DIGITAL INTERACTIVE SERVICES

How to prove the ROI of content marketing?

Content marketing have proven to be one of the most effective marketing strategies. In fact, 78% of the prospective customers prefer to learn about a business through articles and content and 70% of the customers believe that brands providing content want to build a long-term relationship with them. Also, 97% of the B2B marketers believe that using strategic content and videos is instrumental in increasing users’ understanding of the products and services. Therefore, at least 75% of the businesses have a content marketing strategy (either documented or undocumented) to tap into the potential of content. But budgeting for content marketing campaigns can be tricky as it is difficult to measure and prove ROI on content marketing compared with traditional direct advertisement campaigns. So, how do you measure the ROI on content marketing?

Challenges in calculating ROI

The first step is acknowledging that measuring ROI on content marketing is challenging. Only 39% of the businesses consider themselves successful (to at least some degree) in tracking content marketing ROI. You need to take your time to cultivate relationship with prospective customers and know that they may follow your business for a while before finally converting to paying customers. This journey is neither straightforward nor quick; you need to be in the content marketing game for the long term to witness any attribution.

Moreover, many analytics tools and platforms are not best suited for content and may fail to track content-specific conversion categories, such as subscriptions, newsletter sign-ups, form fills, or clickthrough. And since these conversion categories may not directly translate to revenue, calculating content marketing ROI is challenging.

Determining content marketing ROI

You need two things for content marketing ROI calculations: cost of content marketing and gains from content. To calculate your cost of content marketing, you need to consider the cost of content creation — including the salary of employees and content creators as well as the costs associated with content creation (cost of equipment and content licensing) and content distribution costs. These include paid promotions, marking automation, email blasts, etc., as well as fees for content and SEO tools. All these costs are easy to calculate.

However, the challenge is to determine the gains from your content. As a first step, you need to calculate the number of leads generated by the content, conversion rate from leads to new customers, estimated number of new customers, and approximate sales. These values help determine how much value you can expect a new customer to bring in. And, with information about repeat customers, you can evaluate the gains from your content. Once you have these two numbers, it is just a matter of using the following formula for content marketing ROI calculation:

ROI = Gains from content – cost of content marketing/cost of content marketing

Be aware that this value is not static and can change depending on several factors, including evolving market trends, customer sentiment, marketing strategy, brand image, and customer service. These factors influence how customers interact with your brand and how long that will remain with your company, indirectly affecting the gains from content.

Going beyond conversion: Content marketing metrics to track

Unlike traditional or direct marketing campaigns, content marketing goes beyond simple conversion and focuses on building a long-term relationship with potential customers through regular interactions and engagement. Therefore, proving ROI on content marketing also needs to go beyond monetary gains and include metrics that help build relationships with customers. Some of the content marketing metrics that matter include:

• Onsite engagement time
• Lead quality
• Web traffic
• Social media engagement and ROI
• SEO success
• Exposure
• Authority

Each of these metrics help you gauge the success of your content and prove the ROI on content marketing.

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How can Infosys BPM help?

Infosys BPM Content Marketing Operations (CMO) team brings together the best minds in marketing and operations to deliver an experience that can help you adapt to the content marketing trends with business-oriented scalable content production and marketing solutions. Transform your marketing operations to drive better time and cost efficiency, and get the best ROI on your content marketing campaigns with the Infosys BPM CMO team.