Are you a content marketing strategist? One of the facts that the most important thing in your line of duty is the ROI on your efforts. The main reason is that the content marketing strategy should help your business to make money.
You cannot achieve the above objective unless you measure the ROI of your content marketing strategy. It is the same goal that the other marketing strategies have. You cannot convince your managers that content marketing is the best strategy unless you show them the results.
Everyone wants to see results in numbers for his investment in marketing. After all, you are in business and you are not doing this for fun. A high ROI is reasoned enough for someone to pursue a content marketing strategy.
Apart from the ROI, there are several other ways that the content marketing strategy can help your business. It is good to understand all these benefits before moving ahead with this discussion.
Why Content Marketing Strategy is good for Your Business:
Content Marketing Drives a Positive Perception of Your Brand:
BuzzFeed partnered with GE in creating branded content in comparison with display ads. It came out that the content marketing strategy lifts brand awareness significantly more than these ads. Most of the people who saw this content viewed the brand as an innovative and inspiring powerhouse.
The content marketing strategy reported a brand lift of 138%. Besides, close to 80% who came across GE’s branded content did so through social media trusted recommendations. Both Tweet and Facebook post allocated a positive attribute about the brand after viewing the content.
Therefore, content marketing strategy plays a critical role in creating a positive brand perception. It is among the most crucial steps to convert your target audience into leads and customers.
Content Marketing Strategy is a Cost-Effective Way of Boosting Engagement and Organic Reach:
Intel carried out research that compared content spend and TV advertisement. Intel earned 57 million engagement minutes after spending 5 million dollars on a 30-second spot in the Super Bowl. On the other hand, the engagement for 5 million Facebook spends drove 83 million clicks.
The Facebook engagement was on the content hub Intel iQ of the company. These results equate to 257.5 million minutes of engagement and 1.5 million subscribers. The reason is that average users spend close to 1.5 minutes on Intel iQ.
Content Marketing Strategy Increases Customer Acquisition:
According to the state of the inbound marketing of Hubspot, an increase in publication raises customer acquisition. 82% of content marketers who blog every day used their blog to acquire a new customer. It was opposed to 57% of the customers who blog monthly.
Therefore, a content marketing strategy is an excellent way to acquire new customers. The most important thing is to make sure that you are implementing the best plan for your brand.
Read more: Why Every Company Needs Content Marketing?
Content Marketing has a High ROI:
The content marketing strategy will pay off better than the other forms of advertisement. As customers continue to interact with your content, you will get to understand them better. You will understand new customer trends and use these insights to target your advertisement.
Over time, you will discover that content marketing has a very high ROI. The only secret is to make sure that you are doing everything right.
Content Marketing Strategy Boosts Pipeline Revenue:
Xerox set up a targeted campaign to engage and connect their top thirty accounts. The brand partnered with Forbes to develop a magazine that offers valuable and relevant business tips to their audience. More than 70% of the companies that they targeted interacted with the microsite of Xerox.
As a result, the company reported an increase of 300 to 400% which was better than the previous email campaigns. Xerox also generated more than 1,000 scheduled appointments and 20,000 new contacts. The company was able to earn 1.3 billion dollars in pipeline revenue.
Therefore, the content marketing strategy is a great way to increase the pipeline revenue for your brand. All you need is to get everything right while working in your content marketing.
Content Marketing Strategy Drives Sales and Brand Awareness:
ASUS is the largest PC Vendor in the while world. In the past, most consumers globally were not aware of the existence of this brand. Asus was able to create brand awareness by creating a content marketing campaign in partnership with Microsoft.
The campaign comprised of a microsite that featured customer and editorial content. The main examples in the strategy were articles and videos and the branch launched it over eight countries. Microsoft reports that this microsite earned four million visits with an online audience of sixteen million users.
This content marketing strategy helped ASUS to exceed its sales objectives by 60 percent. Computer sales increased by 2.6 million while the global sales went up by 16 percent. Therefore, any brand that would like to drive sales and brand awareness should impress content marketing.
Content Marketing Affects Purchase Decisions:
85% of modern-day consumers carry out online research before making any purchase. You will find them reading product content from trustworthy customers. An average consumer will interact with 11 content pieces before purchasing a product or service.
When dealing with B2B buyers, the chances of visiting the website of the product or service provider stands at 300%. These consumers would like to learn about the available offers before they make a purchase decision.
Therefore, the content marketing strategy has a crucial role to play when it comes to making purchase decisions. It shows your customers that you are a genuine brand that cares for them. Business is not only about selling your products or services to customers.
You have to provide relevant information that helps your customers to make informed decisions. It will help your brand to build credibility, authority, and thought leadership in your niche. Therefore, customers will have a lot of confidence in your brand when they are ready to make a purchase.
You will discover that your target audience is more than willing to work with you. Pay more attention to informative content and avoid salesy speeches. It should not appear as if you are pushing your customers to buy your products or services.
Content Marketing Attracts More Upsells and Customer Renewals:
NewsCred, a content marketing agency, decided to increase its publication from two to six blogs every week. As a result, the brand reported a 24% higher monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 33% more sales, and a 41% higher renewal rate.
These statistics were reported for clients who were engaging with their content. Therefore, content marketing is an excellent strategy that all businesses should impress.
Read Also: How to choose the Best Content Marketing Agency in India?
Content Marketing Enhances Customer Loyalty:
It is six to seven times cheaper to retain your current clients than obtaining new ones. The leading marketers are making good use of valuable content to achieve this objective. You have to make sure that you are posting content that is relevant to your key market segment.
It is one of the best ways to foster strong loyalty within your brand. The best example of such an approach is the Worn Wear campaign by Patagonia. The strategy highlights stories of clients who are using their products until they wear out.
It discourages customers from purchasing new clothing unless it is a complete necessity. It also makes them more loyal and sustainable to the brand.
Content marketing reduces the Cost of Content Development:
According to Forrester, most brands are using the content marketing strategy to reduce the volume of content that is produced within the organization. You will get this information in its Media and marketing Outcome Efficiency Drive Report on Content marketing.
It, in turn, reduces the overall costs for content management and development. With high collaboration and effective planning, the organization within the company will produce and manage less but high-quality assets. You can re-use them to maximize content efficiency and spend.
Top Tips for Your Content Marketing Strategy:
i) Setting a Budget:
There are so many content marketing tools and trends in the market. However, this should not convince you to go with the most popular ones in the market. When you know your content marketing ROI, it will help you set the maximum budget you can spend.
You need to spend within your limits and still, make a profit. There is no way you will run an effective content marketing strategy without a budget. It is the first thing that will guide the decisions that you will make.
ii) Set Realistic Goals:
Most people are so optimistic when developing a content marketing strategy. It is not easy to onboard top management members with your content marketing strategy. Once the company gives you the go-ahead to implement the content marketing strategy, you have to make sure that you deliver.
How do you do this when you have set unrealistic goals? It does not imply that you set targets that are too low because no one will find value in it. Every business manager wants to see an ROI in all his undertakings.
If you fail, it will be harder to get a second chance from the team. The only rule here is to set realistic goals. The management will be keen to evaluate whether what you say makes economic sense. The best way to set realistic expectations is by using SMART goals.
Choose the Right Format for Your Content:
Gone are the days when content marketing was just articles and blog posts. You can now get video, podcasts, and webinars. Creating all these formats will cost you money and time.
When you are able to measure the ROI from each of them, you will be able to do away with the ones that are least productive. It is better to allocate those resources to the most profitable content marketing strategies.
It will help you to maximize the revenue that you get from your content marketing strategy.
The Challenges in Measuring the ROI of Content Marketing:
Most content marketers don’t know how to measure their ROI. Close to 34% of B2B marketers and 47% of B2C marketers don’t measure their content strategy ROI. Most of them argue that the process is time-consuming and tedious.
The next section will help you to learn how to measure your ROI. It will give you usable information on how to measure the ROI from your content marketing strategy.
One of the tools that can help you achieve this objective is HubSpot. It is a comprehensive software that has inbound marketing analytics. It provides a detailed report on critical marketing metrics that inform your content marketing strategy.
Here are the critical steps to take when measuring the ROI on your content marketing strategy;
Step 1: Calculate Your Investment
Most marketers focus on the money they use to create and publish content when they measure their ROI. However, you should not stop at this point. Take into consideration all the elements that go into the creation, distribution, and promotion of your content.
It includes the stock images and royalty-free photos that you buy. Look at the marketing automation tools that you use in distributing your content. Also, include all the costs of advertisements like PPC ads and sponsored posts.
Step 2: Know the Dollar Value of Your Investment
You also need to determine the return that your investment delivers. Calculate the number of customers that your content attracted over a certain period. You can use the HubSpot marketing template to get these statistics.
Multiply this by the average market price of your service or product. It is advisable to use the net revenue and not gross as it will give you more accurate profit amounts. You can also multiply the markup percentage with the average product amount to calculate the figure.
Step 3: Calculate the ROI on Your Content Marketing Strategy
With these figures in place, you can go ahead to calculate the ROI on your strategy. To achieve this, you need to follow this formula;
ROI = [(the Net Revenue x Average Number of Customers) – Investment] / Investment
The formula remains the same regardless of the content type that you are measuring.
Step 4: Assessing and Evaluating Your Content Marketing Strategy
You should not stop at step 3 as a content marketing professional. You have to evaluate the overall performance of your content marketing strategy. Even with a negative or zero ROI, you can make some adjustments to make your content marketing strategy highly productive.
Conclusion:
Measuring the ROI on your content marketing strategy is crucial as it will tell you the effectiveness of your efforts. It will help you to provide undeniable proof of the success of the content marketing strategy.
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