Return on Investment (ROI) are words that appear golden to business owners if it reflects their company’s profit margin. Whether it is a film production company or a digital marketing company in Bangalore, organizations work hard to create valuable products that can record a positive return on their investment of time and money. It not only helps companies grow their brand value but also gives them the confidence to create more quality products. This proposition extends to content marketing as well. Quality content generates leads and affects sales positively. Therefore, let’s understand the concept of content marketing ROI.
What is content marketing ROI?

In simple terms, ROI in content marketing is the revenue you generate from your content marketing efforts in comparison to your spending. The more revenue you generate, the higher will be your profit margin.
While your ROI determines the overall impact of your content marketing tactics, measuring it isn’t a straightforward process. For example, it is easier to track the ROI of a PPC campaign, thanks to quantifiable metrics such as click-through rate, cost per conversion, bounce rate, impressions, and clicks. However, when it comes to content marketing, it can be challenging to gauge the ROI on methods such as blogs, videos, or podcasts. It’s because they don’t link to a trackable landing page as compared to a PPC campaign. Moreover, content marketing is a long-term process that focuses on variables such as audience growth and an increase in sales numbers. These variables align with content marketing’s primary goal of encouraging customers to click on a profitable action in the present and in the future.

Hence, the best way to quantify the performance of content marketing is to engage with sales-based metrics, as recommended by top digital marketing agencies in Bangalore and elsewhere. Let’s have a look at them.
Which are the metrics you need to measure your content marketing’s ROI?

1. Website traffic

Website traffic is of paramount importance for the success of your content marketing strategies. Without any traffic, the effort you took in writing your blog content will go in vain. Moreover, there won’t be any scope for revenue. After all, how can you monetarily gain anything from your content when your audience isn’t looking at it?

So, how do you measure the traffic on your website? Google Analytics is an easy way to go about it. On this platform, you can check on which pages your users frequently land by clicking on Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing pages. It will help you sort out your website pages with the highest traffic.

Moreover, Google Analytics also helps you figure out the referral traffic on your website. Referral traffic is the reporting of visits that came to your website from sources outside of Google or other search engines, such as social media platforms. By recognizing the source of your traffic, you can figure out a marketing strategy that will help you increase your traffic from that source.

The more website traffic you garner, the more leads you generate. Let’s know how you can measure the quality of these leads.

2. Lead Quality

The quality of your leads will determine the number of paying customers you will get on board through your lead-generation activities. The higher the quality of your leads, the more likely they are to become your customers. However, you must know your lead generation tactics thoroughly before measuring the quality of leads they bring. Some of the popular tactics include lead magnets and content upgrades. Let’s take a look at them in detail.

Lead magnets are incentives that marketers offer in exchange for their email address or other contact information. The incentives could be downloadable content, such as a free PDF checklist, report, eBook, whitepaper, video, etc. It will compel customers to exchange their contact information over something valuable, which will increase their trust towards that brand.

On the other hand, a content upgrade is bonus content users can access in exchange for their email addresses. Newspapers and online magazines usually use this strategy for subscription purposes. Their content generates interest amongst their readers and leaves them wanting for more; this is how they end up subscribing to their newsletters. You can adopt a similar strategy for your blog.

To measure the quality of leads generated with these tactics, you can use Google analytics. Go to conversions -> Goals -> Funnel Visualization to analyze which pieces of content are generating the most leads. If your bounce rate is low and conversions are high, it means your content is performing well. Hence, you target your content to these leads and expect them to convert into your customers.

3. Sales

After determining the quality of your leads, the next step is to convert your prospects into customers. It will paint a clear picture of your ROI on your content marketing efforts. If you convert your leads into customers, it means you’re nurturing the right content to your audience.

Again, you can use Google Analytics to measure your sales numbers. You can navigate to Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages and check the page value column. It will show you the average time a user spent on the page before landing on the goal page. This way, you can determine how a particular page contributes to the growth of your website.

But when it comes to content marketing, user behavior isn’t always linear. Assisted conversion is another factor brands have to incorporate in assessing their sales ROI. What is assisted conversion? It is Google’s way of measuring any interaction, other than the final click, that leads to a website’s customer conversion. It allows site owners to understand the value of a multi-channel approach for getting conversions.

Let’s understand assisted conversion with an example. Imagine your user reads one of your blogs and clicks on an embedded link that directs that user to your product. Now, the user leaves your website, researches about your product, and then comes back to your site to purchase it. In this case, the search engine “assisted” your conversion, instead the purchase being a natural flow from reading the blog to buying the product.

Now that you understand assisted conversion, how do you measure it? Look no further than Google Analytics. Go to Conversions -> Multi-Channel Funnels -> Assisted Conversions, and look for the assisted conversion value. You will find the amount your website generated directly, or indirectly through assisted conversions.
Now, let’s look at how you can measure the ROI of your content marketing through SEO practices.

4. SEO

Your content needs to rank high on the search engine to drive traffic to your website and its blog section. For that, you need to optimize your content with keywords relevant to the topic of discussion and searched by users. It is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into the picture. It’s a marketing practice that ranks your content through targeted keywords and lets you have high domain authority. With a high ranking, your content will reach more people, which in turn will generate leads and result in sales.

So, how do you measure the ROI for such a vital aspect of content marketing? One way of analyzing the SEO performance of your content is to search relevant keywords on the incognito mode of your browser. As the incognito mode is bereft of cookies and search history, you will get accurate results about the ranking of your content. The higher your content ranks, the better is your SEO performance.

You can also use Moz’s Link Explorer to find domain authority. Enter your URL in the search box, and the search results will tell your website and page authority ranking. It will also let you know how many websites are citing your content as a reference, which will increase your authority ranking.

5. Social Media

Apart from your SEO efforts, one of the best ways to promote your content is through social media. It is common knowledge that most of your target audience spends a lot of hours a day on social media, consuming various forms of content. If your content ranks amongst them, it can increase the referral traffic on your website or influence purchase decisions too. However, to encourage your audience to commit these actions, you need to identify social media platforms where you’re performing the best. Let’s take a look at a couple of ways to identify them.

The first option you can choose is Google Analytics, where you can analyze the traffic your website is getting from social media platforms. For example, if Instagram provides you with the most social referrals, it means your Instagram content marketing ROI was worth the investment. It also indicates that you must add more resources into your Instagram content marketing efforts to get more conversions and a higher ROI.
The second option you can choose is Buzzsumo. By entering the URL of your content, you can track the number of social media shares from every platform. If people share your content, it will reach a wider audience, which in turn will increase your leads and sales.

We hope this blog has helped you learn the different tactics to measure your content marketing ROI and the tools to do it. Various digital marketing services in Bangalore, Pune and other cities have found favorable outcomes using these tactics. Now, it is your turn to walk the path towards content marketing success.