Marketing has long since moved on from a “spray and pray” approach. Today campaigns are often surgically targeted, planned, and tracked, but many marketers aren’t confident about how to measure the effects of their efforts.
A recent CMO Survey found that an astonishing 65% of marketers can’t quantitatively demonstrate the impact of their marketing.
Many marketers realize that we are falling short. CMI reports that 44% say improving their content measurement is a top priority for 2020, but some aspects of content marketing are easier to measure than others.
What Is Content Marketing ROI?
Content marketing ROI is a percentage that shows how much revenue you gained from content marketing in comparison to what you spent.
How to Calculate Content Marketing ROI
A very popular formula for calculating ROI is the return minus total investment, divided by investment, and that answer is expressed as a percentage:
The important thing to keep in mind with this formula is the total investment —not just the cost of one piece of content. You can learn more about including all overhead costs in Jay’s post .
What are your most successful content marketing campaigns, channels, and assets?
Tracking conversions from an internal blog post to online sales, for example, is quite simple. However, few customer journeys are that straightforward, especially in the convoluted, non-linear world of B2B marketing.
TrustRadius found that buying committees make 95% of tech purchases, but “49% of buyers won’t ever interact with a vendor representative.” Instead, they make their decisions fully based on the content available on various digital touchpoints, and review sites are a major resource for buyers.
This data shows why you need to combine a number of different stats and implement a sophisticated attribution model to measure your content’s business performance with any level of precision. On the other hand, that might not be fully necessary. Here are some rules for the road when determining how you are going to measure content marketing success.