How To Measure Content Marketing ROI In Digital Marketing
The value of content marketing can be largely three-fold:
#1 Increased brand awareness
When you have content to share with your audience, you are going to increase the brand awareness of your brand. This will allow more people to know about your brand. With it, more potential customers will know about your business by seeing and interacting with your content.
#2 Building brand conviction
Content marketing will also allow more people to know more about your brand. It will increase brand conviction of your brand. With content marketing, you will increase the brand conviction of your brand. You can increase your credibility and authority in specific topics and drive expert positioning.
#3 Conversions and advocacy
Content marketing can also help in increasing conversion. With it, you are able to create and develop contents that can lead to conversions. When the messages are sent out after you might have done your research, you will know what the target audience wants to hear and craft messages that turn your prospects to customers.
When assessing your return on investment for your content marketing efforts the three major components to assess are:
- Investment in content creation: time, resource and fiscal cost to the business to produce the content
- Performance of the content: can you track content back to impact on sales?
- Long-tail benefits: did your content increase your search ranking, position your business as a thought leader, or grow an audience of loyal followers?
While the long tail benefits may not be immediately obvious or impactful on your bottom line, don’t discount the value of these overall as part of a holistic marketing effort.
The following are some of the implications to consider when content marketing:
#1 Content ownership
How much of your content did you create in-house? Did you license any images/music and how long is that license for? Do you need to credit individuals in the content for fair usage rights?
#2 Internal ability
How much resource or skills are available for creating your content within your business? Will this support your content marketing goals? This will help to access the overall capability of your resources and decide whether you might need to outsource some of the critical skills needed to succeed.
#3 External support
Do you need to consider working with external videographers, designers, copywriters or marketing agencies to support your content efforts? This will also allow you to determine areas where you need to bring in agencies to assist you in achieving your marketing objectives.
#4 Legalities
is your content compliant with your industry regulatory bodies? Be aware that content online is subject to the same laws as all publishing e.g. defamation so be sure your content doesn’t breach local laws.
Assess the utility of the content provided by reviewing:
- Downloads/Saves: how many customers found the content so valuable they saved it to their device?
- Customer Feedback: take into account any comments both positive and negative to improve your content from your audiences online.
- Plays/Clicks/Views: for video content, Facebook/Instagram counts 3 sec, YouTube counts 30 sec as a video view. Views shouldn’t be a true reflection on the success of a video, however, % of video watched to finish and retention rates are the key assessment of engagement.
It is so important to continue to aligning your content metrics to your wider business goals.
Here you can see the metrics that belong to particular stages of the buyer’s journey.
In the Awareness phase some of the most important metrics to watch are reach
Reach: how many people you have reached with your content?
Impressions: how many times you have reached them?
Frequency: the average overall times you have reached your audience.
Research carried out by MindShare in the UK, revealed that the optimum frequency was between four and eight times, which means to really impact customers and change behaviour, you need an individual to see your content at least four times. Various tools (like Facebook) will allow you to set the frequency based on your overall business goals so be sure to take advantage of this setting where possible.
In the Consideration phase, the metrics you need to measure are clicks, engagement and sentiment. Here, you are trying to nurture a customer through the funnel, so this phase is dedicated to nurturing on-going conversation, providing engagement and adding value along the way.
In the Sales phase, the focus will be on what content is driving people to the checkout, or not as may be the case. At this phase, you need to measure things like clicks to basket, abandoned baskets and overall conversions.
Finally, in the Loyalty or Retention phase, the types of metrics we will look at are repeat purchases, community growth and customer reviews. These metrics will help us to identify brand advocates and the types of content that will help us to drive more repeat purchases and increase customer loyalty.
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