But one of the
problems people often face is knowing whether it’s working. You or your team
have put in the hard hours writing blog posts, creating email campaigns and
engaging with people on social media, but how do you know whether it’s all been
worth it?
The problem is not a
lack of information; the problem is knowing which information to track. Should
you care about the number of likes, followers, comments, shares, page views,
email signups, purchases, or something else?
Only 30% of B2B marketers say their
organizations are effective at content marketing.
Only 44% even know what content marketing
success or effectiveness looks like.
So in this tutorial, you’ll
learn which content marketing metrics to track and how to calculate a content
marketing ROI (return on investment). We’ll take it step by step, starting with
defining your content marketing goals so that you can decide what to track.
Then we’ll look at different metrics you could use, how to calculate costs, and
how to determine the ROI. We’ll finish with a reality check, looking at some of
the things you can’t measure.
By the end of this
tutorial, you’ll be equipped to measure the success of your content marketing
efforts, decide what’s working and what isn’t, and make sure your business is
getting the most bang for your content marketing buck.
1. Define Your Goals
The first step in determining whether your
content marketing is working or not is to define what “working” means to you.
In other words, what are your goals?
As the following chart from the Content
Marketing Institute shows, there are a variety of different reasons for
doing content marketing.
Depending on what your goal is, you may
want to use very different metrics. For example, if your goal is “sales”, then
the metric is pretty clear: how many sales did you achieve as a result of your
content marketing? But if it’s “lead generation”, then you might want to track
the number of people who signed up to your email newsletter or in some other
way registered interest in your products. If your goal is “engagement”, then
maybe you want to track the number of comments, shares or likes your posts
achieve.
These are just a few quick examples—we’ll
go into more depth on different metrics in the next section. For now, you just
need to define the objectives of your content marketing, so that in the next
section we can assign the appropriate metrics to them. For more on this and how
it fits into a broader content marketing strategy, see Lauren Holliday’s
tutorial:
So once you’ve decided
what’s important to you, how do you measure it?
Marketing consultant
Jay Baer provides a good framework for thinking about content marketing metrics
in his article
for Ceros:
Consumption metrics
Sharing metrics
Lead generation
metrics
Sales metrics
Let’s look at each of
those in more detail.
Consumption Metrics
This type of metric is simply about
measuring how many people are reading or watching your content.
So if you run a blog, it could be a simple
measure of traffic, like the number of page views or unique visitors—although
other measures like “average
time on page” can also be useful. If you produce YouTube videos, you’d
track the number of views, and if your content marketing involves Facebook
posts, Tweets or other social media posts, many platforms provide ways of
measuring the “reach” of your posts.
Sharing Metrics
One of the big advantages of content
marketing over traditional advertising is that people often share your content,
giving you free publicity and recommendations. So these metrics look at how
often people are sharing your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other
sites.
A simple way of tracking this is through a
site like Buzzsumo, where you can put in
your site’s URL and see the most shared posts. For example, here are the
results for tutsplus.com:
Lead Generation Metrics
This is about starting to convert readers
or viewers into customers. Personally I don’t much like the metaphor of a
“sales funnel”—it seems too industrial a way of looking at human beings—but the
basic idea is that you attract leads into the top of your funnel, process them
as they fall down the funnel, and spit them out at the other end as paying
customers.
So the “lead generation” metrics capture
how effectively your content marketing is attracting people to become leads, or
potential customers. Generally people become leads when they express an
interest in hearing more from you, so the metric here could be the number of
people signing up for your email newsletter, filling in a contact form, or
signing up to a free membership area of your site.
If your content marketing is heavily social
media based, you could look at things like follower counts here, but keep in
mind that you’ll need a very long funnel to convert a Twitter follower into a
paying customer. The more direct the contact you have and the firmer the expression
of interest, the better.
If you want to know more details about the
sales funnel (without my slightly skeptical commentary), see this tutorial:
OK, this is where we start dealing with
dollars and cents. When people finally decide to buy from you, you can track how
many of those purchases were a result of your content marketing.
For example, you can track clicks through
from your emails to your website and see how many of them result in sales.
Similarly, in programs like Google Analytics, you can see how people navigate
through your site, and how many of your eventual customers came from your blog.
You might want to track the dollar amount
of revenue derived from content marketing, or your metric could be a percentage
conversion rate—how many of your viewers and readers become paying customers.
Other Metrics
While this framework is useful, it doesn’t
cover every metric out there. For example, the goal of your content marketing
may be to increase your website’s authority, and in that case you may want to
measure your search engine ranking for certain keywords. And as I mentioned
earlier, if you’re looking for customer engagement, you may be interested in
things like blog comments or social media conversations.
So use these ideas as a starting point, but
don’t be limited by them. There’s a lot of data available to you, and the most
important thing is to align the metrics you choose to the objectives you’ve set
out.
3. Define the Costs
It’s common to look at
page views and social shares, but don't forget to add up the costs of all this
content you’re creating. That’s the “investment” on which we’ll soon be
calculating the return.
If you’re hiring
freelancers to create the content for you, then those costs will have to be
measured, of course. If you’re producing it yourself, or getting members of
staff to create it, then you’ll have to factor in the time spent.
For example, if your
marketing manager gets paid $1,000 a week, and she spends 10 of her 40 hours a
week on content marketing activities, then content marketing is costing you
$250 a week. If you’re doing it yourself, you’ll need to estimate how much your
own time is worth and perform a similar calculation.
Don’t forget to bake
in all the associated costs like hosting fees for your blog, monthly fees for
those cool social media management tools you’re using, money you spent on
hiring designers, general office overheads, and so on.
4. Calculate Your Content Marketing
ROI
To calculate the
return on your investment, you simply look at the money you’ve earned from
content marketing as a percentage of your costs. Here’s the ROI formula:
ROI = (Revenue − Cost) / Cost
So, for example, if
you’ve earned $1,000 from content marketing, and it cost you $800 to produce,
then your ROI would be:
ROI = ($1,000 – $800) / $800 = $200 / $800 =
25%
You could calculate
the ROI for your content marketing as a whole for a certain time period, or if
you have good enough data available, you could calculate it for particular
channels or even specific pieces of content.
Of course, depending
on your objectives and what you’re tracking, your metrics may not have a dollar
value. If that’s the case, it can still be useful to calculate ROI to make sure
you’re on track, but what you’ll need to do is assign a dollar value to the
metric.
After all, you’re
tracking it because it’s worth something to your business, right? So you just
need to decide how much.
For example, if you’re
tracking lead generation, you could look at some past statistics from your
business to see what each lead is worth. You might find, for example, that 10%
of leads end up converting into paying customers, and that those customers end
up spending on average $100 each.
So the value of each
lead in that case would be $10 (10% of $100). If you gained 50 new leads, then,
the “revenue” number you’d plug into the ROI formula would be $500 (50 x $10).
5. Embrace the Unknown
You’ve probably heard that famous old saying:
“Half the money I spend on
advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”
It originates from the
days of print advertising, when there was almost no way of knowing which people
had seen your ad in which newspaper or billboard, and how many of them became
customers as a result.
With content marketing
on the internet, of course, there are many more ways of tracking your
customers’ behavior and measuring your success. We’ve looked at some of them
in this tutorial, and there are plenty more metrics out there—we’re awash in
data these days.
But don’t let the
abundance of data fool you into thinking you can know everything. Sometimes,
people will read your blog post or watch your video, and although they find it
incredibly useful or entertaining, they’ll take no measurable action
whatsoever. No comment, no signup, no sale. The data will show a potential
customer lost.
Later on, however,
when they come across your company again, they’ll have a positive reaction to
it, due to the conscious or unconscious memory of that great content you
provided in the past. And on that occasion, or maybe the seventh or the
seventeenth time they come across your content, they’ll finally take action.
All of that content they saw before that will show in your stats as having been
ineffective, but it led to a result in the end. Again, this is something traditional
advertisers knew very well: that’s why ad campaigns are so repetitive.
So the final thing to
remember about measuring the success of content marketing is that some things simply
can’t be measured. When you put articles or videos or other content out into
the world, the results can be unexpected.
As well as getting new
customers in unexpected ways, you may also find yourself being invited to speak
at conferences, or getting quoted in newspapers, or attracting new business
partners, all on the strength of a good article you wrote. The intangible
benefits of building authority and brand awareness can be very powerful.
Our Envato Tuts+ data
analyst, Michael James Williams, has recently explained some of the other ways
in which data can be misleading in a fascinating series of articles. I’d
recommend reading them:
In this tutorial,
you’ve learned how to measure the success of your content marketing. You’ve
seen why it’s important to start by clearly defining your objectives and
ensuring that your metrics are aligned to those objectives.
We looked at a variety
of different metrics to use, and covered how to calculate your content
marketing ROI. And finally we covered some of the intangible and unexpected
benefits of content marketing.
Here’s one last thing
to keep in mind: content marketing is a long-term
strategy. In the beginning, it can be very difficult to get any attention,
but as you do it consistently for months and years, you can start to see a
snowball effect, as you gain more followers, and those followers share your
content with other people, gaining you even more followers.
So don’t panic if you
find yourself with a negative ROI in the first few months—that’s completely
normal. It may take a year or more for your efforts to bear fruit. As with any
business project, you’ll want to see a measurable effect eventually, but be
patient in the early days. The most important thing is that your chosen metric
or metrics are heading in the right direction, and that you use the results to understand
which types of content work best with your target audience and give them more
of that content.
I hope this tutorial
has helped you. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment, either
here or in the forum.
