Content marketing is certainly popular right now among businesses. In fact, one could describe it as the “in” thing to do. But unlike many things in business, it’s difficult to measure the actual ROI from the activity. Content marketing leads to all sorts of outcomes: more sharing, exposure, social media engagement, leads, and sales. And with all these different elements, putting a dollar value on your content is not as easy as you might think.
Views on content marketing from the world’s experts tend to be overwhelmingly positive. Neil Patel, the founder of his eponymous website, says that the best way to measure the actual ROI of your content marketing is through conversions made from the marketing itself. He says that if you can create the right content at the right time, you’ll win big and be able to link conversions to content you’re producing.
Measure Your Exposure
So what should you do to measure the added exposure you get from content marketing?
The first thing to do is to attach a dollar value to your content. Using Google Analytics, take a look at how much traffic your website receives through organic search. Then take a look at the keywords associated with your content and how much related keyword searches would cost if you were to pay them through Adwords. This will give you an idea of the dollar value saved by creating the content versus paying for exposure directly using Google Adwords. Multiply the cost-per-click by the number of visitors generated by a post to get a rough idea of the cost saving.
Measure Social Shares
An important part of the sales enablement process is your outreach on social media. Social media is a great way to drum up additional interest in your business and your content. But how do you know whether it’s performing well or not? Remember, to get content in front of people on social media usually costs a lot of money.
Facebook, for instance, charges companies money to get their content in front of users. If you can produce great content, you can calculate the monetary value of social shares by multiplying the number of shares by the cost of advertising each post individually. If your post has comments, clicks or anything else, you can also use this as a measure of engagement. You can then work out whether you’re getting a return on your investment. The more clicks a post has, the greater the value compared to going down the traditional paid advertising route.
Measure The Value Of Links
Another way people come to your website and get converted is by following links – links from other parts of the internet. As a result, you want to create great content to generate links online so that more people link to your website and you get more traffic. Open up a link tool – a tool which tells you which sites are linking to you – and then count the number of links to your website created by a piece of content. Then convert this into a dollar value by looking at how much an SEO company would charge to create those links. If a post gets 20 backlinks worth $20 each, then it’s worth $400.
How are you currently measuring your content marketing?
