13 Tried and Tested Ideas to Improve Your Content Marketing ROI
Building a brand that becomes a common household name, getting a positive market reputation, and having a loyal audience is a dream come true for many businesses in 2023. There’s no better way to make this dream come true than upgrading your content marketing roi game.
The best way to test the success of your marketing campaign is by calculating the Return On Investment using a dedicated formula. The profit margin determined by ROI can be improved not only by defining KPIs for your content and tracking the metrics but also by tapping into the diverse social media offers and delivering relevant, SEO-optimized, and value-packed content on a consistent basis.
The most effective strategy for building a credible brand is putting out valuable content and letting the magic happen. Content marketing plays a huge role in quadrupling your revenue in various ways. The ROI gained through this marketing lane is unmatched!
What is Content Marketing ROI
The answer to countless queries rising these days on what is the roi of content marketing is pretty simple. It is the amount of revenue generated through content marketing, excluding the money spent on the creation of that content.
In other words, you can say the net profit that a business earns through content marketing is termed its Return On Investment. This amount varies from business to business, depending on the content-orientated platform that the business offers.
How to Calculate Content Marketing ROI
For every marketing campaign, smaller or bigger, you would want to precisely measure the financial return you’ll be getting from that campaign.
If you’re wondering how you can determine roi of content marketing, follow these simple steps to do so accurately:
Step 1
Sum up all the investment that you put into the marketing of your product or service. They are usually categorized into two categories.
- The total amount spent on the content creation
- The total amount spent on content distribution/advertising
Total Investment in Content Marketing=
The total amount spent on content creation (hiring writers, designers, editors, buying tools) + The total amount spent on content distribution/advertising (Guest Posting, PPC, Video Ads)
Step 2
Next, you will want to calculate the return you get from that investment in terms of direct sales. You will calculate the total earnings made from the sales driven by your marketing campaign.
Step 3
The last step of how to measure content marketing roi is as simple as applying a formula. Calculate the total ROI on your investment using the following formula of ROI.
Calculate Content Marketing ROI (Heading)
% Content Marketing ROI= (Return-Investment)/Investment *100
Example
For instance, you have invested $100 on hiring a talented writer for a blog post and $400 on getting guest posting service from Kamil Web Solutions, and your total investment would be $500.
You will get a do-follow backlink that will redirect the traffic of a busy blog to your product or service page. A small percentage of the new audience will also buy your product/service of yours. Say they buy 5 of your weight loss supplements worth $500 each. You will make $2500 in sales.
Now, the overall percentage of ROI will be 400%. Here’s how:
% Content Marketing ROI= ($2500-$500)/$500
% Content Marketing ROI =4*100
% Content Marketing ROI =400%
Criteria for Campaign’s Success
While calculating the ROI, sometimes, it may feel like you have spent a lot, and the results are not as expected. Some businesses fail to get a suitable percentage of return even after having a crazy number of sales. This could happen when selling a low-priced product. On the other hand, some businesses get better results than their expectations.
Increased Direct Sales
The key indicator of the success of a marketing campaign is the increase in the number of direct sales. This directly increases the profit margins and Return On Investment.
Non-Financial Indicators of Success
This happens when one starts asking himself, “Is content marketing profitable?”. The one-word answer would be yes. It is because this form of marketing might not always pay in financial terms, as backed by many other marketers. Sometimes, it can also pay you in non-financial terms like the following:
Non-Financial Indicators of Success of a Marketing Campaign
- Increased brand awareness
- Strong audience retention
- Well-built authority in the niche
- Coming out as a ‘credible’ business name
- Improved website traffic
- The insane number of leads that might convert later
Ways to Improve Content Marketing ROI
Now that we have looked into the indicators of success and how to calculate the ROI, it is now time to apply the right strategies to improve the returns. There are various ways one can exponentially increase the returns, and we have compiled the most-effective ones for you. Let’s dive straight into them:
1. Define KPIs for Each Content Type
It is important that you dedicate some key performance indicators for each content type that will help you notch up your marketing strategy a great deal.
Blogs
Don’t forget to give rewards and incentives to your writing team or agency when they achieve a milestone that shows a measurable indicator of the quality of the written blog. For instance, increased website traffic can be in direct relation to improved quality of the value provided in the blog.
Email marketing is an extensive domain and offers various categories for marketers to work in. A general indicator of the success of email copywriting is an increased open rate and decreased opt-out rate.
Social Media
You will need to set clear standards for the copywriting of the social media posts and captions because the exact number of likes, comments, and shares of any post directly tells the tale of the quality of the copy written for that post.
Videos
The key performance indicators for video ads or video-based content include CTR, number of clicks, retention of the audience, number of likes and subscribers, and many more.
PPC Ads
The copy written for an ad determines the sales and conversion derived through that ad. Click-through rate, conversion rate, and impressions on each ad clearly spell out the quality of the content in the ad copy.
2. Track Your Metrics
Analyzing the relevant metrics using professional tools can be a game-changer for your campaigns. Using these tools to track and study the metrics of each piece of content you upload will broaden your vision, and you will be able to predict the ROI with just a glance at the metrics. They will solve all your concerns regarding how to track content marketing roi.
For instance, if you look into the metrics of a social media post, you will be able to see the traffic sources, geography, and age group of your target audience. This study will also give you a clear picture of the type of content, topics, and hashtags that are working in your favor.
Metrics are Used to Measure Content Marketing ROI and here’s is a list of them that you wouldn’t want out to miss out on while analyzing your content;
- Number of Sales
- SEO Performance
- Overall Reach
- Quality of Leads
- Website Traffic
- Social Media Numbers
- Engagement Rate
3. Deliver Value-Packed Content
No content can improve your ROI if it’s not written with the right intent. Writing for marketing purposes is very different from storytelling and novel writing. It requires keeping all the requirements of Google as well as the audiences into consideration in a way that no party overwhelms the other.
You will need to hire writers or agencies who can provide SEO-friendly content free of fluff and full of substance. Make sure the content that you publish on each platform caters precisely to all the pain points of your target audience.
The secret to getting your content viral is to publish content with the right amount of emotional and psychological triggers that aligns with basic human behavior.
Outsourcing Content Creation
You can seek help from a reputed content writing agency to provide you with high-quality content with the fastest turnover, even on the shortest deadlines.
4. Find the Channel that Best Works for You
Every business works in a different capacity and has a different target audience. The target audience of one business might be using one platform more than the others. Hence, that business will target one platform more precisely than others.
You will want to start off by using an audience persona of your ideal customer and look into the social platforms they might be using. Next, you will target those platforms and skip the ones that your potential leads don’t use.
This way, you will be able to do high-quality content creation without spending a fortune on hiring multiple people to target all social media platforms. As your niche narrows down, the list of platforms to target will also narrow down. Following are the most commonly used social media platforms that you might want to target:
- Youtube
5. Introduce Discounts and Coupons
Nothing will make your content more appealing to the audience than one-time offers and deals. Limited-time discount offers and coupon offers to trigger the response to scarcity in the brain. FOMO will take the lead, and your content will start showing its magic.
Source: NotchOrdering
Genuine offers that trigger scarcity improves revenue multiple times because they trigger a basic fear of missing out in humans. This persuasion technique will set your marketing campaign afloat, and it will continue to do wonders for you.
6. Get Autopilot Mode On
The fastest way of getting more profit and b2b content marketing roi is by increasing the number of your marketing campaigns. You will find yourself struggling to manage multiple campaigns if you haven’t gone for automation yet.
Source: LeadsBridge
When your marketing strategies start to pay off, it’s high time to outsource the hard work or buy the best automation tools or software to keep your business going in passive mode. Different platforms may require different automation tools or strategies. Make sure to buy the tool or software that best fits your business requirements.
7. Stay Relevant
When talking of ways to improve content marketing roi, making relevant posts, blogs, or other content-based deliverables perfectly fit the bill. Relevancy is the key feature that builds trust in your audience. Your audience will only buy from you if they are able to relate to your content.
Source: WallStreetMojo
This is exactly why you should always start your business with deep market research and find gaps in the market that your products or services can fill. This creates exclusive relevance in your audience, and whenever they buy something in your niche, your name will always pop up in their mind.
8. Improve the Internal Linking
When it comes to how to improve content marketing roi, there is an effective way to do so. Internal linking it is. When you invest a fortune in preparing a guest post, blog, or any other writing asset, it is imperative that you smartly link that asset to other resources, blogs, or services that your business offers.
Source: SiteCentre
9. Don’t Underestimate Website UX
No matter how good your content is written, if the design of your website is cluttered and outdated, it will fail to appeal to the target audience. This is where the role of UI and UX designers of your team surfaces.
You will need to hire the best designers to manage the website design of your business in accordance with the latest UI and UX practices.
Always map out the content for any website and then start working on it to keep things clear and strategically organized. Moreover, the UX of your business site will complement a perfectly crafted copy to derive more conversions.
10. Be Consistent
Consistency is not only the key to the success of a campaign but also the key to the improvement of content marketing roi. You will need to be consistent when posting or publishing blogs, social media posts, Youtube videos, or LinkedIn posts if you want to see exponential results.
All the platforms take time to prosper, and your audience and sales will equally prosper along with the followings of your social accounts. It might seem impossible at the start, but once you remain consistent, it starts to show insane results, and your chances of getting viral also go higher.
Hiring social media marketing services from an experienced IT service provider will take all the load off of your shoulder and will help in managing things better.
11. Diversify Your Content Creation
You will need to extend the horizons of your content marketing roi streams in order to get more profit. Try tapping into other social media platforms as well that you were missing before.
More platforms mean more audience and more opportunities. However, you might need to hire some extra team members to manage the new platforms, but it will prove to be cost-effective eventually as your sales will also go up. Increased sales will give you the margin of hiring extra employees for new responsibilities.
12. Stick to Regular Promotions of Content
Promotions of your content through various social media channels and ways can improve your ROI, and when you increase the frequency of the promotions, there will be a steady and consistent increase in your ROI.
You will want to promote your services, products, and content-based assets on your social platforms every now and then. For instance, promote your new blog through emails, podcasts, social media mentions as well as YouTube videos to get maximum traffic for your blog.
More traffic will be translated to more sales, which eventually will lead to improved overall ROI.
13. Regularly Optimize Your Content
Lastly, in this content marketing roi guide, we will discuss the importance of optimization. Various platforms have their own algorithms on the basis of which some pieces of writing, posts, blogs, or videos are ranked higher than others.
Make sure to optimize each post in accordance with the requirement of the platforms it is published on. For instance, blogs follow the best practices of SEO to rank higher on Google search results.
Similarly, for video content, follow the YouTube algorithm tips that will help you rank your videos higher in YouTube search results. This will improve your views, engagement, and subscribers. All of this will eventually add to your marketing ROI.
