Content Marketing ROI: Measuring Your Success in 4 Steps

Content marketers typically don’t decide to run a marketing campaign on a whim, hoping it will be successful. Instead, they rely on proven marketing metrics to help inform and guide their content marketing strategy. Marketers measure a campaign’s key metrics like views, bounce rate, engagement, and conversion rates, along with its return on investment (ROI), to evaluate its effectiveness. Google Analytics and other tools help content marketers calculate these metrics, but they aren’t always required.

Measuring the performance of your work is essential for knowing which strategies are most successful, when your team needs to make adjustments, and how to run the most cost-effective marketing campaigns. This approach is standard for all types of marketing, including content marketing.

What is content marketing ROI?

Content marketers run numerous campaigns, creating various types of online content from blog articles to social media posts, podcasts, videos, and more to attract and engage consumers. The purpose of content marketing is to grow brand awareness, develop interest in the brand’s products or services, and help generate leads. The overall goal is to increase conversions and sales.

One way to know if you’re achieving your content creation goals is to measure your content marketing ROI. This metric measures the revenue generated from your content marketing campaigns as a percentage in comparison to the amount your business spent.

While the most common content marketing ROI refers to revenue generated from campaigns, there are other metrics besides sales revenue that content marketers can measure. Take customer lifetime value (CLV), for example, which measures the total revenue generated by a customer over the course of their relationship with your business. However, this metric is less straightforward than marketing campaign-based ROI. To maximize your content marketing strategy, ROI remains the top metric.

To get a complete picture of your content marketing ROI, you may want to run separate ROI calculations for each type of content you create as well as your overall ROI. For instance, measuring ROI for blog posts, website SEO efforts, social media posts, or video content individually and as a whole. Taking this step gives you greater insight into which content types give you the best return on marketing spend and helps inform future content marketing strategy.

How To Measure Content Marketing ROI

Fortunately, calculating your content marketing ROI isn’t difficult, and you don’t need access to marketing analytics tools like Google Analytics to measure it, though they often include an ROI calculator and measure other key performance indicators (KPIs). You just need to know the right ROI formula to use.

B2C and B2B marketers can easily calculate the ROI of content marketing campaigns using this formula:

Content Marketing ROI = ( [Return – Investment] / Investment ) x 100 

When calculating ROI, it’s important to measure the total investment of each content type (i.e. all your blog posts or social media efforts), whether you’re calculating ROI for your entire content marketing efforts or each individual channel of content creation. That’s because conversion rates and revenue can vary greatly between pieces of content and different content forms. If you’re only calculating the ROI of one or two pieces or one content type, you won’t get a true understanding of your overall performance.

Examples

Let’s break content marketing ROI down into some real-world examples. A company with a total content marketing spend of $5,000 may decide to invest $2,000 in an SEO campaign to boost website traffic, $1,000 in social media content creation, and $2,000 in new blog articles to move prospects down the sales funnel. After running those campaigns, the business generated $15,000 in new revenue.

To calculate its overall content marketing ROI, the company would use the previous formula, which would look like this:

Total ROI = ( [15,000 – 5,000] / 5,000 ) x 100

= (10,000 / 5,000 ) x 100

= 2 x 100

= 200%

To calculate the performance of a specific marketing channel or compare performance between channels in this example, you would use the same ROI formula for each one. However, this calculation requires knowing how much revenue was generated from each channel instead of using total revenue. To determine this amount, you may need to use an analytics tool with an attribution model that can assign revenue to specific touchpoints along the customer journey (including social media posts or keywords).

For the purpose of this example, let’s say that social media posts contributed $3,000 of revenue and SEO efforts generated $4,000 (out of the original $15,000 total). Using the same formula as above, you can measure the ROI for each type of content marketing, which looks like:

Social media ROI = ( [3,000 – 1,000] / 1,000 ) x 100

= ( 2,000 / 1,000) x 100

= 2 x 100

= 200%

SEO ROI = ( [4,000 – 2,000] / 2,000 ) x 100

= (2,000 / 2,000) x 100

= 1 x 100

= 100%

Here, you can see that the ROI from social media posts is higher than SEO efforts, even though SEO brought in more revenue overall. Understanding your total content marketing ROI and being able to compare its performance across channels is critical if you want to make the most out of your strategies and campaigns.

What is a good ROI for content marketing?

Now that you know how to calculate content marketing ROI, you may wonder how to know if your ROI is acceptable, great, or needs improvement. Content marketing ROI is somewhat subjective and it can greatly depend on your specific industry, your overhead costs, the level of competition your business faces, and the content marketing channels you’re using. But, there are general standards and industry benchmarks you can compare your performance against.

In general, the minimum ROI you want to achieve is 200%, or a 2:1- ratio, where your business generates two dollars for every dollar it spends. While this ratio appears favorable, it’s low enough that your company may not make a profit after accounting for other business expenses beyond marketing investments.

To ensure a better outcome, most companies aim to achieve a higher ROI ratio of at least five to one, or 500% ROI, which is considered ‘good’ regardless of your industry. A marketing ROI between 500% and 1,000% (or a 5:1 to 10:1 ratio) is within the ‘great’ range, ensuring that your content marketing efforts are not only successful but also that your company is turning a profit.

What Content Marketing ROI Works For

More and more companies are using data to make informed decisions in numerous business aspects, including the marketing sphere. Content marketing ROI enables staff, managers, and executives to gain greater insight into campaigns and make the most out of their marketing budgets and efforts. Here are a few ways your business can use content marketing ROI to its advantage:

Justify Marketing Spend

Generally, businesses award specific budgets to content marketing teams. Those teams then use the funds to run their campaigns. Accurately measuring the sales or revenue generated from the initial investment is critical to prove why that spending is necessary.

Your marketing team may need this information to explain their work to their manager, or your Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) may use marketing ROI data in board meetings to substantiate the marketing department’s budget, ensuring you have the funds to run effective campaigns in the future.

Measure Campaign Success

Content marketing campaigns can be unpredictable, which is why it’s important to calculate ROI on a continual basis. That way, you’ll know if specific campaigns are successful or not, allowing your team to adjust their actions accordingly. You can also use your content marketing ROI as a point of reference when comparing current or future campaigns to optimize your content strategy.

Calculating the Marketing Budget

Determining your ROI and other marketing KPIs such as conversion rate, number of leads, and customer lifetime value for each content marketing channel is necessary to establish performance benchmarks and ensure you’re hitting your goals consistently. It also impacts how you plan your marketing budget and campaigns. If you know your business gets high Facebook Ads ROI, for instance, you’ll want to divert more resources to it over lower revenue-generating platforms.

Competitive Analysis

Sometimes, to truly understand how your business is performing in the marketplace, you need to compare your efforts against your top competitors. Marketing ROI is a great figure to compare because it averages performance statistics over time rather than singling out a single marketing campaign. Tracking industry averages and your competitor’s annual marketing ROI allows you to see how your business measures up and whether you’re on track or need to make changes.

How To Improve Your Content Marketing ROI

Like with other marketing metrics, there are steps your team can take to ensure more successful content marketing campaigns and a higher return on investment. Here are a few strategies to consider for improving marketing ROI:

Define Clear Goals

Take the time to develop specific goals you want to achieve during the planning stage of your content marketing campaign. Your goals could include anything from increasing your lead generation or conversion rate to reducing your bounce rate or even improving customer experience, for example. Defining the marketing metrics you’ll use to measure your campaign’s success (including ROI) is essential for understanding whether your marketing campaign is effective or not and helps you determine your next steps. Along with that, consider the various touch points your customers will interact with along the way and try to maximize your efforts on key channels.

Determine Cost

A 300% return on investment may seem great until your business factors in all its other expenses and realizes it barely made a profit. Understanding your company’s additional costs, especially as they relate to your marketing efforts, will help you get a clearer picture of your total investments. You may want to consider costs from hiring marketing consultants, purchasing analytics tools, subscriptions to customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, or premium marketing channels, just to name a few. Including these costs in your ROI calculations creates a clear, more complete measurement of your success.

Try Different Marketing Channels

To improve ROI, your business may want to experiment with marketing channels or platforms you haven’t used in the past for new growth opportunities. For example, repurposing video content into podcasts or blog articles. Or, you might just want to measure ROI between the channels you’re already using to determine which are most successful. Comparing ROI between different marketing channels allows your team to see which ones perform better, so you can choose to invest more resources into your most effective channels.

Perform A/B Testing

Sometimes the smallest details can have a significant impact on your ROI, which is why A/B testing is important. Altering one specific element of your content marketing efforts—like a social media post’s call to action, a blog article’s layout, or an email’s headline—can improve your performance and help maximize your marketing ROI.

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