Did you know that 80 percent of marketers give priority to content creation?
It’s not surprising, considering that content marketing is one of the best ways to drive engagement, sales, and boost your brand’s awareness.
Furthermore, by creating helpful and informative content, businesses can improve their relationship with their customers. The thing is, sharing value without asking for anything in return increases trust and improves a company’s reputation.
However, not all content is created equal and some formats work better than others. That said, we decided to talk about how you can improve your return on content marketing, calculate it, and maximize it to achieve success.
Why Is It Important to Measure Content Marketing ROI?
Before explaining why it is important to measure your content marketing ROI, let’s briefly explore what it is and how you can measure it.
Content marketing ROI (or return of investment), as its name says, is a number that shows how successful your marketing campaign is. It shows how much revenue you got (or lost) by executing your content creation campaigns and how well they perform.
Measuring your return on content marketing is vital since it allows you to see whether your content creation campaigns are effective and allows you to plan your future actions better. Measuring your content marketing ROI also allows you to assess your marketing budget in a better way since it shows you how much money you should allocate to each campaign or strategy by showing you which ones are performing well, and which should be abandoned.
The best way to calculate your content marketing ROI is by using this formula:
For instance, let’s say you invested $30,000 on PPC campaigns which resulted in $100,000 in revenue from those campaigns.
You’d calculate your ROI like this:
Marketing ROI (%) = [($100,000 – $30,000) / $30,000] * 100
Marketing ROI (%) = 233%
How to Improve ROI on Content Marketing In 5 Ways
Now that we’ve explained what content marketing ROI means, how to calculate it, and why it is important, let’s see how to improve ROI on content marketing to scale your business faster and easier.
1. Create evergreen content
Gerald Lombardo, Co-Founder of The Word Counter, says the best way to maximize return on content is by creating evergreen content:
“Now more than ever, business owners need to understand how to turn their businesses into sources of information more than just product-hubs. Build organic traffic to your website through informative and engaging content creation based on keyword research, and revenue is sure to follow. We frequently use original research and data in our content. The data is fact-based and usually displayed in visual charts that tell a story. This makes it easy to convey the findings and it is differentiated from normal text. Uniqueness is the key and it must add distinct value.
We aim to provide readers with comprehensive, in-depth knowledge of our blog topics. [With our recent article] we were able to earn 89 referring domains pointing to [it].”
However, creating evergreen content is not enough. There should be a solid SEO strategy in place that can help your content rank better on the SERPs engine, as well as a good link-building strategy. You can also use guest posting, for instance, to drive traffic and engagement, and overall improve your content’s ROI.
2. Improve your website’s UX
Creating quality content isn’t sufficient if you want to improve your return on content marketing. As a hub where most of your content is nested, your website needs to be perfectly made so users can seamlessly read and interact with your content.
That said, if you have a website that takes too much time to load, has a confusing design and way too many pop-ups, you cannot expect any decent ROI from your content. Nobody will get to read it!
That said, make sure to improve your website’s speed and load time, decrease annoying obstructions such as ads and pop-ups, and revamp the navigation to make it more logical and intuitive.
3. Boost your CTA game
Attracting visitors to your website is hard enough, however, what you do next really determines what your content marketing ROI will be. That said, you need to think about the user’s journey from beginning to end while keeping their intent in mind.
This is where calls to action (CTA) come in.
Think about what your users need and what they want to achieve by reading your content, and make custom CTA buttons that reflect those needs. Think about whether your visitors want to learn something, solve a problem, or make a buying decision, and narrow down those choices to entice them to take action that will increase your ROI.
Oliver Andrews, owner of OA Design Services also advises the use of CTA buttons as a way to improve the ROI. However, he advises being cautious about it: “When you include CTAs, make sure they don’t overpower your post or video, aren’t overly frequent, and detract from the primary material. Experiment with having them in content to see if they enhance conversions or go unnoticed.”
4. Improve your headlines!
Sometimes, the simplest things lead to success, and you can improve your return on content marketing by tweaking just a few small things. A good point to consider when writing your content is do your headlines speak to your customers and do they seem to provide the answers to their needs?
Adam Korbi, Founder & CEO at iFax states that headlines you choose to put can make a really big difference when it comes to improving your ROI. He claims that he “was able to increase our CR by 65% just by swapping out our headline ‘The world’s most popular faxing app’ to ‘The lowest-cost fax service you’ll find’, which immediately conveyed a value proposition to visitors.”
5. Reuse, repurpose, recycle
Sometimes improving the ROI of your content creation campaigns isn’t just about increasing conversions or creating new content. It’s as well about decreasing the price of your content by repurposing it as much as you can. You can do this by using the information from your blog sections and pulling them into infographics, e-books, social media posts, and e-mail snippets.
The point is, the more you repurpose and reuse your existing content, the less you’ll be spending on your marketing campaign. However, it’s important to mention that we’re not saying you should sacrifice originality. The point is to be where your customers are and using the same content to attract consumers over various channels.
Mike Raia, the VP of Marketing at Integrify says that repurposing content helps their company increase their content marketing ROI.
He shares his experience:
“I have numerous success stories about repurposing content to improve our returns on the content we develop while generating quality leads for our sales team.
[One of the examples include developing] a guide about how to automate employee onboarding as an eBook, which has generated a high volume of early funnel leads.
We then turned the eBook into a series of blog posts that generated a good amount of organic traffic.
We then created a video for our YouTube channel from the blog content and embedded the video on all of our organic pages to improve our rankings even more.
Lastly, we had our product team build an automated onboarding template in our product that we shared with customers and, again, posted on all our organic landing pages to improve rankings.”
Final Words
Content plays a big role in your business success. It’s important to plan and execute it properly and think about the content creation process from start till the end.
Knowing the above five tactics to improve content marketing ROI will surely help you reach and even exceed your goals.
Ready to create or revise your strategy to maximize your ROI on content? Let’s chat and explore the best options for your business!
