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Content Marketing ROI: How To Measure Campaign Success

October 26, 2022

If you’re reading this, you probably invest — or want to invest — a lot in content marketing.

But how do you ensure the return on that investment?

Enter content marketing ROI tracking.

Short for return on investment, ROI is exactly that — what you get in return for all of the time, money, and technology you invest in your content operations.

While a boost in sales or increased page views might be the standard indicators of a good ROI, they don’t always tell the full story — nor are they enough to tell you exactly what is or isn’t working.

Thankfully, there are a few ways to calculate, track, and even boost your content marketing ROI. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what makes a good ROI, what you should measure, and some clever ways to make the most of your investment.

Let’s get started!

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What is content marketing ROI?

Your content marketing ROI tells you what you get in return for your investment in content marketing.

While the concept of ROI is fairly straightforward, it can get a bit complicated when it comes to dealing with returns beyond dollars and cents. Where most ROIs are measured solely in monetary value, content marketing ROI introduces several other important success factors.

Is your content marketing generating the right returns?

But first, let’s review the key concept of ROI and how it’s calculated.

What is return on investment (ROI)?

Your ROI is the amount of value (usually money) returned as a percentage of the value you’ve invested.

ROI is an essential calculation for any investment — be it a stock market portfolio, real estate, or your content marketing campaign. While ROI usually comes down to money, returns can also come in other forms.

For example, a company investing in its public image through content marketing may not see an immediate return but could see long-term returns in the form of increased sales, better reputation/authority, and so on.

In such cases, the ROI can be slightly harder to calculate.

But before we dive into that, let’s break down the monetary math first.

How to calculate monetary ROI

ROI is calculated as the ratio of net return vs. cost of investment, usually expressed as a percentage.

Your ROI is how much more (or less) your return is than your investment.

For example, let’s say you invested $5,000 in 5 articles in the month of November, and those five articles generated $20,000 in sales through converted demo bookings or lead gen campaigns in their first year. In this case, your ROI on that content would be:

ROI = ($20,000 – $5,000) / ($5,000) x 100% = 300%

Amazing! Right?

And such numbers aren’t unusual either — if you’re willing to invest the time.

Though the ROI of content marketing can be significant, it can sometimes take more than six months to see a return on investment.

How can you tell if you have a good ROI?

Since ROI on content marketing isn’t always immediate, it can be hard to tell whether you have a good ROI or not.

For some companies, a positive ROI is easy to spot: after investing in content marketing through blog content and white papers, they might see a measurable increase in organic traffic, which might have a causal effect on number of demos booked or prospects converted. If the net revenue/return from these conversions is higher than the initial investment, then that’s a “good” ROI.

Of course, that’s not always the case. If you invest $5,000 but only generate $5,001 in revenue, then that puts your ROI at only 0.02% (read: not good). While the definition of a “good” ROI will vary between businesses, high-quality content marketing usually delivers massive ROIs — such as 4200% for email marketing campaigns.

The “many” ROIs of content marketing

So what kind of “returns” should we expect from our content marketing investments?

Sales and revenue are, of course, the most obvious returns — and the end goals of all others. Even if a company is looking to increase non-revenue returns such as public reputation and email sign-ups, these returns are ultimately for generating revenue.

It’s these non-revenue returns that make measuring ROI on content marketing tricky. This requires careful analysis of what investments led to which non-revenue returns. And which of those ultimately translated to a sale.

Hence, measuring the ROI of content marketing ultimately boils down to effectively measuring your customer journeys.

Why measure content marketing ROI?

Keeping track of your returns sounds like a lot of work — and, quite frankly, it is. So why go through the trouble, especially if the returns will show up in some form eventually?

Measuring content marketing ROI has many benefits.

As we’ll see, measuring your content marketing ROI has more benefits than just knowing how well your content efforts are doing.

1. Know what’s working (and what isn’t)

Content marketing campaigns rarely target a single channel. Even the smallest campaigns use a combination of email marketing, blog posts, and other content marketing efforts to attract and convert potential customers.

As a result, some things naturally work better than others.

For example, while your blog posts might be drawing in a ton of traffic from search engines, your email marketing campaigns might be falling flat. Even if all of your channels are doing well, some might not be doing as well as you’d expect.

Measuring your content marketing ROI is the best way to identify and fix these problem areas. And since measuring ROI requires measuring the success of your channels, it’s the perfect opportunity to check what is and isn’t working.

2. Boost sales and revenue (and ROI)

Identifying and fixing problems, not only helps avoid wasted investments but also naturally boosts SaaS sales and revenue. In other words, measuring your ROI — and acting on the results — also helps improve it!

Let’s revisit the previous example where you invested $5,000 in your content marketing. Except this time, you spent that $5,000 on web content such as blog posts and white papers, only to generate $2,000 in revenue — in other words, a negative ROI.

Meanwhile, your email marketing campaign is going great.

By measuring the results of both channels, you will have identified that your web content needs drastic improvement. After making those improvements, you’ll simultaneously cut waste while generating a positive ROI.

3. Improve team communication

As we’ll soon find (and maybe you’ve probably already guessed), measuring and acting on your content ROI is a multi-faceted job that requires cooperation across multiple teams.

However, without taking a holistic approach to content marketing, there is the risk of many key parts of your content operations becoming siloed. By investing the time and energy to measure your ROI, you’ll avoid this by naturally improving cooperation and coordination across teams.

How to measure content marketing ROI

Now that we know why it’s important to measure content marketing ROI, it’s time to get into the how.

 Measure your content marketing ROI in four steps.

Chances are that you already have a number of tools for measuring key performance indicators (KPIs). It’s identifying these key metrics (read: our returns on investment) that’s the challenge, especially since one campaign’s key metrics might not be the same as another’s.

Keep this general strategy in mind as you start measuring your own content marketing ROI.

1. Know where you’re investing

How much are you spending on your email marketing tools? What about your web content and analytics software?

No matter where you’re investing, it’s important to keep track of it. In doing so, you’ll establish an important foundation for calculating your ROI later on.

And don’t forget to factor in indirect content marketing costs such as software licensing, freelancer rates, web hosting, and publishing fees.

2. Identify your KPIs

True to their name, your key performance indicators (KPIs) are great indicators of your performance — especially when it comes to measuring your return on investment.

Depending on your campaign, content marketing KPIs might include page views, email signups, and conversion rates of certain channels. It’s crucial not only to identify these KPIs but also to track how well they’re doing — something that will be important for boosting your ROI later on.

3. Draw links between revenue, KPIs, and investments

Are your emails converting qualified leads into customers? Which blog posts are convincing your target audience to buy or subscribe?

Questions like these are important to ask as you connect your content investments to the returns they produce. By linking how much you’ve invested in a content channel to how well it performs through your KPIs and returns, you’ll get a better sense of what’s helping or hurting your ROI.

4. Calculate your ROI

Now that you know (1) the true amount you’ve invested and (2) your total return, you can now calculate your ROI with the formula shown earlier:

ROI = (Net Return) / (Cost Of Investment) x 100%

But don’t forget your KPIs. If your ROI is lower than you’d like, take a closer look at each KPI and read on to the next section for some surefire ways to improve it.

5 ways to boost content marketing ROI

It’s not uncommon to measure your ROI and come up shorter than you’d like.

There are many ways to boost your content marketing ROI.

Thankfully, your ROI isn’t set in stone. Consider these tips to give your ROI (and your profits) a healthy boost as you take a closer look at your content efforts. While not all of them may apply to you, the general rule is to use your measurements to identify what is and isn’t working.

1. Fix problem areas

In measuring your ROI, you may have identified areas that aren’t performing as well as you’d like. Fixing these areas is the first and most effective step in boosting your content marketing ROI.

For example, many campaigns suffer from poor email marketing, often due to a lack of personalization. By creating more personalized emails for a defined target audience, you can quickly boost ROI, engagement rate, and of course, revenue — all without spending an additional fortune on each piece of content.

2. Invest more in what works

Measuring your ROI also gives you an opportunity to double down on what’s already successful.

While successful content marketing almost always leverages multiple channels, some channels might be more relevant than others in your industry. For example, a cosmetics brand may want to invest even more in its social media presence (its stronghold) to increase social shares and other KPIs — even if its blog has a high bounce rate (a problem area).

3. Make ROI measurements an ongoing process

Improving your ROI is an iterative process. As you make changes and try new strategies, make sure to regularly measure your ROI to see the effects. In doing so, you’ll further fine-tune your content marketing strategy and improve your ROI even more.

4. Find ways to be more efficient and optimize

While generating more revenue is a great way to boost ROI, it’s almost always more effective to optimize your investments.

Fixing problem areas and improving underperforming channels is just one way. Another way is to take a closer look at your workflows. If certain parts of content production are especially expensive but aren’t generating enough value, then it may be time to optimize. One common culprit is expensive content management systems that may be too complicated for your needs.

5. Streamline content operations with simple automation tools

On the subject of expensive tools, you don’t need to spend a lot to support your content strategy.

Screenshot of the Wordable dashboard.

With CMS tools like Wordable, you can streamline your content operations, leverage automation, and manage everything from one place without a massive investment. Taking a leaner, simpler approach, will automatically boost your ROI.

Boost your content marketing ROI with Wordable

From automating tedious processes to simplifying your content management, Wordable can boost your ROI by saving you both money and time. Plus, with seamless one-click exports to WordPress, Medium, and HubSpot, each piece of content will perform better than ever before — all without any extra effort or investment.

For more information and to try Wordable for free, sign up today and claim your five free exports.

Related reading:

Brad Smith
Brad is the CEO of Wordable. His content has been highlighted by The New York Times, Business Insider, The Next Web, and thousands more.
Brad Smith
Brad is the CEO of Wordable. His content has been highlighted by The New York Times, Business Insider, The Next Web, and thousands more.