Digital Marketing Insights

Content marketing has, for long, been fuelling good content and rewarding websites and businesses with better traffic, revenues, and ultimately better ROI generation. While it is crucial to invest a great deal of time and effort in crafting the best content marketing strategy, it is equally important to see how your content marketing strategy performs. This offers two benefits- you get to prove that your strategy generates ROI, and it also helps in making required changes in your strategy so that it’s more fruitful. So, if you’re asking, “how can I prove content marketing generates ROI?”, here are several metrics that you should measure.

Consumptions Metrics

Consumption metrics helps to track how many people your content engages. Whether it is guest post service or content on your own website, consumption metrics can help assess your content’s reach. You can use Google Analytics to track most of the metrics associated with the consumption of your content. Some of the important consumption metrics are page views, keyword rankings, time spent on the page, downloads, clickthrough rate, etc. You can also see if your website witnesses unique or new visitors. These metrics help you gauge if you’re reaping the benefits of your investment.

Retention Metrics

When you have a significant number of unique visitors, it is vital to take measures to retain new visitors and measure retention metrics. This helps in assessing if your content marketing strategy helps in keeping your audience engaged. Some of the parameters that indicate retention of new visitors are- bounce rate, percentage of visitors returning to your website, subscribers and followers, etc. Google Analytics also provides these retention metrics.

Sharing Metrics

When you integrate your website and social media pages, much of your traffic might also come from your social media pages. This makes it crucial to measure sharing metrics. While it is not apparently evident as to how a like or a comment on social media platforms convert to currency, they still play a significant role in deciding how popular your business is and whether it should be a part of your content marketing ROI statistics. There are various paid as well as free social media analytics tools that you can use to track the number of likes, shares, retweets, etc. on your posts.

The kind of content that your customers share or comment on helps in understanding what your customers or audience prefer. This will help you direct your effort, particularly to the kind of content that gets more attention and is useful to your audience.

Leads Generation Metrics

Leads can be tracked in various ways. When you’re trying to track leads from a specific price of content, it is important to do it the right way. There are various techniques, and one of them is using cookies. Cookies help track visitors on the website by giving information about the pages that your visitors view before they fill the form you have on your website. You can also use lead-capture forms for the blog or content that you want to track for leads. Requesting name and email id while asking the visitors to sign up for a newsletter should be enough to track leads. While there are many ways, it is crucial that you set up your website such that leads can be tracked.

Sales Metrics

Sales metrics help in gauging the dollars that you make from your content almost in exact values. For people who ask how to measure content marketing ROI in the easiest and most accurate ways, sales metrics is the answer. You can use your CRM (customer relationship management) system for this because your CRM system would have sales- close rate reports. To begin with, make sure that your CRM system and other processes are set up such that they let you track your visitors as they make it to the end sale.

You should use a sales software or your CRM system and have the data about the pages that your visitor visited to get to the lead form transferred to the system or software. After a while, this record might help you identify what kind of content helps the most in the final sale. This will help you understand what type of content requires more attention from a sales point of view.

Pro-Tip

All the metrics that we have discussed help figure out what kind of content performs well and generate leads, better sales, and ultimately in generating ROI. These metrics can help you focus on the kind of content that has the most chances of catering to your audience’s expectations and have them hooked to your business and consume your content regularly. Make sure that you use these insights to craft the right kind of content. Focus on quality and aim to build trust and loyalty with your content.

These metrics provide an answer to the question most content marketers ask, that is, “how can I prove content marketing generates ROI?”. When you’re running a website and giving it your all, it all comes down to revenue. Content being a salient part of any online business, tracking how your content marketing strategy performs can help you get a clearer picture of the content marketing average ROI.

While one thing that different kinds of metrics help with is to prove that content marketing actually generates ROI, there’s another benefit. It takes a lot of time for content marketing strategies to prove that they’re successful in helping your business make expected revenue and give you a justified return on investment. However, what makes it easier to be patient and hopeful while it takes so much time is metrics. When you track your content marketing strategy, you know where you’re going, and it helps in making relatively accurate estimates. We hope these metrics and the pro tip help you in working on your content and, at the same time, provide you with the proof that content marketing generates ROI.

Dileep Thekkethil

Dileep Thekkethil, who was formerly with a US-based online magazine, is the SEO content and guest post service specialist at Stan Ventures. He is a frequent blogger who keeps a tab on the latest updates in the SEO and technology arena.