How To Prove Content Marketing ROI For Your Business

Content marketing has exploded in the last couple of years. The platforms to create new content, curate existing content, and publish all of it to the right channels have grown and matured. However, in spite of the exponentially higher volume of content that is being churned out by businesses today, the fact remains that the majority of these activities still cannot be directly tied to company bottom lines.

Accountability and revenue attribution are the twin gaping holes in this mega-bucket of content that most businesses are racing to build.

A report by Marketing Score showed that 6 out of the 10 lowest ranked marketing tools from an accountability perspective happened to be key elements of content marketing.

So what gives? Where’s the gap, which once plugged, will show the impact that every content marketing effort has on business metrics? How will you start to more effectively measure content marketing ROI?

Attribute revenue to content marketing

Revenue attribution is the final mile in the process of making content more accountable. With revenue attribution in place, you can clearly see and judge how each content asset performs. You can identify the best performing campaigns from a conversion perspective. You can even single out which sale came from which particular white paper or blog post.

This attribution works for nearly every piece of content you create. Landing pages, emails, video content – whatever your poison, it can be tracked and measured to the last cent with revenue attribution.

Content attribution is an integral part of enterprise CRM platforms like Salesforce. By syncing your CRM platform with your campaigns on web analytics (Google Analytics), email (MailChimp or Aweber), social media management (Hootsuite) or marketing automation tools, you can pinpoint the direct revenue driven by each campaign and each individual piece of content.

Attribution can primarily be of three kinds:

First-touch Attribution: Where 100% of the credit for a closed sale is given to the first content asset the customer interacted with.

Last Touch Attribution: Where 100% of the credit for a closed sale is given to the last content asset the customer interacted with.

Multi-touch Attribution: Where credit for an acquired sale is distributed evenly among all content assets the customer interacted with.

Given a choice, I usually recommend a multi-touch attribution model, as no piece of content is shortchanged and the impact of each one comes out clearly. Instead of the equal credit for each asset as described in the image above, I would in fact place custom weights for each content asset. This process allows you to tweak the amount of importance you place on each content asset from a lead acquisition perspective.

Further reading: 12 Steps to Setting up Your Marketing Attribution in Marketo

Let data dictate the content you create

So you’ve set up your content tracking systems. You know what conversion goals your content needs to hit. You know which channels to prioritize and so on. The challenge now is to develop content that meets these parameters and delivers on the lofty goals you’ve set for it.

Create content that people enjoy. Content that they come back to. Content that they seek out and share with others. Easier said than done.

One way of doing this is by digging into your analytics tool and checking the number of visits to each piece of content, time spent per piece, social shares and so on. Keep a track of the topics that set the conversation going among your audience. Once you know what topics interest them, you can go ahead and create more content along similar lines.

Many marketers would be happy with just measuring and showcasing the number of subscribers they got from their content marketing campaigns. However just measuring vanity metrics like subscriber numbers or shares is missing the ROI point altogether. Need inspiration? Use these two as your primary conversion metrics for judging the efficacy of each content asset:

• Revenue per post
• Revenue per subscriber

This investigation into how your content performs will also equip you with insights about which platforms work best for your business.

Research shows that on an average 5 pieces of content account for 50% of visitor traffic. This means, like in the case of search marketing, content marketing has a significant long tail too. The bulk of your visits and conversions will come from star content assets. It’s your job to identify which ones these are and promote them aggressively.

Optimize your content assets

Each content asset you create is the penultimate location leading up to an inquiry, lead or conversion. Thus, it follows that setting up your content assets to meet your conversion goals is of paramount importance. Even the most brilliant content marketing programs fall flat when the asset itself that assists conversions is not optimized.

Let’s look at an example to illustrate what I mean.

Source

Above you see a Shopify “landing page” that hits nearly all the CRO factors out of the park.

• The core objective of the page is loud and clear with a self-explanatory headline.
• The page focuses on an extremely narrow audience – owners of sites built on Wix.
• The call to action is unmissable in a contrasting color and is placed above the fold. It’s repeated at the bottom of this pretty long landing page, for those people who might have missed it earlier.
• While the audience is narrowly targeted with a feature specific to them, the page is selling the company’s flagship product – an ecommerce website. The relevant benefits are explained clearly and concisely just below the sign up form.
• Clean separators, ample white space and appealing images make the page a pleasure to browse.
• The product trial form is elegant in its simplicity. Who wants to scare away customers with long winded forms, right?
• Testimonials from known celebrities like Daymond John of Shark Tank fame make the product look even more compelling.

All in all, I’d give this landing/lead gen page at least a 9 or 10 from a content marketing perspective.

In closing

If you quiz any marketer about it, they’ll tell you how they wish they could measure the impact of every step they take to promote their business. However, data from a recent survey by CMI and MarketingProfs shows that just 21% of B2B marketers are actually successful in measuring their content marketing success.

It’s time to step away from the majority and join that little group of successful content marketers who know what they’re doing and how they’re getting it right.

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How to Track the ROI of Your Video Marketing

Are you struggling to measure the ROI of your marketing videos?

Looking for tools to help track sales from your videos?

A simple framework and a few tools can reveal if your video campaigns are working for you.

In this article you’ll discover how to track and measure the ROI for your video marketing efforts.

Discover how to track the ROI of your video marketing.

#1: Outline Your Campaign Costs

Take the time to do a complete breakdown of all of the projected costs of your video marketing campaign, including the marketing hours you’ll spend promoting it.

Include a buffer of at least 20% of your projected expenses if you manage the campaign on your own. This buffer will be used for unexpected costs, such as having to reshoot footage or invest more in editing.

Keep in mind that there are video marketing companies that offer all-inclusive video marketing packages, and this can make doing a cost outline much easier and more effective.

#2: Determine the Financial Tipping Point

Think about how many sales you need to make from your video marketing campaignto break even. After you reach your break-even amount, everything else will be pure profit. But first you need to determine that amount.

Once you know how much your video costs to produce, you know where your profit begins. Image: Shutterstock.

You can make this a very simple process. For example, if your video marketing campaign has a budget of $5,000 per month, you should expect to see your monthly sales go up by more than $5,000. If your average sale is $100, you already know that you’ll need to make at least 50 sales to compensate for the cost of the video.

You should track your sales (and other metrics) year–over–year in addition tomonth–by–month to make sure that you’ve adjusted for any seasonal changes.

#3: Track Sales From Your Video Campaign

That’s all easy enough, but now you need to differentiate income from your video campaign from income from other marketing factors.

To distinguish your video campaign from other marketing factors, you can always track people who flow from your video and go on to make a purchase. Do this by using web tools to embed links that are specific to your videos.

Use tools to tell you which sales come from video views. Image: Shutterstock.

Keep in mind that these won’t track all of your sales. There will always be people who see your video and make a purchase later on or in a non-traditional way, so you’ll need to inflate your sales slightly to get a true ROI. The benefit, naturally, is that you’ll know that your video made you at least that amount of money.

Use any one of these tools separately or combine them for more complete video marketing campaign analysis.

Brandwatch makes it easy to quantify your company’s brand awareness. Through this tool, you can identify brand sentiments to see if your campaign is working and whether you‘re building brand awareness in a positive, meaningful way.

Clicky allows you to break down website visitors into marketing demographics and track their activity live. If you’re hosting your own videos (rather than uploading them through a service), this is an ideal way to get a better picture of your audience. Audience demographics can be critical in determining not only your ROI and awareness, but also why a particular strategy may not be working (you’re targeting the wrong demographic entirely, for example).

Wistia offers one of the most advanced video analysis suites available. Not only does this tool provide demographic information, but it can also directly track engagement. You cansee how long visitors watched and what actions they took when they finished watching. This includes any purchases that they may have made. Wistia can integrate into your sales funnel and give you critical information about optimizing your video marketing results. 

YouTube offers analytics such as YouTube Insights that will break down your viewership by demographic and track outgoing clicks. You can embed marketing prompts directly into your YouTube videos so you can funnel your viewers directly into a sales channel.

#4: Improve Your Video Marketing Campaigns

Once you’ve measured your ROI, it’s time to look at ways to improve it. Any marketing campaign needs time to grow and develop, but there are tactics that you can use to improve your metrics. Video marketing campaigns are not special in this respect. They require the same type of management, optimization and analysis as other types of marketing campaigns.

Find out how effective your video marketing is. Image: Shutterstock.

Start by looking back at your analysis and asking yourself a few critical questions:

Is your campaign targeted to your core demographics? Once you have your video demographics in hand, you’ll have a better picture of your interested demographics. At this time, you may want to drill down and start targeting these demographics specifically.

Are any core audience demographics responding negatively to this campaign? For instance, your campaign could be performing negatively among the 20- to 30-year-old male demographic. If this is one area in which you’d like to make sales, it may be advantageous to determine why.

Are viewers abandoning your video marketing? And if so, why? Marketing abandonment will happen. People may not be in the mood for a video or may simply have clicked the wrong link. But if you’re seeing large numbers of abandonment, it’s time to figure out why. You can use a tool such as Wistia to see where people are abandoning your video to draw further conclusions.

Is your video marketing campaign giving customers a solid call to action? If your video audience isn’t converting, it may be that people aren’t certain what steps they should take next. Your video marketing should always be clear on what action viewers should take, even if it’s simply requesting more information or viewing another video.

Are viewers continuing to engage with your brand? There are two types of viewers: those who will see your video once and move on, and those who will establish a relationship with your company and continue to engage. You want to foster engagement. If your viewers are clicking out and never coming back, consider boosting your social media visibility and encouraging them to interact.

Make adjustments to improve your ROI. Image: Shutterstock.

Answer the above questions to get a more concrete idea of what areas you need to improve. Following this, you just need classic A/B or split testing. Test new marketing strategies alongside the old, and figure out which one performs best. Keep refining the best, most effective strategies, and eventually you’ll see a meaningful increase in return.

Conclusion

Measuring ROI doesn’t have to be complicated. If you want a general revenue picture, all you need to do is to isolate how much your video costs and how much your sales went up. If you want a more complete revenue picture, use tracking and analysis tools. Now get measuring!

What do you think? Have you used these tactics to measure ROI for your video marketing campaigns? What techniques work well for your business? 

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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How to Amplify Your Content ROI

These digital days, content has taken on a new meaning. Over the years, it has gained significance and become one of the key drivers of significant growth.

However, while everyone might be talking about it, not everyone knows how to use their content marketing strategy effectively, despite the cliché saying, “content is king” echoing throughout the business industry.

Content plays a vital role in delivering return on investment. It is perhaps one of the most effective marketing strategies businesses can rely on to generate leads. Statistics show that 71 percent of B2B companies use content for lead generation. But not all of them have become successful. Here’s what you can do to make your content effective at delivering ROI.

Use Contextual Content

This is the starting point of any content marketing strategy. Creating content within the correct context is vital. You have to consider what your target audience needs—what they are looking for and the answers they’re seeking. Adjust your content to what your potential customers need, not the other way around. Context simply means customizing your content based on where and how your audience reads it.

This requires a lot of research before you can arrive at a potential contextual topic. Before you can arrive at a topic, you first have to determine you target audience—what they love to read and how they consume your content. Is it through laptops, tablets, or smartphones? By careful considering these factors, you will be able to come up with the right content that will capture the interests of your target market.

Create a Personality

In content marketing, your personality counts—a lot. It is the way you deliver your message to your readers or target consumers in a unique and clear manner.

It is not just about your choice of words or how you construct your sentences. It’s about how you create your name from your content. Imagine removing the logo and the brand from your content. Can your consumers still tell it’s yours?

There are simple ways you can create personality in your content. Try telling a story, write it in a unique tone, and blend humor to make your content reactive and stand out from the rest.

Use Semantic Keywords

Though keywords are not the focus of digital marketing anymore, they do carry weight. Incorporate latent semantic indexing in your content to boost your organic traffic.

But what if too many keywords make your content unappealing? Avoid keyword stuffing to ensure great content. This is when we have to make use of our LSI. LSI keywords are keyword-related terms you can sprinkle all over your content. To search for semantic keywords, try searching for your chosen topic in your browser. The suggested terms are your LSI keywords. If you want to be specific, you can also try Google Adwords keyword planner.

Don’t Settle on Your Blog Alone

When your blog fails, how can you deliver ROI from your content? While setting up a blog can help in generating leads, it is not enough. Try to find other mediums where you can post content and deliver information to your target users.

Reach out to other marketers within your industry, and see if you can exchange valuable content with one another. Not only does it help you in content distribution, but it will also help you in expanding your reach to their audience.

As content marketers, we rarely come up with a unique topic that no one else on the web has written about. Instead, focus on writing a unique piece for each prospective blogging platform and adapt to their writing style.

Create a Variety of Content

How do you create share-worthy content? Creating a text-based piece can only do so much. Content marketing is more than writing blogs. When you think you have exhausted all topics through blogging and content writing, try repurposing and repackaging your articles.

Consider other types of content to help you drive more traffic, generate leads, and boost conversions. Infographics, videos, Powerpoints, and downloadable PDFs are just a few on the many content types you can try.

Nail Your Call-to-Action

How will you encourage your target users to take the next step? Create a call-to-action. As a content marketer, you are not creating content to impress, but most importantly, to persuade. CTAs play a crucial role in urging users to explore your business. The correct use of a CTA can promote lead generation and conversion.

How you include CTAs varies from one piece of content to another. Some content works best when you end it with a question, while others are better ended with an encouragement to post opinions in comments. It’s up to you to decide which CTA works best.

Build a Social Interaction

The importance of social media in digital marketing cannot be stressed enough. When it comes to content, social media is the heart of content distribution. Both content and social media work hand-in-hand to boost marketing efforts. Social media enables content to be distributed in various channels. This expands the reach to a wider audience and encourages customers’ responsiveness.

Make It Measurable

How will you know if your content marketing goals have been reached? For every goal you set, you have to figure out a way to measure your growth. The effectiveness of various types of content cannot be derived by a mere assumption. Data and supporting information are needed to measure how your content contributed in delivering ROI to your business.

To measure content effectiveness, there are several types of content metrics you need to consider, including shares, traffic, and lead generation. You can use Google Analytics or other effective online analytics tools to measure content metrics.

Content marketing plays a vital role in the growth of your business, but that role isn’t just about creating content. As a content marketer, you have to extend your effort to drive leads, deliver ROI, and achieve a job well-done.

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5 Ways To Make Your Social Media Marketing Measurable

Why Social Media Metrics Are Challenged (& How To Fix Them)

Measuring social media results remains the top social media challenge for 60% of marketers according to 2015 Trust Radius research.

Despite this, marketers continue to put budget and resources against social media. Yet the inability to track results hinders 40% of marketers from getting sufficient resources.

When it comes to social media, marketers are like John Wanamaker who famously said, “Half the money I spend on [social media] is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

As a result, marketers are reticent to change their social media strategies for fear their results will fall off.

Top 3 Social Media Marketing Challenges-Research Chart

Customers are savvy. They don’t like to be marketed to.

Instead, they tap into their networks using search and social media to get the purchase information they need. But an alluring social media deal can still attract their attention.

While social media can be critical to the buyer decision process, it often occurs before marketers are aware of or able to interact with prospects.

Therefore, like branding it’s necessary to use other, less direct metrics to assess the social media marketing impact. As a point of reference, here’s related social media benchmarks by Hubspot.

Download your social media marketing checklist

3 Top Social Media Metrics – Research Chart

According to Trust Radius research, the top 3 social media metrics are:

• 80% of marketers measure engagement
• 61% of marketers measure audience
• 56% of marketers measure traffic

This shouldn’t be a surprise. These metrics are easy to track.

By contrast, social media metrics directly related to ROI occur further down the funnel and are more difficult to track since social media isn’t the last piece of marketing touched.

• 32% of marketers measure leads
• 24% of marketers measure revenue

Marketers’ problem is that they’re not measuring attributes that show a direct correlation with sales, expenses or profit (i.e. ROI). As a result, they can’t make a sufficiently strong case for more resources.

BTW, these metrics haven’t changed much over the years. Check what top social media metrics experts said in 2011.

In part, their problem is their goals. Done well, metrics should be closely associated with your objectives.

Yet Trust Radius found that generating leads (32%) and driving revenues (29%) ranked lower than brand awareness and web traffic. Even customer service which aids sales was a top goal of only 22% of marketers.

Part of marketers’ challenge is a self-fulfilling prophesy. They aim to increase awareness but can’t associate social media awareness with lead generation and sales.

Top 3 Social Media Goals – Research Chart

A deeper look shows that social media goals vary by company size. Roughly 40% of small and medium sized companies set generating leads as a social media goal.

Download your social media marketing checklist

To measure their social media activity, marketers use 3 tools on average. Smaller companies and beginners use less and larger companies and advanced firms use more.

Number of social media tools to manage marketing activity

Comparison of the number of social media tools used by company size and experience-Research Chart

But there’s a wide amount of variation in the number of software tools used.

Marketers use a variety of different analytics options. What’s surprising is that a higher level of marketers don’t leverage the power of their existing tools such as web analytics and spreadsheets.

Different Types of Tools Used to Track Social Media Activity

35% of respondents identified “Tracking results in a centralized dashboard” as one of their top three challenges.

Download your social media marketing checklist

5 Ways to make your social media marketing more measurable

There’s no perfect solution to make your social media marketing measurable.

By its nature social media requires you appreciate and engage on various platforms in a transparent, non-promotional way to build customer trust.

1. Include a contextually relevant social media call-to-action

While this seems obvious, many marketers still skip this critical step. Without a call-to-action, you’re insuring that your audience won’t do anything.

Also, don’t jump to push customers to purchase directly from your social media presence. Instead, entice them to visit your website for more information or to register for your emailings.

2. Use customized landing pages and promotion codes

Keep the prospect experience consistent so they know that they’re in the right place where possible.

While your ability to create tailored landing pages and promotion codes may be difficult to accomplish depending on your underlying systems, be flexible and consider work-arounds where necessary.

• Ask call center operators to ask prospects how they found out about your product or deal.
• Collect printouts of your offer.
• Ask checkout clerks to keep a manual tally.

3. Select social media platforms targeted at buyer decision-making support

Target social media platforms where you can help prospects closer to the lead and sales process. Where possible, provide the 5 basic types of content: offer product information, answer customer questions, show customers how, explain how to style and show ratings and reviews.

Among the social media options to use are:

• Blogs. Enables you to link directly to your product pages. If you have seasonal product, redirect these links to current product.
• YouTube. Allows you to showcase your product with easy-to-consume content. YouTube, despite Facebook’s efforts, is still the second largest search engine.
• LinkedIn. Works best for B2B relationships. Write your profiles to attract business. It allows for showcasing your work and direct communications.
• Pinterest. Is great for topics such as DIY, food, and fashion. But don’t neglect it for other businesses. It’s BuzzFeed’s number 2 source of social media traffic. Supports the long tail of visibility and purchasing.
• Slideshare. Is useful for capturing B2B business and generating leads. (It’s owned by LinkedIn.)

4. Create trackable offers for mainstream social media platforms

Don’t fret that you’ll have nothing to post on Facebook and Twitter.

While it’s unacceptable to continually post promotion after promotion on social media networks, you can make an OCCASIONAL offer. 

Create a targeted offer that includes the name of the social media platform in it so that you get a general idea of its effectiveness.

5. Add social media advertising

Social media is no longer that “free marketing”. It requires budget and staff to make it effective. Depending on the platform, you may also need to pay for advertising since social media is now a media entity.

If none of these 5 tips makes your social media more measurable, try these 8 ways to show a return on your social media investment.

Download your social media marketing checklist

The bottom line is that to make your social media more measurable, you need to set goals that are directly associated with your business objectives. Then you must ensure that your social media marketing efforts are optimized to help you achieve those goals.

What is your best tip for making social media more measurable?

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