Unlike Digital Marketing, content marketing may not be easy to track direct sales, and thus, many businesses mistake content marketing strategy to generate low ROI. According to Hubspot, businesses that use content marketing strategy are likely to gain 13 times more ROI.
How do you report on content marketing ROI?
Remember that content marketing strategy derives long-term results and gradually increases over time. There is no quick short rule for it. Think of content marketing as the micro-conversion pathways that take you to the end goal. Here are a few things where you will see an instant growth on:
Increased number of visitors
If the content is useful, informational, and intriguing to the audience, they will want more of it and are likely to share further. You can track the impressions on Google Search Console. You can also analyse the number of page views and new visitors on Google Analytics. If the number of new visitors is increasing, your content strategy is working well. This may not result in direct ROI, but it increases your brand visibility, increases engagement which results in higher page ranking and eventually sales!
Increase Database
If you can get new visitors on your site with your content marketing strategy, you can use other channels to convert them into leads. For instance, you can encourage email sign-ups via your content and nudge them to convert whenever they are ready!
The impact of content marketing
The impact of content marketing may be difficult to measure. It can be best explained through an example. In the case of an event venue space renting business, their ROI would be a higher number of bookings.
Over the last year, they observed 2,500 new users that came onto their site via content marketing. Out of them, 25 users (1%) made the bookings. So, if one booking drives revenue of $1,500, 25 bookings generated an ROI of $37,500. After looking at Search Console, the organic CTR (click-through-rate) for these content pieces was 1.3% from over 192,000 impressions.
If you identify this as dissatisfying, the proposed CTA-focused solution aims to increase the booking rate at 2%, meaning the content will drive an additional $37,500 with 25 more bookings.
If you identify that the current content has poor optimised data, aim to boost the CTR by 2%, driving 3,840 visits instead of 2,500 and thus generating $19,500 with 38 leads.
If your content does not target valuable terms, create new, useful content that ranks your page higher, get greater CTR, and in turn, greater revenue. If you want to boost your business, content marketing generates higher ROI.
