Shrinking marketing budgets have led to higher expectations. The strategic solution? Move away from the vanity metrics to spotlight the actionable ones.
Today’s market is utterly fast-paced. Buyers demand more, and businesses stitch new ways to catch up. And even if they do, it’s not the end.
Marketing, once transactional, has made a transformational leap to being relational. But has customer-centricity ended at personalization and value addition? Not quite.
It’s become crucial for marketing to get every tidbit right, from strategy to execution. Businesses desperate to repair their strategic ruptures and keep up are investing in updating their old playbooks.
But investment doesn’t equal impact – it’s an age-old story.
Marketers fail at bridging content marketing’s value with business objectives. In simple terms, B2B marketers invest a copious amount of time and resources into content marketing, often failing to show how it impacts their revenue or pipeline.
This strategic disconnect between content’s performance and business goals has made it complex to justify the spend, let alone the content marketing ROI.
So, it’s become paramount for businesses to track whether their investments are actually worth it. The content marketing landscape is all too familiar with this dilemma.
How can you prove to your CEOs and other stakeholders that investing in content actually works? An efficient solution to navigating this pushback and doubt starts from the basics.
What Is Content Marketing ROI?
Investing in content marketing means playing the long game. But what if your marketing team can’t showcase the results of this investment and procure initial buy-in? According to recent statistics, 65% of marketers can’t.
It’s truly about finding the relevant measuring methodology for your content, starting with content marketing ROI.
Content marketing ROI is simply the percentage that demonstrates the revenue generated (the earn-back) compared to how much the business spent on its marketing efforts. It calculates the efficiency and effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns.
Why is measuring content marketing ROI vital?
This performance metric is crucial for businesses to understand the extent to which their content is making waves – generating revenue, and the like. Calculating website traffic and engagement doesn’t correspond with the spend, and their weight is significant in capturing demand, but it doesn’t justify the entire investment. The total investment into content marketing includes production, management, licensing, distribution, strategy management, and relevant software/tools.
These make it crucial to illustrate whether your content assets are actually moving the needle, i.e., converting prospects into active buyers.
Content marketing ROI plays an integral role here.
It assesses and offers tangible numbers to spotlight the impact generated through targeted campaigns and individual content assets such as blogs, email newsletters, and social media campaigns.
And the benefit of calculating content marketing ROI is that it can highlight qualitative and quantitative factors. Beyond the numbers, it also helps demonstrate how your content pieces are fairing to build customer loyalty, capture leads, and elevate brand awareness.
In short, your content marketing ROI is tangible proof to justify the overall marketing budget allocation. Because CMOs are asked to do more with less.
Marketing faces the biggest budget cuts. A 2024 Gartner report illustrated how the department has faced a 15% year-over-year decline in average marketing budget. And in 2024, it was attributed only 7.7% of the company’s revenue.
Why is this the case?
We have come full circle here. Marketing is perceived as a cost center. And with narrower budgets, there’s more pressure on teams to showcase quantifiable outcomes.
So, the vitality of content marketing ROI.
It’s easier to make informed decisions with clear metrics like which marketing channel is bringing in the profit, and which needs an upgrade.
This way, your content marketing team doesn’t spend unnecessary time churning out assets that don’t really influence the leads or build your brand. To do so effectively, it’s primarily significant to outline how to measure content marketing ROI.
How Should You Measure Content Marketing ROI To Assess Impact on the Bottom Line?
To measure real impact, marketers need to transcend the soft metrics and focus on what actually matters- the bottom line.
So, the commonplace formula for measuring content marketing ROI establishes a direct correlation between content marketing efforts and an increase in sales or revenue.
- Content Marketing ROI = (Revenue – total investment/total investment)/100
Revenue is at the core of every business function – it’s the final boss. Hence, the traditional content marketing ROI formula centers on business revenue.
Although it is important, this formula is a bit constricting. It takes months for leads to convert into sales opportunities. And without these sales, it’s ascertained that the final metrics would again fail to prove how investing in content marketing has moved the needle.
The need for an upgrade in the traditional ROI formula
There are other stages in your buyer’s journey where content illustrates substantial impact, especially in helping leads progress down the funnel.
It may take months to prove whether your content production and the relevant nitty-gritty have a fundamental role in revenue generation. But you can still demonstrate how it affects your pipeline.
Content impacts the deal velocity and lead volume, and is crucial to focus on.
Marketers require a much-needed upgrade in this formula – one that entails precision. This change is requisite because B2B customer journeys are rarely linear and straightforward.
Amidst the 95% of buying committees that make tech purchases, a whopping 49% of them don’t even speak to sales reps. They rely on the content assets available at the different digital touchpoints to finalize their decisions.
So, rather than the traditional formula, curate a more sophisticated one that allows you to measure different stats to build a more accurate picture of your business performance. It must be based on the KPIs that matter to you, not what your competitors are following.
It’s true that industry benchmarks significantly matter, but don’t lose sight of what is relevant to your brand and your customers. Owing to this, it’s better to underline your own system that traces the KPIs you want.
5 Effective Strategies to Improve Your Content Marketing ROI
Each content type has its own set of metrics to consider.
You don’t need to focus on all available metrics to calculate performance, but on the right strategies that augment your existing capabilities. And improve your ROI.
The pivotal ones you can begin with are:
1. Ascertain that the set KPIs align with the overarching business goals.
First, underline the fundamental goal of your campaign and the channels you’ll leverage. They significantly impact the metrics you’re required to measure.
For example, if your priorities are sales and revenue, track the customer journey from awareness to conversion. As the lead progresses down the funnel, focus on every micro-conversion and assign it a tangible value.
2. Focus on the actionable metrics that provide you with tangible insights.
This will help you underscore what to optimize over time. Move away from misleading vanity metrics such as web traffic or CTRs.
Do all the 10k website visitors convert into your buyers? No. Views and traffic don’t demonstrate interest or value.
The relevant metrics are the ones that enable your marketing team to act. They don’t just look impressive on paper, but actually delve into what drives prospects to close deals with your brand.
3. Audit your authority and keyword rankings.
How your ICP perceives your brand is a crucial metric to study, i.e., your authority. It might be complex to track, but if you do it correctly, this metric can help supplement your efforts to improve the ROI.
Tracking your authority means auditing the number and quality of inbound links added to the brand’s social media mentions.
What do these illustrate? Whether your brand authority and awareness are growing.
The same goes for keyword rankings. Analyzing SEO metrics helps you monitor the impact of your blogs. When carried out effectively, your blogs should boost your domain’s SERP and elevate your ranking. In tangible terms, this signifies more organic traffic for your website.
But to get a clear picture of whether you’re doing content marketing right, pair SEO metrics with conversion rates. It will give you a clearer view of whether your marketing team is:
- Leveraging the right keywords
- Truly reaching your target audience
- Influencing leads’ journey through the funnel
4. Merge brand value into the metric mix.
Brand value is considered less significant in measuring success. And is often perceived as an intangible or fluffy aspect of a business.
It’s true that brand building takes time, patience, and consistency. But when paired with content, it functions as a multiplier.
But savvy marketers who have learned how to catch up with changing marketing dynamics know this is untrue. A strong brand ensures your prospects are warm, informed, and already leaning towards purchasing your solutions. This results in shortened sales cycles and improved conversion rates – two factors directly affecting revenue.
A strong brand identity attracts the most relevant leads (that fit your ICP) and pays off in the long term. Growing market recognition means you invest less in paid channels because your prospects are actively searching for you.
This results in compounding ROI, enhancing the value of all your content pieces, rather than just the latest ones.
5. Track the performance of the sales enablement assets.
Your sales teams utilize these content pieces to drive conversion. These aren’t blogs or LinkedIn posts.
These pieces are part of sales enablement directly offered to a potential client at the BOFU stage. They help prospective buyers to finalize their purchasing decisions. Think of one-pagers, proposals, objection-handling decks, among others, that are built by marketing and leveraged by sales.
What makes the sales enablement content vital is its direct involvement in sales deals, from a case study that can build trust to a one-pager highlighting the pricing model that accelerates negotiation.
If your sales enablement content is helping convert leads into opportunities, you’re looking at real and tangible impact – one that should be tracked and optimized.
Content Marketing ROI Is More Than Just Following a Formula.
This is what actually matters to accurately measure the success of your content marketing efforts – impact on the bottom line.
Measuring the ROI is just a means to convert the said impact into understandable terms. But in practice, it’s not a piece of cake. Its multifaceted-ness really puts a schism into the entire process.
“Sometimes, there are still gaps in the data where it’s just impossible to see the immediate impact of certain metrics on core objectives.”
– asserts Google’s VP of Large Customer Solutions.
The real game changer is knowing which metrics to actually track and using this knowledge to execute the right strategies. Content marketing ROI cannot prove your brand’s success and growth to the decimal, but it can help it grow and revamp.
Tracking your content marketing ROI is really just about highlighting the blind spots in your efforts and improving on what’s not working for you – setting you on the right track for the long term.
