The “spray and pray” method of marketing is long gone. Nowadays, campaigns are designed, tracked, and targeted precisely. But when you employ so much time, effort, and resources into your content you need to understand how and if it’s giving you the desired results. In other words, how do you measure the ROI of your content? There is a lot more to metrics that influence data-driven marketing than just click-through rates or cost per acquisition (CPA).
How To Get Started
At the core, there are three phases to measuring any action
Deciding what to track
This is where the classic goal setting comes to play. Define your priorities, set the benchmarks, and have a basic calculation of the cost of your efforts. You can use the infographic above to identify key KPIs.
Defining Success – What Are The KPIs That Work For You
While we have the standard metrics defined for each piece of content, ultimately it is best for each company to define their own content marketing KPIs. What are your goals and what proportion of it is long-term vs short-term? Similar to how platform strategy and distribution strategy is unique to each company so should the KPIs.
Check out these KPIs to measure the performance of your content.
Tracking & Optimizing
Tracking the performance of every content asset you publish against the benchmarks you have defined is the next step after choosing your metrics. This can be done by building dashboards since you can access all your data at any time.
HubSpot provides you with access to all data analytics; from the very beginning, all actions can be observed, such as what a lead is looking for and whether or not it is a potential lead. This is useful for qualifying leads and figuring out conversions.
Calculating ROI
The first step towards calculating ROI is to estimate the production, distribution, and promotion costs in your organization. It is important to take into account average production costs, including copywriting, graphic design, marketing tools, and technology.
The most common formula to calculate ROI is returns minus total investment, divided by investment, and the result is given as a percentage. You can use this formula to determine the return on investment (ROI) of all of your investments, not just one.
Email marketing, social media marketing, website engagement, and conversions are a few of the must-track pieces in content marketing. With the help of analytics, you can learn who has visited your website, what they have looked at, how many have opened your emails, who has unsubscribed, and how long they were there.
Consider the time invested, the cost of production, and the cost of promotion including team overhead and administrative expenses. Having the right dashboards, landing pages, and tracking metrics installed will help understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Are you spending valuable time and money on media that is not bringing any value to you? Reach out to us. Let’s talk!
