December 23, 2020 •DJ Team
Imagine you’re a business owner in the 1950s. You’ve decided to invest in a new billboard on a busy street in town promoting your drug store. It came at a big cost—$300 for the month!—but it will probably be worth it…Right?
There was a time when marketing was this analog and tying a return on investment to any one tactic was not just challenging—it was downright impossible. You could do some math for how many eyes would see your billboard. You could try to ask new customers how they heard about your brand. But you were largely working with unreliable methods to measure the impact of your marketing investment, and no matter your reasons for measuring advertising effectiveness, you were stuck.
Today’s content marketer lives in a completely different world, one rich with available data to be mined and compelling reports to be turned in to the boss in order to prove what you’re doing actually works. It’s easier than ever before to establish attainable content marketing ROI benchmarks based on content performance metrics. This is capability any marketer can tap into with the right tools and know-how.
What are the top content marketing metrics to pay attention to?
Before you can truly start to place a dollar value on the ROI your content is bringing to your brand, you have to understand what you hope to gain in exchange for your investment. There are lots of ways to measure content marketing success, but when it comes to measuring ROI specifically, content marketers tend to focus on just a few key metrics.
What are the top 5 key performance indicators for content? These are the most-used metrics to measure ROI and success in content marketing:
- Organic Website Traffic
- Leads
- Sessions and Pageviews
- Conversion Rates
- Average Time on Page
Let’s break down each one and how you can directly tie it to ROI.
Organic Website Traffic
Depending on what your brand sells, it may be possible for you to project a certain increase in sales based on a certain increase in website traffic. For example, if you tend to convert 1% of website visits into a sale, you know that the more visitors you have, the more sales you’ll get. Use analytics tools to track the visits to your newly published content over time to demonstrate how you’re contributing to overall website traffic.
Leads
For service-based brands and those whose sales cycle is more complicated than an “Add to Cart” button, increased leads might be the single most important indicator of ROI. As you continue to produce lead generation content like whitepapers, eBooks, and webinars, pay attention to how much traffic is driven to those gated pieces of content—and what percentage of that traffic ends up filling out a form to access your content. The more leads you provide to your sales team, the more valuable your content is to your business.
Sessions and Pageviews
Some marketers are focused on getting people to stay on their websites longer. By producing high-quality content in connected webs on your website, you can snag a reader from anywhere on the Internet—a social media post or an organic search, for example—and give them everything they need to sell to themselves. Seeing users come back again and again, and click through to several pages, is a strong indicator that your content is appealing to your customers. Then again, if you don’t have an increase of leads or sales to accompany these numbers, they aren’t worth much in terms of measurable ROI.
Conversion Rates
Above under “organic website traffic,” we mentioned a conversion rate of 1%. That means your brand historically ends up completing one sale for every 100 visitors to your website. Your sales team may want to see that rate increase and task you to help accomplish that job with more or higher quality content. As you publish content and drive traffic to the website, any increase in conversion rate is a signal that your content is doing a better job of appealing to your brand’s target customers.
Average Time on Page
Finally, some stakeholders just want to know the content they’re publishing is any good. The value of becoming a thought leader in the industry might be worth the investment–but is the content good enough to make that happen? The higher the average time on page numbers on your content, the more time visitors are spending with it—a sure sign of quality.
What is a good ROI for your business?
Let’s get down to brass tacks. Every business is different, so at the end of the day, how can you ever know what kind of ROI to expect? There’s actually a very simple answer to this question: If your content is creating more in sales than it cost to produce and publish, then it’s worth it.
The biggest favor content marketers can do for themselves in measuring ROI accurately is to enlist the help of a powerful content metrics dashboard like DemandJump. We know how critical it is for marketers to maximize every piece of content they produce, and that’s why we’ve built our platform to offer invaluable insights into what customers are looking for online. With our content and organic search term attribution, you’ll be able to see exactly how your audience is responding to your content—and how each piece of content contributes to growth.
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