How to measure the ROI of your content marketing and your content?

The days when most of the marketing / communication budget was eaten up by online advertising and paid ads are now behind us. Inevitably, with one internet user in two running an ad blocker, that business quickly becomes far less lucrative… Looking ahead to 2020, companies are devoting a growing share of their budget to their content marketing strategy.

And with good reason: content helps build the trust that internet users place in a brand, nurture the relationship with the audience, attract new qualified leads, and grow sales.

Marketing departments often struggle to justify their budget requests for deploying content marketing strategies. Are you, too, finding it hard to measure the ROI of your content? And as a result, you’re not really sure whether content is a more profitable investment than another marketing initiative?

In this article, we invite you to review the main benefits of content marketing and to discover different techniques for calculating the ROI of your content marketing.

The different types of content

To fuel your content marketing strategy, you have a wide range of formats at your disposal. Depending on your challenges, your objectives, the type of your audience, and also your brand identity, the challenge is to choose the best formats for your content marketing. Infographic, ebook, case study, white paper, video, interactive content, blog post, landing page: a myriad of possibilities is available to you.

Which content works best for your brand?

To answer this question, ask yourself about your brand’s values, the nature of the information to convey, and the type of your audience. Through its content, your company must build a conversion funnel that fosters lead nurturing and generates as many conversions as possible.

We can imagine that the most effective format for attracting new leads is a downloadable ebook or a free webinar. Then, blog posts and content shared on social media or delivered through newsletters serve to stay in touch until the lead is mature and ready to buy.

Before diving into creating content, it is essential to answer 3 questions, and to do so at each stage of the buyer’s journey:

• Who are your personas?
• What are their needs?
• How do they behave?

Of course, the content format is dictated by the topic to be covered and the angle from which it is approached. But all content converges toward a common goal: gaining visibility on Google! Whatever the type of content you choose, the quality of the SEO obviously determines its visibility on the SERP.

Our content optimization platform Semji helps you make your content more effective and more visible on Google. Powered by an AI that analyzes the structure of SERPs, the solution lets you identify your content with strong SEO potential and suggests all the essential optimizations you need to appear at the top of the results.

Want to learn more about Semji? Request your personalized demo without further ado!

The objectives of the different types of content

Each piece of content has its objective and its KPI. Let’s take a closer look at the characteristics of the 3 formats regularly used in content marketing to better understand their role within the strategy:

Type of content	Objectives to meet	KPIs to analyze
E-booksand white papers	Qualify the audience Generate inbound leads	Number of contacts generated by the form Number of downloads Number of visitors reaching the landing page Conversion rate Number of shares on social media
Live webinars	Establish expertise	Number of visitors reaching the landing page Number of shares on social media Number of webinar registrations VS number of attendees Community engagement rate Number of content downloads Conversion rate
Corporate blog	Multiply the sources of traffic to the target site Build the reputation of an industry influencer Refine the editorial strategy	Number of views of each piece of content Overall traffic Number of ranking keywords Change in the site’s position on the SERP Number of backlinksConversion rate if a CTA is present Number of shares, comments, and reactions on social media

To help you decide which content to include in your strategy based on your objectives, here is a matrix proposed by Smart Insights:

Why should your brand invest in content marketing?

There is no shortage of reasons to invest in content marketing: building brand awareness, improving SEO, increasing sales… Let’s take a more detailed look at the benefits content marketing brings to your brand.

Content in the service of SEO

Google loves content, which is the raw material of its search engine, hence the value of building a content marketing strategy with an SEO approach. Without content, there is nothing to offer internet users… That is precisely why content quality ranks first among the main Google ranking factors. The Mountain View firm continually pursues the same objective: to provide its users with the search experience that lets them obtain the most relevant answers to their query. Informative content is often the best way to deliver that experience.

Moreover, Matt Cutts, a former Google engineer who regularly comments on SEO news, says and repeats it in every one of his talks: “The best technique for earning a good ranking on Google is to write good content”. Recent studies show that the content within the site is even THE most important factor in an SEO strategy.

Source: Statista

Globally, Google remains the leading source of traffic to websites. So there’s no reason to neglect it… And every reason to make the most of it through content marketing!

Source: SparkToro’s

Establish your reputation and your credibility

Rolling out a content marketing strategy that puts your expertise front and center gives your brand the status of a reference in its field. All the more so if your content ranks among the top positions on Google! By multiplying your positions in the Google Top 3 on strategic keywords and queries, you naturally build your spontaneous brand awareness by allowing internet users to associate your name with your sector.

On the credibility side, your brand becomes a thought leader by consistently presenting its opinion and its solutions on all the challenges of its sector: an extremely beneficial position for your business!

Boost sales

While sales growth is explained by higher traffic driven by good SEO positioning, content marketing also helps build brand awareness and reassure the audience. A brand with a strong presence that showcases its expertise through its content will record better sales than a brand that stays in the shadows. What’s more, the more involved the purchase, the more the brand will need to be reassuring through its content marketing. Once past the reassurance stage, the brand must remain present and provide satisfaction so as to clear stage 2, which is what enables the move from consideration to purchase.

Another advantage, and not the least: through your content, your brand keeps control and has the power to influence the purchase decision before it is made. If you are able to bring your expertise and your vision at the moment when the customer is researching and looking for elements ahead of a future decision: you’ve won everything!

Build, maintain, and nurture the relationship with your audience

By making content available on the web, brands give internet users the opportunity to come to them. Content ranked thanks to SEO is a bit like a door left permanently open, that anyone is free to walk through whenever they want or need to. Far from being intrusive, the brand is simply present and ready to make itself available whenever necessary.

Content marketing allows the company to maintain contact with the customer and to be able to close the sale as soon as the right moment arrives. On their side, the customer has moved from being obligated to buy a product to being offered a valuable resource that is available when they are inclined to buy and trigger the sale. Your brand ends up extremely valued because it steps in exactly when the internet user needs help, giving them the answers they were expecting.

With a view to lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead conversion, content marketing proves to be an unbeatable technique.

How to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing?

Creating a wealth of content turns out to be an excellent idea, provided that this content is relevant and useful both for your audience and for your company. But how do you measure the effectiveness of a content strategy?

Set up KPIs

There are plenty of KPIs. To get a precise view of the performance of your content strategy, you need to choose them well. To point you in the right direction, here is an overview of the most frequently used KPIs:

• what is the volume of content produced?
• how frequently is this content published?
• how many times is your page viewed?
• how many unique visitors come to the page?
• how many visitors return to this page?
• how many qualified leads are generated by this page?
• how is your reputation on social media evolving?
• how many clicks on CTAs or other links does your content generate?
• what is the bounce rate on your page?
• how many comments and reactions are prompted by the content?
• how many visitors arrive on your page through organic search?
• how many backlinks lead to your page?
• how many internet users have shared the content?
• how many downloads or newsletter sign-ups have been generated by the content?

Of course, the goal is to select the most relevant ones according to your activity and your objectives, then to track how these KPIs evolve over time, at regular intervals. Are they progressing, stalling, or declining?

Track your results with analytics tools

Semji lets you track the conversion goals you have previously defined in Google Analytics Universal, Google Analytics 4, AT Internet, and Matomo. You’ll no longer have to switch between different applications to find out which content performs best: you track all of your performance data, including traffic, clicks, revenue, transactions, and conversion goals in a single tool. You can display the KPIs that are most relevant to your company based on your objectives. Thanks to this feature, you can immediately assess the performance of your content / SEO efforts!

How to calculate the production cost of your content?

Content marketing is a spending item that carries increasing weight in companies’ budgets.

Before we look at the methods for measuring the ROI of your content, let’s first see how to estimate the costs associated with producing your content marketing. Without knowing exactly the real cost of an investment, it’s hard to know precisely the ROI!

Creating the content marketing strategy

Before the actual content creation and semantic study, you obviously need to devise the content marketing strategy. Producing content for the sake of producing content is completely useless. It must fit into an overall reflection around your activity and the direction you want to take.

A study conducted by Vertical Measures reveals that developing a content strategy can cost between €5,000 and €50,000, depending on its level of complexity.

These 4 major pillars of the content marketing strategy need to be studied with great rigor:

• Analysis of the audience and its expectations,
• Definition of the objectives and target benchmarks,
• Creation of a content plan tailored to your company,
• Creation of the editorial calendar.

Pay particular attention to planning your content: this element can make all the difference and lead your strategy toward success… Or toward failure

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Who is involved in the content production process?

To accurately grasp the cost of your content, you need to identify everyone who is involved in one way or another during its production. A narrow view would be to believe that the cost of a piece of content corresponds to the writer’s rate. Yet the writer is only one link in the chain.

Generally, the people involved in a company’s content production are:

• the marketing manager,
• the content manager,
• the editorial manager,
• the writer,
• the SEO consultant,

and more rarely:

• the graphic designer,
• the community manager.

Every company has its own way of working when it comes to devising and rolling out its content strategy. Generally, the content covered by a company is decided during editorial and strategic meetings held by committee.

How much does producing a piece of content actually cost?

As is often the case, the real answer is “it depends”! The elements that cause the price of content to vary are generally:

• the writer’s skills,
• the complexity of the topic to be covered,
• the creation of visuals and graphics,
• the research time required,
• the number of versions needed before approval,
• the SEO optimizations…

According to Vertical Measure, the cost of producing a “good” piece of content would range between $500 and $3,000. So the range is quite wide…

In France, the average cost of producing a piece of content from A to Z is estimated at €1,000.

Obviously, such an investment must pay for itself!

How to measure the ROI of your content?

You will no doubt find many articles that – as we did earlier – point you to the KPIs for measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing. But in the end, few address the question of true ROI, in the financial sense of the term: “I invested €X in my editorial strategy; how much does that investment bring me back”?

To answer you, we drew on an extremely detailed and interesting study conducted by Oracle, in collaboration with Kapost and Eloqua. It is based on 50 large companies from different sectors that publish content regularly.

Source: Oracle

Oracle’s take on content marketing ROI

To highlight the effectiveness of content marketing, this study offers a comparison with paid search, considered the most profitable marketing technique to date.

The content marketing plan studied includes each week:

• 5 “classic” pieces of content: blog post, interview, news item in a media outlet…
• 1 premium piece of content: infographic, white paper, ebook…

Over one month, here is the monthly cost of the content marketing strategy for a mid-sized company:

And for a large company:

The main objective of the content marketing strategy is the acquisition of qualified traffic that will be turned into leads and then into conversions. These converted internet users will in turn generate revenue that will make the investment in content pay off.

According to the study, here is the traffic attracted each month by the content marketing strategy, which is visibly exponential:

Based on this chart, we see that the efforts really begin to pay off after 12 months. The bulk of the traffic acquisition happens between 12 and 24 months after the marketing strategy is deployed.

At the same time, the acquisition cost, or cost per lead, drops:

In the space of just 5 months, the initial acquisition cost drops by 80%!

Here is the estimate of the cost per lead after 24 months of content marketing VS paid search:

The figures speak for themselves…

Overall, this study demonstrates that content marketing attracts more leads at a cost far lower than that of paid search.

Content marketing is a genuine strategy to roll out over time, unlike a paid campaign that has a start date and an end date.

Is producing content really profitable?

A good content marketing strategy helps to drastically reduce the customer acquisition cost.

Once produced and well ranked, content generates leads on a daily basis, just by existing and being visible.

Your challenge is therefore to succeed in maximizing the visibility of your content. Semji can help you achieve that result. Our solution lets you quickly produce better content than your competitors. To learn more about our platform, request your personalized demo right now!