Content marketing has the power to boost top KPIs and raise your ROI. Take advantage of this powerful strategy with this simple guide.
Content marketing has arguably become king for engagement. Regular cadence has proven to be successful for achieving returns and driving conversions. Social platforms and blog posts are some of the main content marketing tools, both of which we’ll cover later in this article.
When considering the creation of a content marketing strategy, a good place to start is with what you’re looking to get from your investment in content marketing. Everyone’s objective is different. What is yours?
Establishing what ROI means to you will guide the rest of this concept. Without it, you could be wasting time and valuable resources.
Measuring ROI
When it comes to measuring ROI, it’s important to understand all components of your content efforts that were executed. Content marketing costs can often be less obvious than, say, paid advertising, but you still need to consider other factors, such as time. The opportunity costs of content marketing should be evaluated to be sure that it’s the right move, and so you can get a better idea of a realistic ROI.
Prioritize
Put together which KPIs you feel are most relevant to your marketing strategy and your content efforts. Not all business KPIs will have a good fit in measuring content marketing, so organizing the ones do will provide a better focus so you can be sure you have relevant results.
Calculating ROI
Calculating ROI is pretty standard. What varies is how it’s applied and the value it indicates. Generally speaking, the equation for ROI is:
Based on your situation, it may be more effective to apply ROI in steps or phases than a single analysis. It may also be beneficial to look into Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). If you often have a small handful of clients for an extended period of time, CLV can evaluate the total return gained from said client, to which you can compare your content marketing efforts.
Example Breakdown
Lets look at an example:
Company X provides software development services and has decided to implement a blog to try to get their name out there. They have internal writers that put the blog content together, an editor that reviews the blog and a social media intern that publishes and promotes the content on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Right out of the gate, you can see that there’s no explicit dollar value attached to anything in the case. If there was, then calculating would be easy using the simple equation. However, in most cases, calculating can be a bit clouded and important costs go under the radar.
The Costs
- Internal team. The writer, editor and intern are all paid accordingly. Let’s just say the writer is paid $100/ hour, the editor $80/ hour and the intern $30/ hour for simplicity sake. The blog post took 4 hours for researching, compiling and drafting, an hour for editing and revision and another hour for publishing and turning the post into bit size pieces for social media.
So, $100 x 4 + $80 x 1 + $30 x 1 = $510/ post
Say your team is putting out 8 blog posts a month (2/ week), that adds up to $48,960/ year, and that’s assuming the wages and times we’ve established.
2. Advertising. Since our industry is quite competitive and our clients usually run about $100,000 per project, we’ll also put $15000 into promoting our socials and Google Ads for the year.
Total Cost
So with all of that figured out, for the posts we now have $48,960 in labour costs and an additional $15,000 for the promotion, totalling about $63,960 in blogging costs.
The Return
For the other half of our calculation, let’s estimate that through our blog we get 30 inquires, 20 of which are fairly qualified leads, 10 of which close, each for a $75,000 project. The first thing to figure out is how this lead was generated, a simple discovery session could solve this or some metric analysis as well.
The Final Calculation
To finish it off, we closed 10 – $75,000 deals, so:
$75,000 x 10 = $750,000 in revenue
With $63,960 in blogging costs, our ROI stands at:
(($750,000 – $63,960) / $63,960) x 100 = 1072.61%
While this is just an example, this is the general approach you should take to calculating ROI.
Many organizations fail to account for total costs and therefore can’t accurately calculate returns. Be honest and include all the costs – you need transparent results, not biased ones.
Benchmarks
Along with other KPIs, ROI changes depending on the industry in question. It’s recommended you take some time to industry averages, so that you have a general idea of where you should sit.
To get you started, here are some benchmarks to look at:
Benefits of Content Marketing
You’ve probably heard over and over how publishing content will help grow your content and improve things like SEO. Plenty of marketers and research backs the importance of content marketing and how effective it can actually be. For example:
- Content marketing generates 3x more leads than outbound and is 62 cents cheaper per lead
- Populating websites can lead to 434% more search engine-indexed pages than other business sites that don’t publish content.
While difficult to calculate, content marketing can also help with brand value, engagement and lead generation. Social and referral traffic is also a big plus. Keeping active with content will likely catch people’s attention, and possibly pass the message on to their social group.
Improving Your ROI
So how do you improve your ROI using content marketing? There is no concrete answer, but there are strategies that will surely get you a better setup to capitalize on returns.
Targeting
With any form of content, it’s important to understand who it’s for. Spamming generic content will lack direction and get lost in the millions of similar posts. Pick a target audience, understand their needs and wants and target your content so it is specialized, but still digestible for those not well-versed in that subject.
Bread & Butter Content
Social platforms and blogging are the go-to for content marketing, and for good reason. They are often cost and time efficient, with a good possibility of seeing return.
- Small businesses with blogs get 126% more lead growth than small businesses without.
Starting a blog can greatly help get more eyes on your business and spread the word. It also helps indirectly with SEO among other things, since keywords can be used to rank higher.
Picking Topics
When it comes to the actual content to post, there are a handful of go-to topics that we’ve found to be effective.
- Guides
- How-To’s
- Tips
- Update existing content
Guides generally appeal to those with a lower understanding of the content. Therefore an informative piece provides a good foundation for those looking to get a short, compact summary. How-To’s can get a bit more involved, showing viewers a step-by-step process for getting something done. Tips add on to an existing knowledge base by giving fairly short, succinct points on the subject area. Updating existing content will help move outdated material out the way to keep things consistently relevant. Otherwise, posts from as little as 6 months old can be completely outdated.
Putting It Together
Improving ROI can often be a case of experimentation. Identifying what works and what doesn’t will take time. In many cases, things that you thought would work well don’t work at all and vice versa. Be transparent and don’t be afraid to cut off what doesn’t work. Take the time to evaluate performance and consider all the alternatives to get the best results.
If you’re ready to grow your numbers and bring your ROI to a whole new level, feel free to open up the conversation so we can help you see results and win more business.
Dan Kosir
Managing Director, Slanted Frame. Writes about B2B growth systems, AI in marketing, and content marketing.