How much is content worth to your business? Is there an easy way to determine ROI on a content marketing investment?
Simple answer is no, you cant put a perfect ROI on content unless your goal is conversions and nothing else. If that’s the case, the math is probably easy for you. Congrats, you don’t really need to read on.
But if not, stick around for some ideas.
Determining content marketing ROI
It is notoriously difficult to measure the ROI on content marketing because content does more than convert customers. It often plays a supporting role in pushing someone to a final decision (i.e. via customer testimonials or case studies) and it also builds awareness.
Content also provides a ton of “implicit value” that generates brand credibility.
For example, what is the value of an article in a credible mainstream publishing outlet that quotes and links to your website blog? Hard to put a dollar figure on it, but you definitely want that, right?
Even if you think you can pin down the dollar value of a piece of content, your attribution may not always be 100% precise or you could have channel cannibalization. If you run SEM campaigns on pages where you rank highly in organic search, you’re likely double hitting customers.
Maybe you think you're getting people from SEO because they enter your website via a branded search query. But are you running any print, TV, radio, or direct mail ads? Those customers may be Googling your brand after ad exposure.
After they’ve already been exposed to your business through an advertisement, a great piece of content can push a customer over the top. But does the reverse of that ever happen (content –> ad –> conversion)? Probably not.
Content as connector of all marketing
The moral of the story? Don’t treat content the same as other marketing investments when it comes to determining ROI.
It simply doesn’t work the same way. Content is the ultimate connector of all your brand and marketing channels. It helps each one work better together. It also diversifies you away from paid marketing channels.
Sometimes you have to cut back marketing spend. Or, perhaps, you have downtime between campaigns. With content marketing continuing to do work for you even when you aren’t spending, this can lessen the impact of a period of slow paid lead gen.
Content does A LOT of other things, too.
Good content educates customers about your products and services, helps you rank in search engines, generates PR opportunities, gets the attention of users on social, populates your email campaigns with stuff people actually want to read, makes the world think of you as a legit brand that cares. And so on.
Choosing the right content marketing KRs
But this doesn’t mean you can’t create a formula for measuring content value. You can! Start by building a framework. What are the different areas where content helps your business? Traffic, domain authority, lead gen, PR, etc.?
When measuring traffic, figure out how much the organic traffic your content generates is worth monetarily.
One way to do this is by earned media measurement. You can get this from an SEO or PR tool, which will look at how much you’d pay to get the same amount of traffic from paid advertising.
Another great metric for measuring content value is domain authority. Domain authority in some ways mirrors organic traffic but it also is a proxy for your brand's credibility from an SEO perspective. Get a good DA from sites like Moz, Ahrefs, or Majestic.
Domain authority, which is distributed to individual pages on your site, is a measure of how many relevant backlinks you have linking to your site. Most third parties won't link to you unless you have something worth linking to, so backlinks are another great metric for content.
Leads are an excellent content metric. These should be straightforward to track, and hopefully you know how much a lead is worth to your business. Consider giving content partial credit for multi-attribution or assisted leads (i.e. customer saw ad, then content, then converted).
Finally, think about content from a brand awareness and credibility standpoint. How is content contributing to more people seeing and respecting your brand overall? Does your content make you an industry thought leader?
Possible ways to measure this include PR hits, social followers, and overall organic traffic to your website.
Putting together a content marketing ROI dashboard
Take all your chosen metrics and put them together a central dashboard where you’ll keep them all updated on an ongoing basis. This can be as simple as a Google doc or Excel spreadsheet.
Keep them together and present them in context. Isolating any of them into one report puts you at risk of oversimpifying. It doesn’t paint the full picture.
While you may not have a perfect dollar value on all content efforts, you’ll likely have at least a few reference points. “Our content generates x leads worth x dollars, and the estimated earned media value of our content traffic equals x dollars.” This is the story you want to tell.
The cherry on top is all the extra brand-related (and vanity) metrics that content helps you with like social traffic, engagement, followers, PR hits, etc. Take these plus your dollar numbers and ask how much it's worth to invest to continue growing these numbers?
Measuring and proving content value is probably more art than science. The best way to do it is to take a wide range of metrics into account collectively rather than looking at any single metric as a standalone.
Originally tweeted by Joey Campbell (@jrok78) on March 15, 2021.