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 !
22 ROI Examples of Content Marketing showing Hard Business Results
In the end CEO’s prefer to see clear results. Hard business results. They want to see the ROI of Content Marketing.
In this article I show you those hard business results using 22 examples of companies that used content marketing, and which had clear business results. These are not business results in terms of brand lift, social following increase, or whatever vanity metric you can come up with.
I will show you real cases, providing you with real numbers, where content marketing is increasing revenue for both B2C as B2B companies.
Before we jump into those 22 cases of hard cold business results of content marketing, first a little intro on the business value of content marketing. Read more 
Killer Content along the Buyer’s Journey: A Practical Guide to Monetize Your Content
The Mafia at Cleveland’s Hotel Statler. Photo: http://markwadestone.wordpress.com
Content can be actively used to move buyers through the buyer’s journey. Organizations need to visualize this journey. Visualizing this journey allows them to better understand which content they have and which content they are missing. Visualizing the content along the buyer’s journey also allows you to actively move buyers to the next stage in their journey.
Not so long ago Eric Wittlake (@wittlake) wrote an article why you should stop mapping content formats to the buyer’s Journey. He explains how marketers tend to map formats to certain stages in the buying cycle.
This post will learn you how you can:
- use a practical method to create the right content along the buyer’s journey
- how you can actively drive buyer’ss through the buying cycle, with content
- how you can link content with marketing automation
- understand which data the method produces to show real marketing ROI
To understand the role of content in this, you first need to understand the difference between content formats and content itself. Read more
CEO’s Agree: Marketers don’t show Marketing ROI. How to regain trust?
Are we blind for our own Marketing ROI?
(image source: lifehacker.com)
Showing Marketing ROI and the ability to contribute to the growth of the business is in many ways the biggest challenge of every marketer.
Every so often reports show that B2B marketers have problems showing Marketing ROI. And then marketers have to do ‘more with less’.
Why is this?
Why do we have problems in showing our Marketing ROI? What can we do to regain trust from our CEO?
