Business deals, investments, and campaigns are lucrative when they tend to yield great returns either in the short-run or long-run. Content Marketing has proved to be a boon for several organizations, and it will continue to do so in the coming years. Whether you’re just about to set up your own business, or want to expand it further, a great content marketing campaign certainly creates a ‘win-win’ situation for driving customers towards your brand.
Now, the question arises, how to ascertain the real ROI from your content marketing campaigns? How to identify if your revenues are consistently covering your marketing expenses? How to find out if it’s the right time to put a ‘full-stop’ to your content marketing campaigns, or you should still invest in them boldly? Calculating Content Marketing Campaign ROI is crucial, so let’s talk about it, and find out the further steps involved:
- Estimate Your Monthly Expenses
Before arriving straight on ROI, it is important to figure out how much investment you make in your content marketing campaign. And, you must ensure that you consider each and every content marketing expense involved. Whether you’ve hired full-time employees or multifarious contractors, you should find out the total costs incurred in terms of salaries, overhead expenses, and anything that has helped you in your content marketing campaign. As a result, you’ll have an accurate idea of how much you invested in implementing your campaign.
- Ascertain Direct Online Conversions
An effective content marketing strategy results in direct conversions. It’s not only about driving a mammoth of traffic to your website, but also about converting your leads into direct sales. For achieving this objective, the marketer should emphasize on knowing the value of each conversion. However, the process of ascertaining the exact value of conversions will depend on the complexity of your business. Say: If you’re a retailer, you’ll be supposed to find out the average purchase price of your product to find out the number of conversions on a monthly basis.
- Time to Know About the Impact of Traffic Your Content Generate
In the initial stages of your marketing campaign, it’s really hard to see positive ROI. However, once you’ve managed assessing your on-site conversions, and bringing traffic towards your website, it will ultimately lead to higher visibility, and better domain authority. Whether your online traffic comes solely from search engines, or involves referrals as well, it’s all because of the efforts, time, and cost you put in creating your content marketing strategy. If it is able to drive traffic towards your website, you’ve implemented it in an effective manner indeed. For focusing on ROI coming from your organic traffic alone, you can easily classify it on the basis of traffic source. And if your content marketing campaigns are creating rage over social media, then don’t forget considering your social traffic as well.
Ultimately, you’ll have information regarding the monthly conversions as a whole, which when multiplied with average purchase price, will give you an exact total of financial advantages you reaped from your content marketing campaign (in a month).
- Calculate your Qualitative Benefits As Well
The biggest mistake marketers commit while calculating their ROI on a content marketing campaign is to focus merely on the factors which can be counted, or calculated. Several factors such as the credibility of your brand, its potential to attract new customers, and retain the existing ones, the frequent visibility of your brand on search engines, etc. affect your ROI, if you are thinking to take this amazing marketing strategy in the long-run. The more readers and followers subscribe to your mailing list, the more beneficial it will be for your brand. Investing in an efficient and pleasant customer service team will build confidence among your customers, that you’re taking the responsibility to solve your customers’ doubts, and queries.
Converting negative ROI into a positive one requires the ability to generate valuable content that can inform your readers well, and inspires them to be your loyal customers. Just know about the costs of creating valuable content, and the value it creates for your brand in return. Further, target prospective customers for your brand through your content, interact with them on various platforms, and instill a sense of confidence among them to build a long term-relationship that will ultimately inform you about your actual ROI.
