Companies use this marketing initiative to create a personality and thought leadership, as well as provide an opportunity to engage with consumers. Creating effective content improves SEO, thus enabling potential customers to find businesses more easily via online search.
However, determining the ROI on content marketing is not straightforward, but there are ways to measure it.
Consumption metrics– This metric measures how many people are consuming your content and which channels they are using to consume it. It also measures how frequent and in-depth their consumption is.
You can calculate the consumption metric by counting total and unique visits, downloads, time spent on site, cost per visitor, and bounce rate.
Lead generation metrics- This metric measures effectiveness of a content piece by requiring a name or email address before viewing the content.
Sharing metrics- This metric measures 1) what content is being shared and 2) by who. An increasing number of shares implies that your content is becoming more effective.
It is also important to analyze who is actually sharing your content. Social influencers spread the word across a larger audience, therefore making them a more desirable target.
Sales metrics- This is the most straightforward way of measuring ROI for content marketing efforts. There are CRM systems to track actual sales close rates. It is key that the CRM system can follow a customer’s path from awareness to the actual sale. With this type of system, you can determine which types of content really drive sales.
Content marketing is vital to a business’s marketing campaign. By using these metrics effectively and efficiently, businesses will be able to figure out which content works and which doesn’t. It also helps companies determine how to best create and utilize content marketing.