Measure This Year’s Success
Content marketing has become an increasingly vital part of a company’s marketing strategy. In this digital age, consumers are constantly bombarded with images, videos, blogs, and ads from their favorite companies.
If a company wants to stay on its consumers minds, the best way is to create new content for them to see at all hours of the day. But it can’t be any type of content. It has to be something that will intrigue the consumer, and that type of intriguing content is different for each target audience. The only way to know what will appeal to your company’s consumers (after narrowing down your target audience’s interests) is trial and error. To measure the profitability of each marketing campaign, you must be able to evaluate the success of each campaign using metrics like ROI, KPI, and CRO. Here’s a breakdown of what all the acronyms mean.
ROI or Return on Investment is the most common way to measure success based on work the company has done. To calculate your company’s ROI is to divide net profit by total assets. So, if your company’s net profit is $100,000 and the total assets are $400,000, the ROI would be .25 or 25 percent. You can determine the success of your business using the ROI equation in several different ways. It can be used to measure the effectiveness of your pricing policies, inventory investment, capital equipment, and even content marketing efforts; although measuring the effectiveness of an online campaign can be harder than measuring the other more concrete numbers. (1)
There are four types of metrics used to measure the profitability of content marketing: consumption, lead-generation, sales, and sharing metrics.
Consumption Metrics
If your company isn’t using Google Analytics, then start. Google Analytics allows your company to track consumption metrics, which include visitor traffic, the paths they take while navigating your website and how they interact with the content on each page.
To receive the best possible consumption metrics, your company needs to focus on its Key Performance Indicators (KPI). A KPI is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. (2) KPI’s are different for each company based on its goals. A KPI for a social service organization could be the number of clients assisted during the year, but for a school it could be the percentage of students that graduate each year.(3)
Lead-Generation Metrics
Have you ever filled out a form on a website? If you answered yes, then you have been a percentage of that company’s lead-generation metrics. Lead-capture forms allow companies to gain information and initiate a sale with potentially interested customers.
Lead-generation metrics also allow your company to track the content that initially brought customers to your website. A visitor could initially find a blog, picture, or video you created and fill out a lead form after clicking around your website.(3)
Sharing Metrics
Social media sites are great for sharing content and generating traffic, but it can be harder to measure the metrics of a “Like” on Facebook or “Favorite” on Twitter. These social interactions are definitely important, especially in a content heavy business industry, but when it comes to content marketing ROI, it’s harder to assign a dollar value than measuring the consumption or lead-generation metrics.
The level of importance you place on the sharing metrics depends on your company’s KPIs. If a key performance indicator your company has chosen focuses on learning how consumers share your content then you will obviously place a high priority on sharing metrics. However, if your KPIs do not relate to social media sites, don’t waste time trying to calculate the metrics.(3)
Sales Metrics
The most concrete way to measure the success of a company’s content marketing is by how much money a campaign brings in. Sales metrics are the easiest aspect of the ROI equation to understand and calculate.
Review the sales, marketing, customer service and technical support interactions your company has with current and future clients in the customer relationship management (CRM) system. Sales metrics are an excellent tool for proving whether your content marketing is turning prospects into paying customers. Make sure your CRM system is capable of tracking a visitor from first click on the website to the final sale. If it doesn’t, then fix it. That information is imperative to find out what content is best at bringing in the most paying customers. For example, is it your videos, weekly blog posts, or customer case studies that are most intriguing? Once you find out, your content marketing team can focus on producing more of that type of content. (3)
Don’t Stress
Having trouble measuring everything? The most important thing to focus on is web traffic and leads. If your content is creating more traffic, leads and revenue, then all of the other metrics are secondary.
Content marketing has become an increasingly powerful aspect of a successful marketing strategy. But, it is important to know how to measure the success of the content (in terms of ROI) to ensure the content your company is creating is attracting the highest possible amount of new customers, because customers = CASH!
Article 1: Return on Investment (ROI)
Article 2: Key Performance Indicators
Article 3: Prove Your Commitment to Achieving Content Marketing ROI
By Brenna Love