What is Content Marketing ROI? How to get it, and with what formula? Why is it important? If the rate of return on investment for content can be considered, how can it be improved, content marketing ROI?
Digital marketing is a set of different activities (including site SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing) that should convey a brand’s message to the target customer on online platforms. Every business has its digital marketing strategy. Plans and organizes activities to achieve certain goals in a certain period. It considers the costs of their implementation as well as the criteria for evaluating the success of each.
Evaluation is the review and analysis that determines how successful the strategies were in line with the brand’s needs. As a result, the business has the opportunity to repeat successful programs, projects, and campaigns and take steps toward growth. One thing to note is that it is not easy to evaluate and measure all the activities that fall under digital marketing.
Evaluating the success of content marketing is complicated. One of the criteria introduced in some sources to evaluate the success of content marketing is the rate of return on investment (ROI).
How much is it possible to achieve the ROI of content marketing in practice? In this context, I answer this important question and the questions that were raised at the beginning.
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What is content marketing ROI?
Before addressing the main questions, it is better to clarify what exactly the rate of return on investment is and how it is calculated.
Businesses have a specific budget for marketing. That budget is divided between the various needs of the marketing team and the projects it has. For example, a part of the marketing budget is allocated to click ads and a part to the brand ambassador. One of the most important things that every marketing expert should do is to check how profitable the ad they paid for it was.
For example, a store site spent 10,000 per month on click ads. As a result of that advertisement, only 5000 more sales have been made. So, click ads not only didn’t bring more sales and profit to the business, but they didn’t even return its cost.
The rate of return on investment is not only a measure for evaluating campaigns and marketing activities. That rate is used to evaluate the overall business, its management, a specific project, and any type of investment in general.
According to the definition of ROI and its formula, we can easily reach the definition and formula of content marketing ROI (the following simple definition is from the Semrush site):
Content marketing ROI is a percentage that shows how much revenue you gained from content marketing in comparison to what you spent.
Is it possible to determine the rate of return on investment of content marketing?
It is better to first review some important statistics about content marketing:
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing methods and in return brings 3 times more potential customers to the business than those methods.
- Content marketing makes 70% of customers experience a close connection with the brand.
- In 2022, the most investment in content marketing has been for producing video content and holding events.
- 94% of successful marketers who work for B2B businesses measure the impact of content on sales growth with various metrics.
As the statistics show, content marketing is important and effective. The main task in content marketing is to produce different types of attractive and engaging content for the target audience (target customers) and distribute it on different platforms. The content marketing manager must make sure that the highest quality content keeps the name of the business and its products in front of the audience so that new customers are attracted to the brand and current customers of the brand are also retained.
So, content is produced in content marketing to achieve different goals. The brand may have a specialized newsletter that is emailed monthly to some of its special customers. The content of the brand’s Instagram may be published once in a while, just for fun. If the brand is new, the most important thing is to introduce the brand. So, for some time, the content marketer must produce and distribute content to introduce the brand and its products.
Of course, some of the content is produced for advertising purposes. The digital marketing team of a store website may plan a Christmas campaign and decide to spend up to 100,000 on social media advertising. The content marketing team is asked to produce content for publication and distribution in all social networks of the brand to promote the campaign, and discounts, and introduce some products.
The complexities of evaluating the success of content marketing
Is it possible to evaluate the success of specialized brand newsletters with the help of ROI? What about the contents that were produced to introduce the brand? Content marketing helps and influences business sales. But that impact is not always tangible and measurable with numbers.
If the specialized newsletter can increase the credibility of the brand and cause the customer to consider that brand as a reference in the field of business, then the newsletter has been successful. If the contents that are produced for Instagram business make the user like, comment, save and share; were successful If, after the end of the campaign and the Christmas sale, it is determined that customers who came to the website from social networks made 600,000 purchases; A content marketing manager has succeeded in producing and distributing content that has been profitable for the business.
Each online platform has its characteristics and the content marketer uses it to distribute certain content. Therefore, the criteria for evaluating the success of each content are different according to the purpose of its production and the platform on which it is published.
ROI vs. KPIs
The digital marketing and content marketing team use KPIs or key performance indicators to have a realistic picture of the performance of their content and strategies and that complexity does not hinder their evaluation and analysis. Therefore, the success of any content is evaluated with criteria that are in perfect proportion to its purpose and specific characteristics. For example, the content written for the website’s blog helps the site’s SEO. So, their success is measured by the indicators specified in SEO for website content. ROI may be one of the criteria to evaluate the success of a set of content or content marketing as a whole.
Is it possible to improve content marketing ROI?
Content marketing should be done correctly and in principle so that the contents that may be calculated ROI have an acceptable rate of return on investment for the business. Based on this and what was said about the complexities of evaluating the success of content marketing, the suggestions, and solutions that have been expressed in various sources to improve the return on investment of content marketing are nothing but suggestions for the overall improvement of content marketing and evaluating its success.
The following two solutions are for improving content marketing and content marketing ROI, both together:
1. Define an evaluation system to measure the success of content marketing
Before starting, in collaboration with the digital marketing team and other parties involved in the marketing and sales work of the business, key performance indicators and important metrics for evaluating the success of content marketing should be determined. Without having a content evaluation system, the marketer cannot find out which content and which media work best to deliver the business message to the target group.
2. Find your strengths and weaknesses
In most cases, to convert a user into a customer and also to keep a customer, the content marketer must work for a long time and produce and distribute various content. Therefore, it is not possible to say with certainty in each case which content ultimately made the user buy from the business. The only way is through that evaluation system to find and strengthen the strengths. Then, he found the weak points and fixed them as much as possible.