much money was splurged in the project and how much of it returned.
When it comes to defining the concept of content marketing ROI, there is no any specific definition. The niche of all the companies vary from one and so does their goals. Accordingly, the thought procedure for ROI is different for every marketer. Hence, its definition fluctuates depending on business’s content marketing KPIs.
For understanding what you get in return, first, you need to understand how much money is going into your content marketing strategy. You just need to take a piece of writing that you used for marketing purpose and gather some of its average costings.
The production cost of the content comprises the rate you pay on every post and the expense incurred for its editing. On the other hand, the platforms you used for marketing a content such as SEO, social media, etc are included in the promotion cost.
A lot of time and resources are spent on promoting the content. To know how much value does it add to your marketing strategy, it becomes pivotal to make an optimum use of KPI. By this means, you can do the simple math, measuring ROI of content. For better convenience, we have compiled a list of metrics that will help you evaluate the comprehensive performance of content marketing campaign.
The potential of the content is measured as soon as it gets published. It is the moment since when it starts performing, traveling in different directions. Either it might reach a lot of people or none. In any of the case, you’ll come to know its consumption rate.
This way, it would be helpful for you to learn certain important aspects related to the content reach. Some of the examples are ― Did it reached your potential audience? Is it able to engage viewers? Which sharing platform proved you to be the best? From which geographical location, you received more viewers?
You can find a feasible solution to these questions by evaluating KPIs that are mentioned as under:
The percentage obtained from the people who left the website without making further engagement against the total number of people visited. Suppose your website offer products, a user visited it but left without purchasing a product, it would be considered as the bounce rate.
If the bounce rate is 50%, it means 50% of the users landed on your website without visiting other pages. Nonetheless, it doesn’t always show poor performance of your site, as it depends on the purpose of the page.
Technically, the bounce rates within the range of 26% to 40% is fine, 41% to 70% is average, but more than 70% could be an alarming situation. For measuring the bounce rate, you can take help from Google Analytics.
This metric is the bridge that helps to bring you the base to the statistics of the bounce rate. Focusing more on the average time a viewer is spending on the page rather than stressing on the high bounce rate.
People spending a considerable amount of time on the page where you published your content shows that the information drafted is relevant. By this means, you get a chance to analyze whether the content was interesting enough to hold the presence of the reader. On an average, if a person stays on the page for 30-45 seconds, it is considered as an impressive start.
It simply means to the number of people landed on the particular page. Pageview plays an integral role in tracking the efficiency of digital marketing strategies. However, it is not meant for learning overall performance of the piece of content. Instead, it shows the reach.
Keeping track of the pageviews, you can scrutinize, whether you’re playing content marketing well or not. If you’re not reaching a potential audience, it is probably the time when you need to take actions for targeting a correct bunch of people.
How much popular is your brand? Are people talking about you more often? Or you’re just forgotten by the audience at large same as other brands? Is your content able to gain exposure in the market?
Find the answers to these questions by referring to the metrics that are mentioned as under:
The number of links you’re getting to your website is the stage that defines the popularity of your brand. Indeed, it isn’t a metric that is essential for the all the contents. This is because not all articles receive considerable links from outside. There are just a few of the contents that give the green signal for a significant promotion. For gaining more exposure, you can keep a track of the referral paths form where you’re getting links.
Regardless of any platforms, the number of times your brands get mentioned greatly affects in determining what is your conversational ratio. The better number of mentions, the better has your content performed. It reveals, how engaging has it been proved to become popular.
Moreover, mentions would show what other people have to say about your brand. Therefore, it is crucial to keep a track of the number of times you were mentioned on the internet. Above all, it demonstrates the value of your brand and how much is its worth.
For example, a brand name HubSpot is the most popular one when it comes to offering latest statistics. You can take a look from the above picture which I evaluated by using Brandmentions.com. This way you can refer to such tools that would help you know number of times your brand gets mentioned on the internet. Experience the quick exposure of the content and accordingly grow your brand proficiently.
One of the most important factors that affect the performance of the content is knowing the level of engagement. It throws the light on how well it was created from the perspective of customers. This is the main reason, why marketers consider the level of engagement as the top priority in the content marketing strategy. To know about your content, just take a glance into following metrics.
Keeping track of how many comments you received on your post will help you the most to learn the engagement level of the content. Besides, comments, shares and any other reactions to it through social media would also make a great difference. If the number of interactions is more, it demonstrates the sound performance of the content.
Unlike other metrics, you don’t have to go through a long procedure of evaluations. It is the simplest form, which doesn’t need any further efforts. Just checking the post itself would aid you to know the number of comments or shares a post received.
Content is created with the purpose to spread it more and more. When users use to read the content, it becomes essential to guide them to the path in such a way that it helps them to make the conversion. This is where the purpose of Call To Action arises.
This way it becomes accessible for you to connect the audience to your content. You just need to monitor click-through rates of CTA. It will show whether the content created was based on the stages of the sales cycle.
The cycle includes 3 stages:
– Awareness Stage
– Consideration Stage
– Decision Stage
The content that flows through all the above-mentioned stages describes how well is it created.
Content is considered as the main hero in the digital marketing. It plays a vital role to increase branding. Beyond creating engaging content, creating one that leads to conversion is the core aim of the strategy. Therefore, it is indispensable to track if it is capable enough of converting. You can do so through the metrics that are mentioned as under:
Leads are the lifeline of any business, without it no one can flourish. Therefore, it becomes imperative to track the lead generated via content. It is one of the major goals of any content marketing campaign. Some popular CRMs you can use are – Hubspot, Zoho, and Capterra.
You can take a look at the number of leads have been generated through the email subscriptions, forms, trial signup or any other actionable steps you included in your content. This way you can track this metric effectively and can evaluate how many qualified leads are generated.
The number of leads generated denotes the conversion. This metric would help you the most to know whether users are responding to the actions you take in your content marketing. Simply calculating the conversion rate via following formula would aid you the most to know the actual sales.
For instance, 800 leads are generated from all the platforms and 283 leads are generated from content marketing, the conversion rate would be 35.3%.
Now, after acquainting knowledge on the KPIs and you come to know how to measure content marketing ROI, it is your turn to take some actions. Do some maths, gather statistics and pull all that data in the excel sheet. Thereafter, draft a graph or chart which would help you learn all the possible steps to take for adding some value to the content you create.
Being a business owner or digital marketer, if you don’t know which plan of action played well, it is worthless to run a content marketing campaign. Measuring its ROI, you get a great chance to learn about the loopholes and caliber of the strategy, improving it thoroughly. This way, it would be easy for a marketer to differentiate from just being a follower and leading the industry.
Now that you’re introduced to the entire scenario of the content marketing, the ball is in your court whether to measure ROI or not. Nonetheless, referring this blog post would help you the most for doing some math easily. Apparently, it would help you boost business revenue just focusing little more on the content.
Kick-start measuring your content marketing ROI today! In case, you stuck somewhere just revisit this piece of writing and you’ll start understanding which areas to focus while marketing content.
Do you have any other content marketing KPIs apart from those mentioned in this blog post? Let’s do the talking for it on the comment section below.
