The entire process of building a brand, marketing it on social media and helping it grow involves a great investment of finances, resources and time. What happens when your content doesn’t incur the desired results? Alarming, isn’t it?
While there are several factors that contribute to achieving the desired ROI (Return on investment), the base is the content that you market. Content here is a lot more than merely words written beneath the social media posts that are posted on the pages. Whatever you communicate as a brand and the way it is portrayed in front of the target audience, is content.
Content Marketing is an extremely effective and cost-effective marketing strategy that involves creating and pushing the content such that it reaches the right audience and drives the desired result. This desired result is referred to as ROI, i.e. the revenue you gain from content marketing as compared to what you spend on it.
Knowing the ROI percentage helps you track the effectiveness of your content as well as helps you create and invest better for ideal results.
Now that you know the importance of ROI, here are the 4 steps that you must abide by to measure the ROI of the content marketed by you:
1) Your Investment For Creating The Content
The primary investment for content marketing is done on content creation. It involves paying the in-house team of content creators or an outsourced agency and for the creative visuals (image or video) that goes up with the written content. Calculating these costs tells you the actual price to create your content, which can help in calculating your content marketing ROI.
2) The Investment On Marketing The Content
Often good content alone cannot drive enough traffic to your page. Hence you resort to paid promotions and advertisements to drive traffic and for this, there are several paid tools and software to organize and ease this task for you.
The total costs in creating your content and pushing it in the market is the ‘investment’ that will help you calculate your ROI.
3) Evaluating The Revenue Generated By Your Content
Once your content reaches its desired audience, it begins to generate revenues for you. The sales are generated when your audience clicks on your ‘Call To Action’ to reach a page or buy your product. The number of clicks majorly determines the revenues which in return helps to calculate your ROI.
4) Calculating The ROI
Now that you know how much you have invested in your content and how much sales are generated, you can put in all the numbers and calculate the percentage of the return of investment with the following formula:
Content Marketing ROI = {(Return – Investment) / Investment} x 100
To elaborate, if your total investment in your content is $200 and you have collected a revenue of $800, then your ROI comes to-
{($800-$200)/$200} X 100 = 300%
Besides the above method, there are certainly other metrics that help you calculate the ROI for your content-
- Lead Quality– This determines how well your content is reaching your target audience and whether they or more people from a different spectrum are showing interest and purchasing your product.
- Website Traffic– The increase in traffic to your website caused by the content also indicates a positive response.
- Engagement– Your audience reacting to your ‘Call To Action’ and reaching the end result is your desired engagement. If your CTA says- “Visit in the link to read more” your audience is expected to click on the link and read the entire blog/article as a sign of successful engagement.
- Social Media Engagement– This indicates the activeness of your audience on your social media page with their likes, comments, and shares. This could be on special engagement content or normal posts.
Now that you know the importance of calculating ROI and the steps to do so, we hope it helps you to make your Content Marketing game stronger. Besides that, you can even track the above-mentioned metrics to judge how your content is doing and how you can improve for better results.
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