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Content Marketing ROI: Is It Measurable?

While some of us - admit it, don't be shy! - may actually be having fun with content marketing, researching and writing all those pages and pages of witty, engaging text, others get paid for having harder heads and beadier eyes.

Somewhere upstairs, someone is asking - or, at least, they ought to be asking - the obvious question: What’s all this content costing me and what is it giving me in return? What, in short, is the ROI on all these blogs, social media, videos, and so forth?

Clearly, nobody, not even the most brilliant MBA, thinks in quite such simplistic terms. More likely, it’s slightly more specific questions that are keeping the CEO, CFO, or marketing manager up at night, questions such as these:

  • What new sales is this series of blog entries winning us?
  • How much more loyal are customers who read our whitepapers or "like" us on Facebook vs. those that don't?
  • How much more qualified are the leads our website is generating vs. those reaching us via other channels?
  • What revenues actually can be attributed to all this money, time, and effort we’re putting into our content-based marketing plan?

The ROI from content marketing can be difficult to quantify, but quantify we must. The trouble is, by now, most companies' online presence is fairly sprawling. And even before there was content posted specifically to implement a new marketing strategy, there was a website, and there were other marketing efforts - on Web and off - underway, as well. So, actually pinpointing the effectiveness and hard-dollar ROI of content marketing efforts can be difficult to tease out from the overall picture.

Still, your clients should try, and here’s why: Only with good metrics in hand can any online marketing campaign be fine-tuned on the fly and thereby even come close to attaining its goals - and perhaps more important on a purely personal level, only with data showing true success and ROI will there by another round of marketing in which they may be asked to participate.

While connecting actual increases in revenues to a particular content marketing effort may be a stiff challenge, there are much data that can be collected fairly easy and that can serve as a fairly good proxy for how effective a campaign is in grabbing eyeballs and prompting all-important pass-along activity. Over at Vertical Leap, a U.K.-based marketing outfit, Sarah Howard notes that “re-tweets, likes, shares and follows” are follow-on actions that can be counted quite easily. “Social media,” Ms. Howard writes, “provides us with a raft of modern ways of assessing how far content is traveling, and how fast.”

And when a piece of content gets cited in industry blogs or in news stories elsewhere on the Web, that’s yet another measure of its effectiveness. Here, Google Analytics can serve well, too.

Also, making sense of such proxy data will be most effective if right up front, your clients figure out what marketing problem they're trying to address with new content.

Clearly, even if your client cannot nail defensible ROI figures for their content, they can take moves to improve that metric. The most obvious approach is simply to make the content-production process more efficient and/or less costly. That might mean a shift from producing original content to curating others’ content. Curation is a hot topic in content marketing, right now, and a quick Google of the topic will yield lots of helpful information.

Another good idea: Reuse content as best you can. That doesn’t necessarily means simply copying and pasting paragraphs of text word for word from blog to Facebook to whitepaper. Smart reuse may involve a reframing and recasting of certain thoughts, or it may require an in-depth rewrite. Either way, the aim should be to identify useful, compelling nuggets of knowledge and use them more than once.

For your client, this may be as straightforward as scanning the comments that customers are posting to their blog or a technical help forum, finding those getting the most attention, and reusing them selectively in other venues. Often, it turns out, engaged, enthusiastic customers make the best points about and come up with the best ways to use technical products or services.

Indeed, an exciting field of study has developed around this idea, much of it informed by the thinking of an MIT professor named Eric von Hippel. (And speaking of content marketing, as a matter of principle, Prof. von Hippel makes electronic copies of all his books available online at no charge!)

Topics: content marketing - content strategy - content marketing strategy

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