When traveling to a new place, you check the distance. On the way, you keep reviewing the distance still to cross to gauge how many hours of travel are left. This measure also lets you know if you are on the right track and headed in the right direction. This process is valid for content marketing as well. Let us explore what are the ideas to improve your content marketing ROI.

If you don’t measure your content efforts, you might not gain the success you have promised yourself. Suppose you wanted to convert your potential leads into customers through content. However, if you fail to add a goal and metric, you will never know if you managed to gain the conversions.

While there are several aspects to measure your content marketing performance, ROI helps you know whether or not you are relevant. It is essential to note that content marketing ROI is slightly different from the traditional ways of defining ROI. First, the performance and cost analysis works differently in content marketing ROI. Second, unlike sales, the conversion is not direct or immediate. It is a relative factor.

Forty-six percent of the B2B companies plan on increasing their content marketing spend in the next 12 months. This showcases the potential of content marketing and how it can improve acquisition. A massive 50% of the content created focuses on awareness and interest.

Let us understand the ROI of content marketing and the benefits of content marketing.

Content Marketing ROI: What is it and how to calculate it?

Content marketing ROI is the percentage of revenue you have gained from your content efforts compared to the spend. So, if you have generated more income against your cost, your content marketing ROI will be profitable.

There is a simple formula for calculating content marketing ROI.

ROI from Content Marketing = (Return – Investment/Investment) * 100

1.  To calculate an average overall return from all your content marketing efforts, it is important to start calculating individually.

2.  For instance, let’s say you want to know what the returns are for all the content marketing activities. You have been doing podcasts, webinars, blogs, and some social media activity.

3.  Take each activity individually. In the case of podcasts, imagine you have a podcast that talks about your company and, in the end, promotes gated content that you can download by providing an email address. Let’s calculate the returns here.

4.  First, calculate the total spend.

a. This includes the total time taken by the host of the podcast to prepare.

b. It also includes the host’s pay per hour.

c. If they are using your space to do the podcast, your overhead cost will also be considered.

d. After determining the host’s cost, you will have to add your cost, as well. You are the producer of this podcast; the content marketer will market the podcast. You will spend some time and effort editing and cleaning up the podcast.

e. Lastly, you will conduct social media promotions for the same. All in all, you will need to consider the editor, the host, the content marketer, the social media person, and your own fees when defining the cost.

f. You are also offering gated content at the end of the podcast, it is important to keep an account of the cost that goes into preparing the same.

5. We have calculated the cost of actually producing one podcast and the gated content that goes with it. Let’s check the returns you will get with this investment, based on the following.

a. The number of people who downloaded the gated content.

b. The subscribers to the podcast.

c. The sales you achieve from this podcast.

d. The subscribers to your email newsletter.

6. At the end of the day, your actual ROI will comprise the total number of customers you get from this podcast and the amount they spend on the product or service.

7. Here, the investment will be the actual cost of producing the ebook and podcast, while the return would be the money you get from the people who have converted into customers.

Content Marketing ROI: B2B vs. B2C

You must understand that the ROI calculation for B2B will be completely different from the B2C companies.

It can be pretty tricky to calculate the returns for B2C companies. Your investment goes in the same way as the B2B companies.

Primarily, the issue is that you need to identify how many people listen to the podcast or see the content material you designed before hopping onto a journey with you. However, if you have a valid data point, it is easier to work with it. In the case of B2C, getting that data can be quite a task.

Define the KPIs and measure returns

Every business needs a scoring method to identify how the content works and what aspects need to be changed.

Start by fine-tuning the KPIs for the content.

1. The first thing to consider is the customer’s journey. It is essential to identify how they move from awareness to decision to purchase. Doing so will improve the sales cycle and generate more revenue. It will also help you create content that truly matters.
2. Social media awareness can help build the brand and improve content marketing.
3. At this point, you will need to select the top metrics that truly matter. For instance, some metrics will help you discover how well the blog is working. Other metrics will help with generating more leads and tracking the time spent on the page.

It is essential to define the metrics and identify how to introduce them into your content for better impact.

Top ideas to improve your Content Marketing ROI

The following are the top suggestions to improve content marketing ROI.

1. Identify the buyer persona

Among the ideas to improve content marketing ROI, foremost, every business should consider the ideal buyer. Unless you know what makes a potential customer try a product or the issue they face, you cannot expect conversions. To maximize ROI, understand who your buyer is, why they need a product or service like yours, and educate them. You should target your content towards this buyer to make it more relevant and impactful.

2. Visualise consumer journey

How do you imagine your customer’s journey on your website? What parts of the website are more relevant to them? Segment your users from the start, and visualize their journey on your website. Who is more likely to visit the home page? Who will see the other pages? Posing such questions will help you write a more relevant and impressive copy, which will gather more conversions.

3. Define an apt strategy

No content can perform or achieve specific goals if you don’t have a defining strategy. Start with working on the content marketing strategy. In the ideal strategy, you know your content marketing goals and aim to maximize the outcome.

What is the best channel to connect with your customers? What does brand value mean to them? Are they new customers or repeat ones? What is the most relevant content piece to them? How will they move from awareness to the decision-making stage? Once these details are clear, your content strategy becomes definable.

4. Use the expertise

It is impossible to start creating content from scratch. However, you might want to dip into the team’s expertise to get some interesting topics and content assets, which will enable you to build your brand online.

You can start building proven content assets and resources that will boost your business. Interview team members, learn what kind of knowledge resource you can build, and create content pieces around them. It will be an excellent resource for your business.

5. Define the metrics

It is helpful to define the metrics early on. When you build your content strategy, establish the goals and induce the metrics to help you achieve what you want.

It is essential to list out all the metrics in advance to boost your marketing efforts. For instance, as we discussed initially, it is essential to measure the content cost and usage. It would help if you accounted for all the content assets.

For instance, if you paid for a content piece and didn’t use it, it increased overhead. Similarly, if something is working well, you need to identify the engagement and action insights.

You must work around various metrics such as content marketing cost per month, content marketing pricing, and the overall success rate to understand the growth of a campaign.

6. Repurpose the content

You need to keep reusing the same content performing well on the sites. Repurpose the content into a blog; if it is a blog, use it as social media content. An ebook can become an illustration and so on. You will have to keep reworking the range to meet the desired goals.

You need not create new content every time; if you have an excellent range handy, keep using it differently.

It is equally important to measure the influencer marketing content’s worth. You also need to perform an analysis of the in-house vs outsourced content performance metrics. It will help you identify the overall growth and returns of the content against the costs you have incurred.

Conclusion

Content marketing is an essential part of your B2B marketing strategy. Effective monitoring and impactful strategies can help scale your business effectively.

To ensure you create an impact, you should continuously measure the returns and reiterate the strategies to meet the desired outcomes. It is essential to discard the content that is not used and introduce content strategy and tactics that build assets.

Keep listening to conversations, use the impactful content in different formats, and check for usability and performance. Eventually, your content will derive the returns you desire.

Take a look at our Digital Growth System designed to help you analyze the funnel for content marketing, define the ROI accordingly, and see your content marketing dreams come true.