A common challenge in the life of a marketing professional is proving the value of their work to their superiors and to the market.
In digital marketing, this mission has become much easier.
After all, it is possible to measure almost all the results of a digital strategy and there is no shortage of tools to analyze the most important metrics.
However, there are strategies that can make this analysis a little more difficult. For example: how is the ROI of content marketing calculated ?
How do you know if a content-based method, which indirectly contributes to sales, is profitable for the company?
To answer these questions, we prepared this article with everything you need to know about applying ROI in content marketing. Join us!
Why calculate the ROI of content marketing?
Before we talk about the reasons for applying south africa telegram data this formula, let’s understand what content marketing ROI is actually all about.
ROI, an acronym for Return On Investment, measures the profit or loss of each strategy used by a company in a given period.
The goal of this indicator is to understand which types of investments are worthwhile and which ones need to be optimized or discontinued.
In addition, this metric helps managers make informed decisions .
But here a problem arises:
When deciding to measure the ROI of a company’s digital marketing, the result obtained can be quite ambiguous.
With so many strategies and methods available, how can a manager identify what brings better or worse results?
For this reason, the ROI calculation must be a little more detailed. In this case, it is possible to measure the return on investment of email marketing, social media, SEO and/or inbound marketing .
When it comes to content marketing, the importance of measuring its ROI lies in evaluating the impact that the strategy has on the company’s revenue.
Although sales generation is not the main focus of this method, it needs to generate some financial return. It cannot be just another cost in digital marketing .
More objectively, ROI can show whether your blog is successful, whether leads generated through this channel are converting into customers, and whether content marketing is more cost-effective than other types of marketing .
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How to set goals to calculate content marketing ROI?
An essential step in making this calculation we’re still a few months away from the winter holidays is to define your company’s content marketing objectives.
Depending on your purpose, this element may be too complex to be used in a mathematical operation.
Remember that a KPI must be simple to understand and easy to measure, since any marketing professional needs to track this data without facing objections.
Example:
Going back to the objectives, imagine that your company wants to generate 10 thousand leads in a year of content marketing strategy.
Since you need to know how much revenue this action will generate, you need to assign a financial value to your goal.
For example, for every 25 leads generated on your blog, one becomes a customer. Furthermore, assuming that each customer generated by this channel generates an average revenue of $100.
So, if we divide the average revenue of a customer by the number of leads sufficient to obtain that sale, then we have the estimated value of $4 per lead.
In this way, we manage to financially quantify your main objective .
This will make it easier to calculate your ROI, as you will know how much each lead returns to your company on average.
The ROI calculation changes depending on the defined goal
This same concept holds true jiangxi mobile phone number list for other goals and metrics.
For example, if you want to achieve a certain goal, such as improving organic traffic or blog engagement , you will need to know the financial value each customer brings, the number of views, organic visits, shares, and other indicators.
Given the variety of content marketing objectives, there is no way to standardize the calculation of ROI .
The general formula — which we will see later — may be the same, but the way in which the return on investment is calculated will depend greatly on the objective that your company wants to achieve.
After all, each goal has an indicator that specifically contributes to the company’s revenue.
What are metrics and how to measure them?
The ROI formula is basically composed of the cost of the investment and the return it generates. These two variables, in turn, carry with them a series of metrics that help in the composition of the calculation.
To make a more efficient analysis, let’s understand the costs and revenues involved in each of these variables:
Investment Metrics (Cost)
First, let’s look at the costs that make up the investment in a content marketing strategy .
By default, we should consider the inverted values in the following areas:
- blog management platform (if not free);
- blog hosting service ;
- content production (cost of outsourcing or hourly salary of responsible officials);
- content promotion and distribution channels (social networks, e-mail marketing, landing pages );
- paid advertising channels (such as Facebook Ads and Google Adwords );
- monitoring and analysis tools;
- image banks;
- equipment for recording videos and audios (if you use these formats in the strategy).
With the numbers for each of these investments in hand, add them up taking into account a specific analysis period (monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or annually).
Return on investment (revenue) metrics
In terms of revenue, metrics vary greatly depending on the objectives of your strategy. However, we can highlight the main ones:
- views or page views;
- unique visitors;
- organic traffic;
- number of leads;
- conversion rate into leads (total leads generated/total visitors*100);
- sales amount;
- number of customers;
- conversion rate into customers (total customers/total leads*100);
- average revenue per customer/lead/unique visitor/view.
Most of these metrics can be analyzed by Google Analytics or any other Web Analytics tool.
Finally, always remember to assign a financial value to each of these indicators.