Understanding the ROI of B2B Content Marketing

ROI – return on investment – is a measure of how much revenue your content marketing yields in comparison to the amount you spend on it every month.

In an ideal world, every business would monitor ROI from all their initiatives and then get rid of those that produce none. After all, anything that does not produce the revenue you require is a net drain on your business. In reality, though, many projects do not even have their ROI measured.

Content marketing is highly likely to fall into this category.

One reason is many organizations start content marketing only because they feel they “have to.” Under these circumstances, content is not a high priority and does not end up facing the same level of scrutiny that more familiar marketing and advertising initiatives do.

Sometimes, however, marketers simply do not know how to measure content marketing ROI.

What’s the Best Way to Measure Content Marketing ROI?

To measure ROI from content marketing you need at least three pieces of information:

Cost of Content

Several things contribute to the cost of content, including the cost of your time, the time spent researching, writing, and designing content, fees required by freelancers, any video production time, and other things necessary to bring your content to life.

Understanding the ROI of B2B Content MarketingCost of Distribution

In this case, distribution refers to all the costs arising from running the overall content campaign, including servers and other hardware, paid promotions, influencer fees, and software that help to facilitate the process of “getting eyes” on your content.

Amount of Revenue

Revenue is the amount of money flowing into your business that you can attribute to a content marketing strategy. Many marketers fall short here because they cannot trace a direct line from sales made to content that contributed to the sale.

Total revenue minus marketing costs is your ROI. To convert it to a percentage, divide it by your marketing costs. A healthy content marketing program should be achieving an ROI above 100%.

How to Verify Your Return On Investment From Content Marketing

To verify ROI, you need sound sales attribution – the ability to see what factors brought about a given sale. A few different “moving parts” go into ensuring you can capture and use this data.

  • Analytics: You’ll need software to show you what content Users access on your website.
  • Conversions: You need to know precisely what conversion actions lead toward a sale.
  • Content: You need to have content aligned with each step within the buyer journey.

When each piece of content has a clear place in the path from first awareness to final sale, you can recognize which content is helping to motivate customers. From there, working backwards to understand the costs associated with each content piece is easier.

If your company is a mid-market or publicly-traded global industrial enterprise, Amplify’s industrial marketing services and guidance can help you achieve your B2B marketing ROI. Find out how.