How to Measure the ROI of Your Content Marketing
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 6:55 am
You can invest a lot of money into content marketing, but it can also be one of the hardest things to do when it comes to tracking your return on investment (ROI). But it’s important to figure this out so you know you’re not just wasting your money on useless content, or so you can see which areas of your content marketing are working, which ones need to be improved, and which ones you should just stop altogether.
ROI is about comparing the resources (time and money) spent on something to the results it brings. Often, this is the financial gain (the profit) you get when you cash out the money you originally invested – this is generally understood as ROI. But in terms of content marketing, other metrics can and should be used to measure return, such as the number of followers gained on social media, page rankings, or the quality of leads generated from online content.
Because of this, ROI can’t be determined without first understanding how your content relates to your overall business goals. For example, if your goal is to increase your social media presence and that’s why you’ve been investing in social media content , you may want to use metrics like followers gained to calculate your return on investment.
In this guide, we'll take a closer look at how you can understand and measure the ROI of your content marketing, so you can discover what's really working for your business.
Deciding what to track
Markus-winkler-IrRbSND5EUc-unsplash
Content marketing isn’t just about creating amazing content for your brand (although that’s a big part of it), it’s also about ensuring that this content achieves the desired results. To understand your return on investment, you need to know what you’re tracking. As stated above, ROI is often understood to be about financial gain, but it doesn’t always have to be that way.
So before you start any new nigeria phone number library content marketing campaign, you first need to understand who you are actually targeting and what you aim to achieve so that you can align your results with your overall goals. This will help you determine your return on investment. Below are some suggestions for important metrics you can use when tracking your content marketing:
Social media engagement, whether it be followers, comments, likes or shares.
Website traffic and engagement
Email Open/Response Rate – Email outreach remains one of the most effective forms of marketing, so it’s important to really nail down this aspect of the process and ensure your email deliverability has been fully optimized to improve your chances.
SEO Success: Checking if your pages are ranking well on Google and for the right keywords
Newsletter subscriptions
Sales: from ads, newsletters, social media posts, etc.
Lead quality: By working with your sales team, you may be able to identify how you direct potential customers to your products or services and whether this leads to a sale.
What you choose to track is up to you, and will ultimately depend on what you want to achieve with your content. Just make sure you have a good idea of the metrics you're using to calculate your content marketing ROI before you get started. This will better help you give feedback to the team and measure your success.
Collection and analysis of your data
Google Analytics
Next, you need to collect and analyse data from your content. Again, there are a number of ways to do this depending on what you’re measuring. You can take a simple approach and look at how many sales were made as a result of a specific piece of content. Tracking links and visits to your website through Google Analytics can be very useful for this. Alternatively, you may want to monitor your web traffic or social media engagement over a set period of time – for example, over a week or a month. There are a number of platforms you can use to do this, including GA, Hootsuite, Sprout and BuzzSumo.
Last but not least, you may want to use an SEO service provider or SEO platform to check how you are doing with your rankings. Before you start investing in your content, it is worth creating a database list of where you are currently ranking and for which keywords. This will help you monitor your progress.
Once you have collected your data through your chosen method, you can begin analyzing. Most tools and platforms will come with filtering options to help you do this.
Calculate and report ROI
Return on investment 1
To be really specific when reporting your ROI, it's worth coming up with your own formula where possible. As a general rule, the basic formula for calculating ROI is:
(Return on Investment)/Investment x 100 = ROI percentage
But if you've chosen to use a different metric, there's still a way to create the perfect formula for getting a percentage. You just need to put a little thought into it and rearrange the basic formula. Below are some examples of how you can calculate these percentages to help you get started:
Of course, you don’t have to do this, but it can be useful if you have to convey your findings to your manager or other senior team members. Alternatively, you can keep it simple by gathering your data and deciding whether the money you’re investing will help you achieve the desired outcomes and therefore whether it’s worth it. An example of this could be:
Objective: Increase web traffic through Facebook Ads
Budget: £100
Results: Traffic increased by 23% compared to the previous month
Return on investment: positive
Propose viable measures
Return on investment 2
Finally, once you have a better understanding of your ROI based on your content marketing, you can start implementing some actionable steps for the future. If you’re not seeing the results you want, you may need to rethink your campaigns or step up your content efforts. In either case, use your ROI statistics and data analysis to decide what’s working and set specific goals.
ROI is about comparing the resources (time and money) spent on something to the results it brings. Often, this is the financial gain (the profit) you get when you cash out the money you originally invested – this is generally understood as ROI. But in terms of content marketing, other metrics can and should be used to measure return, such as the number of followers gained on social media, page rankings, or the quality of leads generated from online content.
Because of this, ROI can’t be determined without first understanding how your content relates to your overall business goals. For example, if your goal is to increase your social media presence and that’s why you’ve been investing in social media content , you may want to use metrics like followers gained to calculate your return on investment.
In this guide, we'll take a closer look at how you can understand and measure the ROI of your content marketing, so you can discover what's really working for your business.
Deciding what to track
Markus-winkler-IrRbSND5EUc-unsplash
Content marketing isn’t just about creating amazing content for your brand (although that’s a big part of it), it’s also about ensuring that this content achieves the desired results. To understand your return on investment, you need to know what you’re tracking. As stated above, ROI is often understood to be about financial gain, but it doesn’t always have to be that way.
So before you start any new nigeria phone number library content marketing campaign, you first need to understand who you are actually targeting and what you aim to achieve so that you can align your results with your overall goals. This will help you determine your return on investment. Below are some suggestions for important metrics you can use when tracking your content marketing:
Social media engagement, whether it be followers, comments, likes or shares.
Website traffic and engagement
Email Open/Response Rate – Email outreach remains one of the most effective forms of marketing, so it’s important to really nail down this aspect of the process and ensure your email deliverability has been fully optimized to improve your chances.
SEO Success: Checking if your pages are ranking well on Google and for the right keywords
Newsletter subscriptions
Sales: from ads, newsletters, social media posts, etc.
Lead quality: By working with your sales team, you may be able to identify how you direct potential customers to your products or services and whether this leads to a sale.
What you choose to track is up to you, and will ultimately depend on what you want to achieve with your content. Just make sure you have a good idea of the metrics you're using to calculate your content marketing ROI before you get started. This will better help you give feedback to the team and measure your success.
Collection and analysis of your data
Google Analytics
Next, you need to collect and analyse data from your content. Again, there are a number of ways to do this depending on what you’re measuring. You can take a simple approach and look at how many sales were made as a result of a specific piece of content. Tracking links and visits to your website through Google Analytics can be very useful for this. Alternatively, you may want to monitor your web traffic or social media engagement over a set period of time – for example, over a week or a month. There are a number of platforms you can use to do this, including GA, Hootsuite, Sprout and BuzzSumo.
Last but not least, you may want to use an SEO service provider or SEO platform to check how you are doing with your rankings. Before you start investing in your content, it is worth creating a database list of where you are currently ranking and for which keywords. This will help you monitor your progress.
Once you have collected your data through your chosen method, you can begin analyzing. Most tools and platforms will come with filtering options to help you do this.
Calculate and report ROI
Return on investment 1
To be really specific when reporting your ROI, it's worth coming up with your own formula where possible. As a general rule, the basic formula for calculating ROI is:
(Return on Investment)/Investment x 100 = ROI percentage
But if you've chosen to use a different metric, there's still a way to create the perfect formula for getting a percentage. You just need to put a little thought into it and rearrange the basic formula. Below are some examples of how you can calculate these percentages to help you get started:
Of course, you don’t have to do this, but it can be useful if you have to convey your findings to your manager or other senior team members. Alternatively, you can keep it simple by gathering your data and deciding whether the money you’re investing will help you achieve the desired outcomes and therefore whether it’s worth it. An example of this could be:
Objective: Increase web traffic through Facebook Ads
Budget: £100
Results: Traffic increased by 23% compared to the previous month
Return on investment: positive
Propose viable measures
Return on investment 2
Finally, once you have a better understanding of your ROI based on your content marketing, you can start implementing some actionable steps for the future. If you’re not seeing the results you want, you may need to rethink your campaigns or step up your content efforts. In either case, use your ROI statistics and data analysis to decide what’s working and set specific goals.