Although content marketing is one of the most popular and sought after digital marketing strategies, calculating its return on investment (ROI) is a grey area for many marketers.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 88% of the top performers measure content marketing ROI, compared to two-thirds of the overall sample and only half of the bottom performers.
That leaves a lot of small and mid-size businesses struggling to nail down the effects of their content strategy. This is why we left guessing behind and asked marketers for the full-proof, everyday strategies for measuring content marketing ROI.
How do you measure content marketing ROI?
Content marketing ROI is a percentage that shows how much revenue you gained from content marketing, compared to the amount of money you spent to produce and distribute content.
All you have to do is determine the price of producing and distributing the content and the amount of money it brought you. If the former is less than the latter, you’re good.
Seems simple? Well, we already mentioned that determining revenue from content is often tricky. Generating sales from your blog is not always a simple, immediate chain of action.
The more ambitious your content marketing goals, the more complicated it is to measure content marketing ROI.
This is why marketers measure the value of content using metrics that suit their company’s specific marketing objectives. These metrics are:
- Web traffic
- Lead Quality – the likelihood that the lead is going to become your customer.
- Onsite Engagement – the way visitors interact with a piece of content and, subsequently, the entire website.
- Sales
Apart from these main four metrics, some businesses also track social media ROI, SEO success, and exposure and authority. You can read more about tracking all these metrics here.
LeadQuizzes conducted a survey among marketers, asking them which one is the most valuable content marketing ROI metric for their business. Out of 77 respondents, almost half of them prioritize sales. About a third of marketers told us they track content ROI by measuring lead quality.
Here are their tips (some answers have been edited for length and clarity).
Web traffic
Traffic doesn’t equal conversion and sales, but it is a prerequisite to them. This is why some marketers prefer to keep it simple and measure their content marketing ROI based on this metric.
“It’s important to understand the power of traffic regardless of whether it’s high or low quality,” says Will Kabrall from Social Hero Media.
The more traffic your content generates, the more opportunities for experimenting to ensure growth and sales.
“When you have huge amounts of traffic coming in due to good content, we gain the opportunity to use holistic conversion rate optimization to maximize this traffic and continually increase the amount of these people that will convert right away,” Kabrall explains.
Lead Quality
Just like there is high- and low-quality web traffic, there are also varying degrees of lead quality. There are two approaches to this metric among the marketers we talked to.
Lead quality scoring is a straightforward and simple, yet more specific content ROI metric compared to web traffic.
1. Scoring through split testing
“When we do a campaign, we normally leverage organic and paid ads. We develop a piece of content (i.e pdf, case study, video). We share it organically on LinkedIn within the target audience to test it for engagement.
Once we see that there is great engagement on the post, we do a separate campaign using LinkedIn Ads. Its goal is to broaden our reach for awareness purposes,” explains Julbert Abraham, the CEO of Abraham Global Marketing, specializing in LinkedIn marketing.
“We measure the engagement on that particular post for a couple of weeks. We also analyze the people who are engaging with that piece of content.
Finally, we do a follow-up LinkedIn ad campaign, targeting this highly-engaged audience, asking them to fill out the lead generation form. The information we gather allows us to further qualify the leads.”
While this approach is practical if social media is the main distribution channel for your content, it is rendered impossible if you draw clicks organically.
2. Interactive scoring
a) Based on buyer persona
“With over 215,000 sessions a month, having the proper lead conversion elements in place is key,” explains Rob Steffens, director of sales and marketing in Bluleadz.
These leads are scored based on their level of similarity to the ideal buyer persona.
One of the ways to convert website visitors are CTAs with lead magnets, such as this one you can find on BlueLeadz blog posts.
“Once we convert that traffic, we score our leads to determine if they would be the right fit to do business with us. This is a great indicator to see if we are hitting the mark with our content and attracting the right audience to our brand online.”
b) Based on buyer readiness
Another way to measure lead quality is by focusing on buyer readiness and prior customers’ engagement with your business and competitors.
“We know they are a qualified lead when they have their project management team in place, set budget for their project, and an idea of their timeline,” says James McMinn JR, a senior digital strategist in Matchbox Design Group.
“The last thing we usually consider is how many other companies they are looking at. We expect there to be competition and appreciate a good challenge.
This way, we know that the client is going to respect our work because we have been properly vetted. This helps us form a relationship with the lead.”
c) Through interactive content
Another great way to build traffic, generate leads, and score their quality is interactive content such as quizzes.
Interactive content generates 4-5x more pageviews than static content, while 79% of marketers agree it brings them repeat visitors and multiple exposures. For example, well-crafted quizzes can score a 50% lead capture rate.
“Quizzes are a lot more engaging than ebooks, training videos, or webinars. Your visitors answer some questions knowing that they’ll get a personal response and recommendation in minutes,” advises Jeremy Ellens, one of the founders of LeadQuizzes.
“It will bring you a higher lead capture rate, and at the same time, you can also learn a lot about your audience by the questions they answer.”
While lead scoring is a quick and sufficiently detailed way of tracking your content marketing ROI, it has its limitations if your strategy has more ambitious goals.
Onsite engagement
1. Holistic approach
Holistic onsite engagement measuring approach is a good choice for marketers who are running multipronged, large campaigns on several channels.
a) Use custom analysis that fits your goals
“As a marketing executive, I like to see my content dashboard showing me the following: social shares, engagement, click-through-rate, backlinks, comments (SPAM filtered), bounce rate, time on page, email opt-ins, lead attribution and lead quality scores,” explains George Schildge, managing partner at Matrix Marketing Group.
Quiz built into a Matrix Marketing blog post that aims to generate leads.
“The content this agency creates is segmented into three parts: industry thought leadership, how-to guides, and use cases, case studies, and stories.
For each content type, we expect some general metric attribution, but each piece of content has a different purpose and goal. So the base-line metrics are modified to meet the content element,” Schildge says.
b) Use data analytics tools
“It’s very tricky to calculate content marketing, especially if you don’t have any 3rd party tools to help,” admits Bryce Christiansen from PlusThis.
How content marketing ROI tracking looks like in Google Analytics. (Source: PoofNewSales)
“We started by using Google Analytics and applying tracking through them. But more recently, we’ve been tracking more and more of our content marketing ROI through another Infusionsoft integration called Wicked Reports.
This allows us to track what pages lead to a sale in our funnels so we can know if a lead came from a particular blog or webpage and capture that as a lead source. We can then look at our sales and track back to what content leads to the sale.”
Project manager at ClearPivot, Chantelle Stevenson, recommends Databox as a tool for simple, effective content marketing ROI measurement.
“Databox helps connect our organic, direct traffic, and referral leads on a monthly basis, providing valuable insights for our clients.
When ads are placed (either utilizing Google Ads or Facebook Ads), these engagements are then tied to Databox reporting tools, which measure specifically where and how the content in the ad was engaged with,” says Stevenson.
Tracking content marketing ROI in Databox.
2. One metric approach
If your content marketing is limited to a specific goal, such as generating leads or traffic, tracking 10 metrics at the same time is overkill.
a) Track conversion rate
“Conversion rate is important to us because it quantifies the health of the traffic we are attracting to the site, and how we are getting them into the sales process.
If the conversion rate is low, we are either attracting the wrong traffic with our content or have the wrong CTAs on our content,” explains Elliot Miller, a co-founder of Bracken Marketing.
b) Track social media engagement
Some businesses draw minimal traffic from social media – for others, Facebook or Instagram are oxygen.
“We can assess during each period if we had high engagement from our content. This helps us understand whether the engagement correlates to an increase in fandom for our accounts.
The compounding efforts of content and engagement are meant to build up a pool of pre-qualified users who will transition to the website,” says Alexander Blair from V2M2 Group.
“These users will then typically spend more time on the website and view more pages, decreasing the bounce rate and become more likely to purchase or at least keep the client top of mind.”
Which metric you are going to prioritize depends on your goals, product, and target audience.
c) Track onsite behavior
“Increased engagement, in the form of time spent on a page, the number of pages viewed, and percent of returning visitors, are metrics that demonstrate that you are connecting with your target user,” says Kathryn Hawkins, founder and managing director of Eucalypt Media.
For Eucalypt Media, blog is the place to connect and build trust.
“Whether or not that user signs up for your newsletter or buys a product that day, she’s paying close attention to what you’re saying. That represents trust in your brand, which is a difficult thing to earn.
The higher your engagement level, the more useful your readers find your content. Even if it’s not connected to an immediate sale, it’s a huge win for your brand.”
Sales
As we previously mentioned, sales are the most popular content marketing ROI metric, despite being the most complex metric to track.
“The long term benefit of this strategy is that we can see which blogs are driving the most traffic and which blogs have the highest conversion rates. We then focus on optimizing these blogs.” – Sarah DeSantis, Synerge-marketing
Here are some tips fresh from the marketers on how to do it.
1. Include a trackable CTA in each post
“We wrote a piece of content for a new client in March 2019, and two new clients valued at $12,500+ each could be attributed to a single blog post. That’s one blog post with a 25k return in just one month,” explains Sarah DeSantis, director of inbound marketing at Synerge-Marketing.
You can find a trackable CTA at the bottom of the page in this Synerge-marketing’s campaign.
“For those blogs that drive a lot of traffic, but don’t necessarily convert, we focus on how we can convert more of that traffic via smarter, better CTAs, more compelling next steps, etc,” adds DeSantis.
“For those blogs that have an impressive conversion rate, but not necessarily a good amount of traffic, we research the keyword traffic and optimize the post for those keywords that are performing well.”
2. Track content performance by the channel
Kate Brooks, head of the Pro Essay Writer Content Marketing department puts it: “some blog posts can generate a lot of social media engagement and few sales. At the same time, other blog posts can generate zero engagement, and drive sales”.
“It is not about which one is better, it is about how they work together. Because of this, I like to track content sales performance by the media,” explains Andrew Morrison, the founder of Dotcom Gains.
An example of a content on DotcomGains blog, with a great potential to go viral.
“Here’s how I do it… I add an optional custom field on the check-out page. I ask people: how did you hear about us? It’s a drop-down field, so people can choose from a few options – it’s fast, easy and saves people from writing.
It’s simple, yet effective! Most buyers respond. Once you have this in place, you can see how a content marketing strategy is working.
Let’s say, for example, that you have a blog, make videos on YouTube and run a few ads on different media. Let’s suppose you sell a $100 product. Imagine that 50% of buyers found you by your blog and 10% arrives from YouTube.
You get 1,000 buyers, earning $50,000 thanks to your blog and $10,000 by YouTube. However, you spent $20,000 on the content on your blog and $12,000 for your videos. This means videos cost more than they earned. Now you know that you can (and should!) invest more in your blog and have to stop investing in YouTube.
Notice that the time frame you take into account is very important for this calculation. Usually, content is unprofitable in the short term and becomes very profitable in the long term. My suggestion is to calculate a 3-month ROI, a 6-month ROI, and a 12-month ROI. The first and second ROI will help for short-term decisions, while the last one is more accurate and is crucial for long-term planning.”
3. Keep it simple with numbers
This is a good choice for industries with specific customer acquisition costs, such as the health industry.
“Cost per lead and cost per acquisition are the two most important metrics. As long as our CPA is less than the cost of the first sale, then the marketing strategy should work.
Success is if CPA is less than the actual cost of the service sold so that it does not dig into profits. The ultimate goal is always to re-sell to the client,” says Garett Ewers from Rejuv Medical.
Bonus: Wildcard approach
“There’s no formula for measuring engagement in my opinion, other than the reactions people have to your content and the quality of the interactions you have as a result,” claims Oliver Roddy, business development manager at Catalyst.
Catalyst’s blog – keeping things friendly and practical.
“We had a client call up recently and directly mention one of our pieces as a joke; we have had prospects tell us that they took the meeting because they loved our content so much and have had new clients tell us our content played a pivotal role in their decision-making process. We also get quite a lot of downloads directly from blog posts.
The metric or formula I suppose therefore is really simple: is your content having a positive effect on your overall goals? Ours are to engage more people, capture more leads and close more new customers, so the answer would be yes, which means it is creating a very positive ROI.”
Conclusion
Ultimately, some marketers we talked to insist on the big-picture approach to measuring content marketing ROI, without favoring any of the metrics. And there is some truth to that – after all, content marketing is a holistic strategy that is equally useful in terms of generating traffic, leads, engagement, and sales.
“Growing a business is tough and ultimately if your content isn’t connecting all of these dots throughout the buyer’s journey then each individual metric really doesn’t matter. The formula/strategy must be focused on understanding your ideal customers first and using content throughout the entire process to accomplish the goals at hand,” advises Ryan Caracciolo from Striventa.
And how do you calculate content marketing ROI? If you have questions, tips, and ideas you’d like to share with us, leave a comment or click on this survey and share your experience with us!