Understanding the ROI of your content marketing is essential, especially in a B2B context.
When ROI is clear, you have the data you need to continuously improve. More of your budget goes toward techniques that ultimately produce real differences.
Plus, a strong grasp on ROI is the key to discussing digital marketing and its place in business strategy. Executives may know little about the latest SEO trends, but they look to the future with ROI as their compass.
When you speak that language, it helps ensure marketing gets the resources it needs.
The ROI of B2B content marketing isn’t always clear.
To communicate it, you need to make a fundamental choice about what type of ROI is most pertinent to you.
Let’s look at four common options:
Lead Conversion Rate
Lead conversion may be the most intuitive approach to measuring content ROI since the ultimate goal of most content is to drive sales. To get a firm grasp on this metric, define all of your conversions – including subscribes and downloads – and set up your Web analytics software to report on each of them. This also helps verify content is effective throughout the buyer journey.
Landing Page Conversion Rate
Landing pages are major conversion engines. Product-focused landing pages tend to have the shortest pathway between arrival and conversion. Google Analytics provides a complete solution for tracking performance in the “Landing Page” report under the Behavior menu. Again, this relies on defining some custom site goals before the report will be accurate.
Social Media Performance
Informative and helpful content gets shares, which amplifies your brand voice across the Web. Luckily, connecting content to social media performance is particularly simple. Just use Google Analytics to view traffic by channel (under “Acquisition,” then “All Traffic.”) You can also use your social media automation tools to monitor brand mentions, reach, and sentiment.
Email Marketing Performance
Content and email marketing are closely intertwined, with content serving as a launch pad that attracts subscribers. Email marketing tends to help brands develop long-term relationships with B2B decision-makers who aren’t yet ready to buy. With that in mind, if you understand the ROI of your email marketing campaign, you can clarify the value of the content that feeds it.
Since no single dimension can illuminate everything to do with content marketing ROI, it’s a good idea to combine several – or even all – of these based on your goals and work environment.
Capturing, organizing, and reporting the right data is the key to making sure your projects and the metrics they influence are always trending in the right direction. Luckily, Google Analytics can help you do it for free.