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For any business, the most important part of a Content Marketing Strategy is the ROI or return on investment. Instructor, Velera Wilson shares her insight on LinkedIn Learning’s Content Marketing: ROI. 

Establishing Content Marketing Goals

“A successful content marketing strategy requires buy-in from every department in your company.”

(Wilson, 2020)

As the marketer of a major media company, I agree. To do this define your content marketing goals and identify what gaps and opportunities exist. Then answer how content marketing can solve the business needs. 

Metrics are the path to content marketing success.

(Wilson, 2020)

Once you have identified the goals, the next step is building metrics to measure success. This is a fundamental step in content marketing.

Here are a few of the metrics that Wilson suggests in the video to measure common marketing goals:

“Brand Awareness” metrics:

• Search volume
• Traffic to your website
• Reach or impressions
• Number of video views
• Press mentions – for example, how often were you featured or cited in media

“Engagement” metrics:  

• Likes
• Comments
• Follows
• Shares
• Click-throughs (are consumers responding to your call to action?) 

“Lead Generation” metrics:

• Downloads
• Contact forms
• Email Subscriptions

“Sales” metrics:  

• Online sales
• Offline sales

For a “Retention and Loyalty” strategy, the goal is to keep as many customers as possible over time. You will want to measure:

• Renewals 
• Attrition (how many people are not renewing) 
• Your Net Promoter Score (NPS) – this is a score that shows how likely existing customers are to recommend your product or services
• Customer Referrals 

“Upselling or cross-selling” metrics: 

• Are existing customers buying additional products and services
• Percent of sales and revenue 
• Number of extra products or services purchased 

It’s also important to set benchmarks for success.  

Here are some “how-to” benchmark tips: 

1. Evaluate: Look at past campaigns to inform your decision and tactics to help boost performance.  
2. Research your competitor’s websites and social media. 
   • What are they doing?
   • What types of content are they producing?  
   • How well is their content performing?
   • What kind of response are they getting?  
3. Review Marketing studies and reports.  Use tools and programs like eMarketer and the Content Marketing Institute(CMI) for best practices and trends.                                                                                                 

Next, define time frames to track the performance of your content marketing strategy. Identify the start and end date and track all content during the promotional period. This helps to determine which content is, or isn’t, performing and what changes need to be made. 

How do you calculate Content Marketing ROI? 

Step 1: Determine Net Profit by calculating Total Sales minus Cost of Investment

Step 2: Divide the Total Net Profit by the Cost of Investment to get the %ROI

Note: Cost of Investment is the total investment spent to create and promote the content

Now Create the Content You Need to Drive Results

There are three things to consider when creating content for your campaigns: 

1. Target Audience: Who is your audience? What content and platforms resonate most for them? Is it short-form or long-form video, infographics, images, product sheets? Social media platforms, your website, podcast, or email? Where and when is your target audience most active on all platforms? 
2. Available Resources: Consider your budget in terms of time and resources. If you have a tight budget, consider in-house resources, repurpose existing content. 
3. Create Content to serve your business goals and that meets the consumer’s needs through the Buyer’s Journey. 

“Content is not a one-size-fits-all”

(Wilson, 2020)

Wilson shares some secrets for successful content in each step of the Buyer’s Journey (Wilson, 2020). Read the must-dos for each of the stages below. 

Awareness stage: This when the buyer realizes they have a problem and need a solution. They are information gathering.

Must do: Use light content that can be easily accessed and digested. Infographics, short videos, blogs, and social media posts are effective.    

Consideration stage:  At this stage, the consumer is looking at products and trends. They are looking more in-depth at brands.  

Must do: Educate the buyer. Provide in-depth content via webinars, analyst reports, and white papers. 

Decision stage:  The consumer is now leaning towards your product or service as a solution. They may be reading reviews and visiting your website at his stage. 

Must do: Give them details on your product or services. Reinforce your credibility with product overview sheets, demos, and customer case studies

Purchase stage: The customer has decided to buy your product or service.

Must do: Continue to focus on delivering content through the buyer’s journey to reinforce their decision. 

Make sure that the content you are creating reaches your audience through one or more of the following distribution channels: 

• Paid distribution.  This refers to paid social media ads and retargeting.
• Earned or shared distribution. This is entirely driven by users. If you build it (meaning good content) they’ll come and hopefully share it! 
• Owned distribution. These are platforms that you control such as your blog, newsletters, website, and social media pages

Reporting on Campaign Performance

It’s important to note that customers will likely engage with your content many times before making a purchase decision. Determining which content drove that decision is valuable for your campaign performance. You can evaluate the content along the buyer’s journey through “Attribution Models”. 

The “First Touch Attribution model” assigns 100% credit to the content your customer interacts with first.

A “Last Touch Attribution model” ignores all the content prior to the purchasing decision. 

The “Linear Attribution model” seems most fair. It assigns equal value to all content, assuming all content equally influenced the purchase. 

And, the “Time-Delay Attribution model” gradually assigns more credit to the content that was closest to the conversion. 

Use existing social media tools and/or invest in content marketing tracking tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social to streamline analysis and track the progress. This allows you to adjust quickly if your content is not performing based on your business goals. For online analysis check out SEMRUSH or MOZ to track search rankings and page views. 

“You can’t set it and then forget it in content marketing”

(Wilson,2020)

Note the difference between “useful” and “relevant” metrics in content marketing.  Useful metrics include measuring click-through rates, page views, and video views. Relevant metrics speak to the overall effectiveness of your campaign. You can identify relevant metrics through leads, sales, and engagement. 

Monitor your content and make adjustments. If your content is not performing, address the page or post and see what the issue might be, then change to make it better. It is important to also look at what is working well and make your successful content even better!  

Tips to improve your content:  

1. Copy 
   • Change subject lines
   • Preview texts 
   • Adjust the length of social media captions 
   • Change the tone from formal to casual to test for effectiveness

2. Design/layout (where do you want to draw attention) 
   • Change images
   • Font sizes 
   • Colour
   • Position of call to action (CTA) buttons

3. Time of day 
   1. Your audience is a real person and they have times in the day that they are on and off social media and other platforms

3. Call to Action 
   • Adjust this to see how it affects performance. For example, switch the words “click here” to “learn more”

Wilson’s Conclusion 

By the end of this course, Wilson believes that you are now ready to develop measurable content campaigns. She reminds us that content marketing is an ever-evolving process. You will need to make adjustments over time to optimize your campaign performance. Wilson recommends staying current on the latest content marketing trends. LinkedIn Learning courses and articles from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) are good sources.

My Thoughts…

A big “aha moment” for me was learning about the influence of content marketing in the buyer’s journey – what to post and when. I have also taken note of the useful and relevant metrics in building a content marketing strategy. Brand Awareness and Engagement are the two most prioritized goals for my industry. Understanding the metrics to best measure these priorities is helpful to create great content and report the result.

References

Wilson, V. (2020, November 4). LinkedIn Learning Content Marketing: ROI. Retrieved from LinkedIn.com: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/content-marketing-roi

_{Author: Rhonda Halarewich}

_{Keywords: Content Marketing; ROI; Marketing ROI; How To}

_{Readability: Grade 7}