Content Marketing: ROI

1. Establishing Content Marketing Goals
2. How to Calculate Content Marketing ROI
3. Creating Content to Drive Results
4. Reporting Campaign Performance
5. Author’s Conclusion
6. My Conclusion
7. References

Establishing Content Marketing Goals

When it comes to your stakeholders, figuring out who they are is the first place you want to start. Velera (Wilson, 2020) identifies three different kinds of stakeholders: those with authority, the ones whom your company impacts, and those who do something for your content marketing campaigns.  

Velera provides some handy metrics that are aligned with each of the different steps in the marketing funnel, and I honestly couldn’t think of better ones.

Content Marketing Goals	Aligned Metrics
Brand Awareness	Search volume, website traffic, reach, impressions, and press mentions.
Engagement	Likes, comments, follows, shares, click-throughs
Lead Generation	Downloads, email subscriptions, inbound calls
Sales	How much money do you bring in
Retention/Loyalty	Renewals, number of cancellations, number of customers leaving, Net Promotor Score (NPS)
Cross Selling	Number of sales, number of extra products/services purchased.

When setting up your content marketing goals, it’s important to include performance benchmarks. If you don’t set up benchmarks, how are you going to know what works, what doesn’t work, and whether your goals have been met or not? The big three ways to set up performance benchmarks mentioned in the LinkedIn Learning course (Wilson, 2020):

1. Look at and use your past campaigns
2. Research your competitors
3. Set up timeframes for measuring

How to Calculate Content Marketing ROI

Ugh, math, I know, but trust me, it’s not complicated and fairly straightforward.

So why do we need to calculate ROI (return on investment)? When it comes down to it, calculating the ROI shows and justifies your spending to the stakeholders.

Before you get to the formula for calculating ROI, you first need 2 things (yup, that’s right, just two things):

1. The Cost of the Investment (money spent)
2. The Net Profit (your sales minus your cost)

With these two variables, you can then plug them into the following formula:

See what did I tell you? Easy peasy!

Now when it comes to estimating ROI, Velera provides some excellent reasons why estimating it is a good idea. Velera states that estimating ROI helps to secure marketing funds, shows revenue potential, monitors and compares estimates made with actual performance, and allows you to adjust your campaign variables (Wilson, 2020).

Creating Content to Drive Results

As I have mentioned in previous blogs, when creating content, you want to choose content that engages your target audience and makes them want to interact with you online.

“Potential customers need to engage with your content multiple times before trust is built and they decide to make a purchase” (Wilson, 2020).  I included this direct quote from the LinkedIn Learning course because I couldn’t think of a better way to phrase it. Think about it, when you see an ad on social media, do you click it and instantly purchase? No, of course you don’t! You do research on the company, check reviews, and see if you can find customer photos of the products. Trust me, I have been burnt before on buying something without really looking into the company, and I don’t want you to make the same mistake I made.

Velera (Wilson, 2020) touches on the marketing funnel; I won’t talk about it here as I have covered it in my Digital Marketing Foundations blog. Click the link to check it out, but not until you finish reading this blog post!

There are 4 campaign attribution models that Velera (Wilson, 2020) asks the reader to consider when it comes to your campaign. She sums up what each one means, so I am just including what she talks about directly.

1. First Touch – this assigns 100% of the credit to the content that your customer interacts with first
2. Last Touch – this assigns 100% of the credit to the content your customer engages with last before making a purchase
3. Linear – assigns equal value to all your content along the buyer’s journey toward their purchase
4. Time Delay – assigns more credit to the content closest to the conversation than content that was engaged with earlier on.

Reporting Campaign Performance

An entire ocean of tools is available to help track analytics and performance! Velera (Wilson, 2020) provides a few helpful tools to track your campaign progress:

• Social Media
  • Buffer
• • Sprout Social
  • Hootsuite
• SEO Tracking Tools
  • SEMrush
  • Moz
• Email Tools
  • HubSpot
• • GetResponse
  • Marketo
• Website Analytic Tools
  • Google Analytics
  • Crazy Egg

With your content, it doesn’t have to stay the same once you create it. There are a lot of variables that can be changed to help you create more engaging content, Velera (Wilson, 2020) provides 4 variables that you could look at changing:

1. Your copy – look at changing the tone, length or adding keyword-rich content
2. Design/Layout – look at changing the font you use, the colour scheme, or images and video
3. Time of Day – try posting different content at different times of day and see when you get the most engagement.
4. Call to Action – look into changing your call to action, see what your competitors use for their call to action or even Google different calls to action.

Author’s Conclusion

Velera Wilson concludes her LinkedIn Learning course by suggesting that the viewer looks into other LinkedIn Learning courses available that cover ROI. She also suggests checking out the Content Marketing Institute website for articles and training that they provide.

My Conclusion

I checked out my blog website on SEMrush just to see what would come up. As of right now, my blog isn’t showing anything, but I feel like that is just because it’s fairly new and I am still working on it. The website SEMrush has a lot of different analytics that you can look at including keyword manager, domain overview, traffic analytics, and backlink analytics. The keyword overview tool is really cool in that it lets you create a list of keywords and then shows you the intent of the searcher, how much the keyword is searched, and the cost per click.

References

Wilson, V. (2020 November). Content Marketing: ROI [Video]. LinkedIn.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/content-marketing-roi/why-calculate-roi-of-content-marketing?autoplay=true&u=2109516