The Key to Determining Your Content Marketing ROI
While creating good content is hard—measuring it can often be even harder. According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 21% of B2B and 23% of B2C marketers enjoyed success tracking the return on investment (ROI) of their content marketing programs.
But just because most marketing content today is published online—meaning it’s trackable, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy to do so.
Marketers have always struggled to measure the success of their efforts in an accurate and meaningful way. The question, “How much money did our investment return” is perplexing. Why? One, it’s difficult to focus specifically on sales. Two, it’s difficult to attribute a specific asset—or even a program—to a sale.
As Barry Feldman points out, the key is to establish objectives, benchmarks, and key performance indicators (KPIs). You have to decide what to measure, and then figure out how to interpret it. It helps to break down the metrics most relevant to your business into distinct categories, as discussed in The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics.
Once you are consistently measuring your metrics, you can incentivize your team for achieving content output and performance goals, diagnose and troubleshoot when things don’t go as planned, and create alignment between divisions. You can’t know your ROI until you measure it, and Feldman helpfully walks you through best practices in doing so below.
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