to measure content marketing ROI right: Math, metrics & mistakes to avoid

Content is the king of marketing. According to a Parse.ly study 53% of revenue goals for organizations are not tied to content. This is a huge problem. This is a major mistake.

Many people believe that the calculation of ROI (return on investment) for content marketing is a puzzle that is still largely unsolved. However, it isn’t true. While your content marketing efforts are highly attributable to others, there are some mistakes you should avoid.

This post will give you all the information you need to have a clear picture of your performance.

Table of Contents

• 
  What’s content marketing ROI?
  
• 
  The content market ROI formula
  
• 
  Why It’s Important
  
• 
  5 tips to make it perfect
  

What is the content marketing ROI?

The content marketing ROI is the percentage of revenue you have earned from content marketing.

You might argue that there is more to it then calculating the revenue it generated, which I partially agree with. If we’re serious, however, all the metrics used in marketing have one goal: driving revenue.

A content marketing campaign that drives traffic, engagement and awareness is a failure if it does not positively impact your bottom line.

For example, take this Google Data Studio dashboard:

Source

Data Studio is a valuable marketing tool. The metrics it displays are notable content marketing gains. However, they don’t tell the whole story. To see the results of your hard work, you need to know how much effort and money went into it. You won’t be able to determine what is worth scaling and reproducing.

How to calculate content marketing ROI

For content marketing ROI, the formula is revenue from content plus content marketing spend divided by spend.

Let’s take, for example, a $7,500 monthly investment in content marketing. The revenue that you can attribute to it is $10,000.

(($10,000 – $7.500) /$7500) x 100 = 33.3%.

Your content marketing ROI is 33%. This means that you get $1.33 back for every $1 spent in content marketing.

Let’s suppose you spend $5,000 each month on content marketing and that it brings you 35 users each worth $49 This is a return on investment of $1,175.

(($1,175- $5,000) / $1.175) x 100 = 65.7%.

Your content marketing ROI is now -66%. You’re losing money.

How can you calculate your content marketing ROI?

Content marketing strategies must have visibility into the return on investment. Let’s look at the reasons why.

1. Where to place your investment

Recently, I spoke with the founder of a SaaS firm who wanted me to join their team as a freelance writer. He realized that his company blog was responsible for 80% of his customers and his revenue. Therefore, he wanted to increase the amount of content and SEO he invests in.

This was because he knew how content marketing had helped him company, and that blogging was the most important channel.

He is not the only one.

This means that you can attribute revenue to specific channels or content types, allowing you to spend your money where it matters most. Content marketing is not for everyone. While you may be successful in blogging, your competition may be thriving on social media.

You can get a better understanding of your content marketing ROI by digging into your data.

• Your audience will be interested in what content you have to offer.
• How to cut back on spending
• Changes in strategy or tactics

2. Stakeholders can buy-in to your project

Content marketing is expensive, even though it has many benefits. There are many expenses, from writers’ salaries to tools to other related costs.

It’s difficult to convince stakeholders to continue funding content marketing when they meet to discuss business updates.

Traffic and sessions are essential, but they don’t suffice to keep your business afloat. Only income can achieve that.

3. Attract new customers to your service

Getting more clients to your marketing agency will be easier if you tie content to revenue. This will allow potential buyers to choose your services.

B2B Marketing is a subject that the modern buyer understands better than mere traffic. “We increased our revenue by 70% in x month” is better than “We generated x pages in x month.”

This is something I know because I have sold traffic before and it’s not an easy sell these days. While driving traffic to your websiteis essential, many B2B buyers want information about how content marketing fits in their bottom line metrics.

How to measure your content marketing ROI right

Although there is a simple formula to calculate content marketing ROI, it’s not easy. I have seen a lot of people overlook important considerations. These five tips will help you get the best picture of your content marketing performance.

1. Tracking is essential

You need to be able attribute specific content types and channels to get the best out of your content marketing ROI calculation. First and foremost, you need to ensure that your tracking is in place. For all offers, you need to use tactics such as:

• Landing pages, Thank you pages that are specific to content or campaigns.
• Google Analytics Goals and Events
• UTMs and other tracking parameters allow you to analyze performance by source/medium, campaign, content type, and more.

To create tracked links, you can use Google’s UTM builder

These tactics will allow you to see which offers convert the most and which channels, or blog post, are driving the most traffic.

2. Value your conversions

Many businesses use a variety marketing campaigns that don’t involve direct sales. You will need to assign a value to this conversion.

If you have 70 leads per month from gated content downloads, and 10 of those leads become paying customers, then you can assign a value to that campaign’s leads and traffic to the landing pages. Here are some tips to help you determine conversion values

To get the best picture of your content performance, you will need to access your sales team’s analytics data (such through Google Analytics or Search Console). However, you should use a CRM with automation software.

A CRM can show you all the content that users have accessed during their buyer journey.

3. Know your metrics

You need to be able to assign monetary value to your conversions in order to get campaign- and content-specific ROI. This will allow you to see if your content marketing has taken the correct course, and if there are any areas that need improvement. Depending on your goals, here are some key metrics you should focus on:

4. Collect ALL your costs

Although it sounds obvious, this is where most content marketers make mistakes. You need to consider the many content marketing tools that you can use. Consider:

Content production costs

You also have to pay freelance writers. This includes:

• 
  Keyword search tools
  
• 
  AI copywriting software
  
• Uploading content to your CMS and editing it
• Designing images

Content distribution and optimization costs

Content distribution channels can be paid, earned, or owned. You might also use:

• Paid campaigns
• Social media tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer
• 
  Social media content creators
  
• Mention is a social listening tool that allows you to listen to others.
• Manager of social media or community
• Analytics tools (other than Google Analytics which is free)

Your tools allow you to make rough estimates. Let’s take, for example, that you pay $100 per month for a content optimization tool. You publish 10 posts each month. Each article can be described as $10 to optimize.

5. It’s not perfect

Let’s suppose a potential buyer stumbles upon one of your blog articles while searching for a solution to a problem. Although they are aware that your brand may be a solution, they aren’t ready to purchase it immediately. They find you on Google two weeks later and learn more about you. Then they land on your website again where they sign up to a free trial. While the channel they came from will be the reason for the conversion, what about the blog post that brought them to your site?

It will be more difficult to track top-of-funnel deals if you have a Content Marketing funnel. This is not to say you will be able capture every aspect your content marketing ROI, but I have provided some tips to help you get close. Be aware that underreporting is more common than overreporting.

Calculate your content marketing ROI now

Although calculating the content marketing ROI is not rocket science, it’s easy to overlook important details and cause confusion. With the help of these tips, you should be capable of getting a fairly close calculation to understand your strategy and improve it.

Let’s recap:

• The content marketing ROI formula is (return-cost / cost) x 100
• It is important to know your content marketing ROI to determine how much budget you should invest in content and which channels.
• You need to ensure accurate measurement by having tracking, conversion values and the right metrics.

About the author

Ali Faagba works as a content strategist for SaaS and B2B companies. He is passionate about product-led strategies and tests his SEO assumptions at Product Marketing Profit. Entrepreneur, Zapier and CoSchedule are just a few of the many bylines.

The post How To Measure Content Marketing ROI Right: Math, Metrics & Mistakes to Avoid was originally published on WordStream.