Content Marketing ROI

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Value of content marketing

The value of content marketing measurement can be largely three-fold.

• Brand awareness: This is the more potential customers that know about your business and your proposition within the market.
• Brand conviction: This is the credibility and authority that you have as a business, or in certain brand topics and industry themes.
• Conversions and advocacy: This is, essentially, the content that you can use to drive sales and also repeat business.

Calculating ROI

There are three main components to calculating this return in investment (ROI) from your content marketing.

Content

The first component is looking at your initial investment in the content. This is not just from a financial or a monetary perspective, but investment in terms of time. How long has it taken you to create content for your content marketing mix? If the content is ultimately been unsuccessful, it's not just a case of the monetary input, but also the resource from a manpower and also from a time perspective that you've actually entered into creating that content.

Performance

Then there’s the performance of that content.

Looking around the engagement, the metrics, and essentially, how your audience has reacted to that content and determining whether it's worth the initial investment. Can you track back the performance of this content to result in any sales or new clients, or indeed, any new leads?

Long tail benefits

The immediate impact of your content may not be fully realized in the short-term, and there may be longer-term benefits to your content.

So, making sure that you're taking into account 6-month to 12-month impacts from an SEO perspective, or indeed, lead generation that needs to turn into lead nurturing before a close in terms of a sale or a new customer, and making sure that you're taking these considerations into full context. On your content marketing, it is important to consider the cost implications of your content creation.

Cost implications

So, have you invested in content creation and the ownership of that from a hundred percent perspective? Or did you have to license imagery or music? Or do you need to credit individuals along your content creation process? How much internal availability is there in terms of resource or skills for the creation of that content?

And what did you need to invest in in order to make sure that was deliverable for the business? Did you need to hire external support like an agency or a design consultancy to help you get content across the line? Also consider any additional external videographers, designers, or cooperatives that you've had to involve in the content creation process. And lastly, is your content compliant with regulatory bodies?

Is there a financial implication to making sure that your content is compliant? Industries like pharmaceuticals and alcohol have regulatory boards, and sometimes need to fund this. This needs to be part of your content marketing ROI considerations as well.

Accessing content utility

We're going to look at three metrics around assessing the content utility when looking at your content marketing return of investment.

• Downloads and saves: How many customers found the content that you provided so useful, they decided to save it to their device?
• Customer feedback: How much customer feedback have you generated along the way? Have you been able to take any comments from a positive or a negative perspective and enacted business change as a result of being able to access them through their pieces of content?
• Plays, clicks, and views: How many views or plays on pieces of video content? Get a true view of what the video plays look like, though, because some of the platforms, like Facebook, register three seconds as a video view. YouTube look at 30 seconds as a video view. So make sure your video view metrics parlay across the board and are relevant to each other, rather than what the insights, the platforms are delivering on the face surface.

Accessing content performance

Do the digging and deep dive into the statistics.

• Content recall: You should be able to get a helicopter view of your content performance by assessing content recall. So how quickly linked is your brand to the content that you've pushed at previously, and how aligned is it with the style of your brand?
• Clicks to point of sale: How much traffic have you driven towards the endpoint where a consumer actually converts? And how has it resulted in business effect, or in terms of your bottom line?
• Overlaying commercial results with your recent content activities: Looking over the peaks in the chart in your business, and looking towards busy times when you're activating large pieces of content, and seeing is there a correlation or a link between business results and your content marketing efforts.