Why 78 % of Marketers Struggle with Content Marketing ROI
Start with a goal: Where are you headed?
Every content marketing campaign should start with a single question: What do we want to accomplish? Without the answer to this question, you could end up like the famous scene from “Alice in Wonderland,” where Alice asks:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where.”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
Brand awareness, traffic or generating more leads — regardless of your goal, it’s important to define these items first. Then you can dive into effectively measuring each item. Here are a few tips for getting started.
1. Measure brand awareness
Maybe your goal is to generate more brand awareness. You want to capture attention, get people excited about what your brand is doing, and spread the news about your products and services. As a part of this campaign, you may create blog posts, videos, eBooks, and other interesting pieces of content. But after creating all this great content, how do you know whether all your hard work is generating results?
A couple of metrics to watch are social shares and views from your partnership audience. You can also attach a dollar value to your efforts. For example, let’s say you use Facebook or Twitter to promote the content. At the end of your campaign, calculate your reach. Use their advertising tools to see how much you would have spent to generate similar exposure. Then you can say, “We would have spent X dollars to achieve similar results.”
2. Aim for higher traffic
Are your content marketing efforts more top-of-funnel focused, geared for lead generation? Maybe you want to capture more website or blog traffic by showing visitors value, so you can then lead them into the marketing funnel, where they give you permission to market to them. At that point, depending on the length of your sales cycle, you can begin offering more mid-funnel content designed to deepen their engagement with you.