3 Steps to Proving Content Marketing ROI

Content marketing has become one of the foremost tools used in today’s marketing industry. One key component that marketers and business owners alike agree on is establishing and proving a campaign’s return on investment or ROI. These numbers are especially crucial when businesses are determining their profit margins and measuring success between their marketing efforts and the return. Take a look at three steps to being tracking and proving your content marketing efforts ROI:

Create S.M.A.R.T. Goals Around Data Your Organization Cares About

Creating goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound is always a great idea when developing your marketing strategy and anticipating their outcome. However, if you’re setting goals around data your boss is not necessarily concerned about, you may find yourself without a clear set of results to present. Find out which analytics matter most to your organization. A few examples include:  

• Marketing cost per customer
• Incoming leads origins
• Click through rates
• Social Sharing

Although this is not a comprehensive list, these are numbers you should be tracking and setting goals for. The more you dive into your organization’s numbers, the better you will be able to identify trends, analyze campaign results and set future goals.  

Set Benchmarks

Setting benchmarks is an important indicator of any organization’s marketing health. Being able to make data-driven marketing decisions will help when developing strategy and designing campaigns and content. Benchmarking also helps your business determine incoming traffic and create content that nurtures your leads. Evaluating what drives your business will help your overall profit margins as well as keep track of what the competition and industry standards are. Having a comparision scale to measure growth (or decline), is always a benefit and should be a standard practice when piecing together reports.

Analyze and Refine Marketing Initiatives

After you have determined a strategic definition of what success looks like through your S.M.A.R.T. goals and have set data benchmarks, you should analyze your numbers and refine your initiatives. One of the upsides of having goals and benchmarks is your ability to deep dive into its results and make adjustments to your initiative. If a campaign or content strategy has not been meeting its goal, your data and ROI numbers will provide you with indicators of where there is weakness. You should be constantly refining your strategy and mapping out your business trends. Part of proving ROI is presenting solutions when there is a measurable problem!

Proving ROI when it pertains to content marketing doesn’t have to be rabbit hole of complexities. Establishing goals, setting benchmark standards and evaluating your initiatives will always help you identify where your marketing is having impact and return. Interested in learning more about launching your business’ marketing campaigns? Download The Handy Tool Kit For Launching & Measuring Remarkable Marketing Campaigns for FREE!