How to Measure Content Marketing ROI

Knowing exactly how to measure your Content marketing success can be a tedious task, but it is an essential one, if you want to know the value of your time, effort and money.

Measuring your Content marketing ROI can be complicated, if you haven’t taken the time do define what that ROI means to you.

If what you’re looking to measure is the income you gained from your content marketing, your measurement would be pretty straightforward in certain scenarios.

In the above scenario, you’d first have to estimate how much money you spent on creating the content (in house as well as virtual content creation cost) and then add to that the money you spent on distribution (include the cost of tools used). Next, you’d calculate the sales you generated from the content (this is easy to do if the relationship between your content and sales is direct) and subtract the cost of production to get your revenue.
However, if the relationship between your content and sales isn’t direct, which is the case more often than not, calculating your content marketing ROI simply in terms of money earned isn’t the best approach to take.
Depending on how you define your content marketing success, there are a number of intangible KPI metrics that can determine the overall effectiveness of your content marketing program.

A Holistic Approach to Calculating Content Marketing Success

Depending on how you choose to define your content marketing success, there are a number of goals that you can take into consideration.

The following are some goals that you might set for your content marketing programs:

Content Reach: This goal relates to the amount of traffic your content generated, including the overall exposure it received via social shares, brand mentions, and other such KPI’s

Engagement: This goal speaks to the success on your content in terms of user engagement, which can be measured by KPI’s such as bounce rate, time spent on the page, number of pages viewed per session, as well as social engagement which includes likes and shares.

Conversions and Direct sales: This goal is all about measuring the number of visitors that were converted to leads that became customers as well as calculating the amount of sales that you were able to generate directly from your content through CTA’s that you may have placed in your content.

SEO Goals: This goal is about measuring the effect your content has on your rankings in Google by tracking your target keywords, and backlinks that your content generates. Links from high quality, authority blogs are a great boost to overall rankings, so if your content is generating such links, it’s a great indicator of the success of our content in this context.

Depending on which stage of content marketing you’re currently in, the goals mentioned above will mean different things to you at different points in your journey to achieving a holistic level of content marketing success.

Once you’ve defined your content marketing goals and aspirations, you can then move onto reading our next article in the series which tells you exactly how to track your content marketing ROI using various tools that we’ll mention as well.