The online space is full of information. It has got everything that someone wants to know. It can be said that it is nearly impossible not to find information for something online. This information is called content. It is funny how people don’t depend on libraries anymore. What you need is all on the internet. The internet also helps with education. And so, the demand for quality content never dies, and one has to keep putting up relevant content online to make sure they are visible to people who are looking out for it.
Content online is in abundance. There are hundreds and thousands of articles, blog posts, and whatnot, on a web page written by so many people. Content creation has become a means to earn money these days. But to do one, one has to know how to effectively optimize their content to make sure it ranks on the top. This is otherwise called content optimization. When content marketing is done the right way, one can expect a fair ROI. Understanding content optimization is necessary to stand ahead of the competitions in the market and to have more visibility to your brand.
What Is Content Marketing ROI
When you optimize your content such that it has good ranking online and it attracts more customers. It mostly includes structuring the content in the right way, picking the right content, adding relevant keywords and so on. As a brand, you must focus on relevant content. There are necessarily three reasons why you should do content marketing:
- More sales
- Cost Cribbing
- Potential and positive customers
Words matter and especially in a job that needs convincing of people. No matter what your best strategies or tactics are, you need the right content to pull customer attention. This is the reason why many famous brands have engaging and breathtaking content or captions. They create captions that relate a customer to the brand, ultimately making them believe that the brand is nothing without them. Phillips is the best example of this; its caption reads – “Innovation and You is Phillips”. Any customer would make a connection with the brand at the very first instance. How is content marketing important in every walk of a brand’s life? Well, here is how it helps move forward:
- SEO – While optimizing for search engines, ‘right keywords’ are necessary to rank your brand on top. And this is done in SEO optimized content.
- Social Media Marketing – A brand’s social presence is defined by the kind of content they post and the stories they curate on their social media handle.
- PPC – PPC comes to play only when there is apt content for the brand on its platform.
The most important of all before you proceed to calculate your ROI is to make sure you adhere to the following points:
Establishing a clear goal – Your content should have a clear set of goals. For this, you can answer questions like who is the target audience? What way will the content help them? Why is it essential to provide them with the content? Why do you want to take up producing the content? This will help your content creation process be more straightforward.
Analyze the right distribution channel – There are various channels to choose from when it comes to distributing or promoting a product. However, there are only a few that will suit your brand. This might be because not all methods are compatible or suitable for the kind of product you are marketing or not all of your target customers are in the channel that you would want to promote in. For this, you have to understand your customer goals. It is more like working from the backend. So, understanding your customer needs is extremely important while deciding the path for distribution and promotion.
Make quality content – The sole purpose of creating content is to reach out to your target audience. You might be a blogger for a non-profit or a blogger striving to promote your product or service. Whatever be it, it is imperative to create content that will help the target audience. In the former one, quality content will often lead to a reasonable conversion rate and eventually help you get the right customers.
Update and Refresh – Make sure you keep updating your blog or feed with the latest information relating to your niche. People will seem it engaging only when they find new and fresh content on your feed. Also, once in a while, repurpose your past blogs to give a recap to your readers on what your blog or feed emphasizes. The benefits of this are that it generates traffic, establishes authority, builds brand awareness and engages the audience, which helps in generating leads.
Assess – You must assess your performance regularly to know where you stand concerning your goal setting. Measuring leads, customer satisfaction, retweets/shares, traffic and SEO performance will give you a compelling result to know your performance.
The best way to know if your content is by creating a market for your product is by measuring the ROI on it. It is essential to measure the ROI so you can form your future product strategies based on it. There is a set way to measure your ROI. It goes step by step:
Step 1 – Measure Your Content Marketing ROI
Measure the creation cost – The first step in measuring your ROI is to estimate the cost spent on creating the content. It can be the content creator’s salary or work got done by a video or a photo editor, or a photographer if you are sourcing original images. Other types of costs can be the money spent on the work done by other departments or other outsourced work. It is crucial to measure every single penny as it will give you the exact result. So never hide any costs even if the content is produced in-house.
Step 2 – Distribution Cost
The other cost involved in the promotion or the distribution cost. It can be related to the modes or the medium used to publicize the content. This will also include the PPC, i.e., pay-per-click cost or advertising through other channels. Most of the content creation involves using various online tools to optimize the content. So you should also include the tools and the software used for the distribution. Some online tools might be paid while others are free. If it is a former one, make sure you include this cost as well.
Step 3 – Work Out the Amount INR in Return
This is the step where you will add up all the costs from step 1 and step 2. This involves all direct and indirect costs. If your content is good, then it will create a good number of sales. Some content has a direct connection with the sales. This can be determined when the content connects to a CTA button, and customers get to click it directly, and that determines the sales or the amount in return. In other cases, it might be a few steps later. Add up all individual sale amounts and keep it aside further to determine the return on investment for your content marketing.
Step 4 – ROI Calculator
There’s a simple method to calculate the ROI on your content, and the below formula can give this:
Content Marketing ROI = [(Return on investment – Investment) / Investment] x 100
This formula gives you the result in percentage that will help you understand the percentage value of your returns. So how would you determine if you have done well in sales? Well, it is pretty straightforward. If the percentage of your return is higher than the investment that you have made in creating your content, then you are doing a great job and require a pat on your back!
The amount spent or the investment depends on the smart choices you make in selecting your investment tools or methods or the options you choose.
There are several metrics that you can consider while measuring content marketing ROI. They can be listed as below:
- Lead quality
- Web Traffic
- SEO’s success
You don’t need to have to consider all the given metrics for measuring ROI. For example, you are looking to see how your recent post or a campaign is doing on social media; you have to check the social media engagement.
So the best method would be to first draft the goals and then consider or choose the kind of metrics that you will need. Plan, ahead, and set goals. This helps in studying and working on only those metrics that matter, and this, in turn, will save time and money.
LEAD QUALITY – Good content will generate good customer traffic. And so it is essential that one creates compelling content. Content is hugely crucial for lead generation. There are many ways to measure if your lead campaign is performing well or not. It can result in some of these actions:
- Your customers click the Call-To-Action button. This means that they are impressed with the content and that they’d like to explore more.
- Readers have opted for the lead magnet that you have created recently. A lead magnet is anything that compels a visitor to convert as a potential customer by giving their email IDs in return for some digital piece of document. It can be a PDF or email updates or so on. It is necessary to make sure the lead magnet is convincing, as it has a high conversion rate.
- The third act might be the visitors calling and enquiring your sales team about the product.
All these actions show that there is a high chance of your visitors getting converted to potential customers. You can check these updates in Google Analytics after having set it for your brand. This can be viewed under the conversions tab.
SEO SUCCESS – SEO is the practice of using the backend algorithms and altering your webpage such that your product or brand ranks on top of the search engine results. This means increasing web traffic by ranking your webpage. To know if your website is doing good in terms of SEO, you need to look for the following:
- Check if there are adequate keywords and that the targeted keywords rank well for your content.
- Check if you are getting more inbound links. Ahrefs backlink checker and Google search console can help you in this.
- Answer boxes are one of the success tabs, and if your content is appearing in them, then you’re doing best in terms of SEO.
WEBSITE TRAFFIC – Website traffic is the ground construction for any brand. Without this, there is no revenue. It is true. It is an elementary logic that states that if none is seeing it, then none is buying it. So you need to gauge and check once in a while if someone is looking for your content. Website traffic can help you determine the success of your content. But one thing you need to understand is that traffic is not a constant and keeps fluctuating based on various factors like market trends, offers and so on.
The best way to measure your website traffic is to go for it through Google Analytics. Check under ‘Channel’, ‘Acquisition’, and ‘All-Traffic’. You will also be able to check for it based on the demographics. Google Analytics is your one-stop for all the brand assessments.
These are some of the most influential metrics that you can analyze to know the performance of your content. Measuring ROI is vital for it tells you how your brand is performing in the market. It will help you see if your content marketing strategies are profitable. Assumptions are the stepping stone to pitfalls. You have to make sure that you have in your hand the right numbers to determine your performance.
