Measuring the ROI of content marketing
Despite a huge surge in adoption of content marketing, measuring the business impact or calculating the ROI of content marketing is complicated.
“How do I calculate content marketing ROI” is one of the questions I get the most from people wanting to start with content marketing. Often, when it comes to content marketing, marketers are struggling to build their own business case internally.
With this post I want to demystify the field of content marketing ROI, and provide some practical help on how marketers can measure things that have a quantifiable impact on the results of the brand.
In this post I cover the following subjects:
- what is important to measure?
- how do I select the right metrics and KPI’s?
- how can I setup a dashboard? how do you calculate ROI?
Are you ready? Here we go !
Digital Marketing Transformation – 3 Strategic Pillars of Change
Marketing in the eyes of CMO’s is becoming increasingly complex. Embracing this complexity is not easy, as it requires changes in your organization, skill-set and technology. Embracing this change requires a digital marketing transformation.
But it’s a necessary change: the technology revolution and the increasing power of large dominant internet players are forcing modern CMO’s to rethink their strategy.
The action required required boils down to 3 strategic pillars of change:
- building a customer centric organization
- Introducing a broad new skillsets
- Investing in backbone marketing technology
Let’s take a deep dive in each of these strategic pillars of change…
Why CMO’s are becoming CIO’s: Extreme Complexity
As one frustrated CMO exclaimed at the Forrester CIO-CMO Summit in 2013, “I feel more like a CIO than a CMO! I have marketing automation, CRM, listening platforms. I’m up to my eyeballs in technology.”
Just 3 years later, this overwhelming feeling is still very much alive. In virtually any market or type of business, the speed in which technology is advancing, is adding extreme complexity to the world of CMO’s.
Those that do not react will become obsolete. Read more 
The CMO’s Guide to Digital Marketing Organization Structures
Digital is everywhere. As a result, the pressure on leadership is increasing to redesign the marketing organization structure towards more customer centricity, customer experiences, data driven and personal marketing.
Marketing leadership is reacting by investing in new concepts such as content marketing, inbound marketing, marketing automation and (big) data marketing. But without the right organization, any of these new concepts is set for failure.
But today’s modern marketing organization is complex, and requires purposeful planning and a combination of talent, technology, and consumer insights in order to have a positive impact on the company’s bottom line.
In this blog post, I want to explore how you can structure your marketing organization, and answer the following questions:
- what skill-sets and profiles do you need?
- what organization structure do you need?
- what new functions and teams do you need?
- how will departments work together in new agile ways?
- how do you structure for content marketing?
- how do you organize for agile marketing operations?
Best-Of-The-Best Marketing Ebooks of 2015
Marketing is changing rapidly. Some say it has changed more in the last 5 years than it did in the last 500 years.
Responsibilities of CMO’s are also increasing due to the shift in buyer behavior and the fast changing world of marketing technology.
We may very well be entering a golden age of marketing, but this is not coming without some cost.
That cost is visible as a whole new learning curve for marketers, who are starting to have to be more and more technical. And on the other side you have technical people, who are having to learn more marketing.
Modern marketing leaders, or aspiring modern marketers must learn to master the discipline of lifelong-learning by continuously reading, studying and experimenting in an ever expanding field of marketing expertise.
Today, like I did in 2014, I want to provide you with a selection of the best marketing ebooks that have been created in 2015. These marketing ebooks are part of my way of lifelong learning, and I want to share some of the best that I found in 2015 with you.
(if you are not interested in the little personal story that follow, just scroll down to find the list of best marketing ebooks of 2015 !) Read more
How to Create a Unique Content Marketing Culture?
A culture of content goes far beyond enabling and empowering content creators outside of marketing.
A culture of content is an organizational environment and attitude that embraces and evangelizes the importance of content marketing and internal knowledge-sharing across the entire enterprise.
A business that achieves an internal culture of content is one that inspires employees—not just those in marketing—to create content for both internal and external consumption. If brands want to succeed as publishers long-term, their commitment to storytelling has to start with their company’s culture.
The question is: how do you do that? In this blog post I want to take you through a number of steps that introduce a genuine culture of content. Read more
5 Big Fundamentals of Digital Marketing Transformation
Transforming a marketing organization to embrace digital marketing requires change. Some companies seem to make this transition seamlessly, and other are struggling.
The dream of agile marketing operations, 1-1 marketing, digital customer experience, intelligent marketing technology and digital customer journeys seem to be impossible to reach.
What are some of the big fundamentals driving digital marketing transformation?
In this blog post I discuss 5 critical “must-do’s” to get organized for Digital Marketing Transformation.
But organizing for digital marketing transformation is not without its challenges…
Organizing for Content: A Detailed Overview
Organizing for content can be complex, very much similar to controlling a complex swarm-system, just like the swarm of birds in the picture.
Luckily you can get organized to control the complexity of content marketing.
In this blog post I want share in detail, using examples and best practices, how small, medium and large organization can get organized on different levels for content marketing:
- Strategy
- Organization
- People
- Processes
Best-of-the-Best Practices on Slideshare – My private collection
The first time I ever published something on Slideshare, I was excited. It was a presentation called “Spreading the Content Marketing Virus”, which in essence told “my story”.
It tells the story of why I dramatically shifted the marketing strategy of the company I worked for at the time. From outbound to inbound marketing.
Hybrid marketing is probably more correct, as we kept on applying paid media where useful. But also from analog marketing (does that even exist ?) to digital marketing.
I was excited because it was ‘my’ story. And obviously that’s important to me. Ever since then I have continued to post presentations on Slideshare.
Today I want to
- share with you what I learned on Slideshare,
- and share some of my “private web resources collection” of best practices about Slideshare publishing.
7 Ass-Kicking ‘Awesome’ Digital Marketing Ebooks of 2014
Catching the attention of buyers is done differently today. In the digital world we live in today, classic interruption marketing is less and less effective.
Applying traditional marketing tactics in the online world doesn’t work.
In your case as a marketing professional, you are constantly looking for insight, trends, best practices and how-to-do stuff. You are blind for advertising, you use Google as your best friend, follow RSS feeds of major marketing blogs, and subscribe to newsletters. Right?
What catches your attention? As digital marketers we are constantly flooded with whitepapers, ebooks, ultimate guides and webinars.
Not all of them are of the same quality.
But sometimes you encounter brilliant, well researched, and extensive ebooks.
In this blog post I want to share some of the best ebooks I have found in 2014. Each and every piece is really useful, practical, visual, and something you want to save on your PC.
With the holiday period coming up, you might have some time to read some of them ;-).
* image by Mary(n_n)West, on Flickr.
