ROI of Content Marketing: The Metric that Guarantees the Success of the Strategy

A frequent challenge in the life of the marketer is proving the value of their work to their superiors and to the market. In digital marketing, this mission has become much easier.

After all, it is possible to measure almost all the digital strategy results, and there is no shortage of tools to analyze the most important metrics. You can find the latest tools on top rated SEO Community as well as by consulting the best SEO Expert. 

However, some strategies can make this analysis a bit difficult. For example: how is ROI calculated for content marketing?

How to know if a method based on content production, which indirectly contributes to sales, is profitable for the company?

Why calculate ROI for content marketing?

Before we talk about the reasons for applying this formula, let’s understand what the ROI of content marketing is all about.

ROI, an acronym for Return on Investment, measures the profit or loss of each strategy used by a company in a certain period.

The objective of this indicator is to understand which types of investments are worthwhile and which ones need to be optimized or suspended. SEO Company Dubai will guide you better on this matter. 

Additionally, this metric helps managers make informed decisions. But here, a problem arises:

When deciding to measure the ROI of a company’s digital marketing, the result can sometimes be ambiguous.

With so many strategies and methods available, how can a manager identify what brings the best or worst results?

For that reason, the ROI calculation should be a bit more detailed. In that scenario, it is necessary to measure the return on investment of email marketing, social networks, SEO, and/or inbound marketing.

Speaking of content marketing, the importance of measuring your ROI is in evaluating the impact of strategy on the company’s income.

Although lead generation is not the main focus of this method, you need to generate some financial return.

The ROI calculation is modified according to the defined goal

This same concept holds true for other goals and metrics.

For example, if you want to achieve a certain goal, such as improving organic traffic or blog engagement , you will need to know the financial value that each customer brings, the number of views, organic visits, shares, and other indicators.

Given the variety of content marketing objectives, there is no way to standardize the ROI calculation.

The general formula – which we will see later – may be the same, but how the return on investment is calculated will depend a lot on the objective that your company wants to meet.

After all, each objective has an indicator that contributes specifically to the company’s revenue.

What are the metrics and how to measure them?

The ROI formula is basically composed of the cost of the investment and the return it generates. In turn, these two variables carry with them a series of metrics that help in the composition of the calculation.

To make a more efficient analysis, we are going to understand the costs and income involved in each of these variables:

Investment metrics (cost)

First, let’s see what are the costs that make up the investment in a content marketing strategy.

By default, we must consider inverted values ​​in the following areas:

• Blog management platform (if not free);
• Blog hosting service ;
• Content production (cost of outsourcing or salary/hour of responsible officials);
• content promotion and distribution channels (social networks, email marketing, landing pages );
• Paid outreach channels (such as Facebook Ads and Google Adwords );
• Monitoring and analysis tools;
• Image banks;
• Video and audio recording equipment (if you use these formats in your strategy).

With the numbers of each of these investments in hand, make the sum taking into account a specific period of analysis (monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual).

Return metrics (revenue)

In revenue, metrics vary greatly depending on the objectives of your strategy. However, we can highlight the main ones:

• Visualizations or page views;
• Unique visitors;
• Organic traffic;
• Number of leads;
• Conversion rate into leads (total leads generated / total visitors * 100);
• Amount of sales;
• Number of clients;
• Conversion rate in clients (total clients / total leads * 100);
• Average revenue per customer / lead / unique visitor / view.