Is your content marketing campaign really paying off? You’ve invested a lot of time, money, and resources into it. What’s your return on investment? How much is the campaign increasing traffic to your website? How much of that traffic is turning into leads, and sales? And, most importantly, how do you tell?
With traditional forms of marketing, measuring your ROI is done largely through trends, formulas, and estimates. It’s impossible to get exact figures for how many people saw your billboard, and it’s even sketchier determining how many of those people the billboard convinced to buy your product.
But Internet marketing is different. On the Internet, analytics allow you to measure every pageview, every clickthrough, and every search query that relates to your site, your product, or your brand. The two major services that help you measure your content marketing ROI are Google Analytics, and Hubspot, though there are others as well. An analytics service provides you with a detailed report of exactly who’s interacting with your content and how.
Say you have a blog. Your posts provide detailed and helpful information for your particular field, and include links back to previous blog posts, as well as to a landing page on your website. Most blogs and websites will tell you how many views a particular page or post has gotten. That gives you a rough idea of how well your blog is doing. But an analytics service can provide you with a list of all the different search queries that led people to your blog, ranked in order of popularity. And once a viewer reaches a particular blog post, analytics can tell you where they went from there. Did they just leave your site entirely after clicking the post? Or did they click on any of the other posts you linked to? Did they wind up on the landing page? Did they spend a few minutes exploring your site? An analytics service can track a person’s entire visit to your site and tell you where they’re from, how much time they spent on your site, and ultimately what’s getting traffic and what’s not.
Depending on what service you use, there are also options to track e-mails and social media the same way. That newsletter you sent out last month: how many people actually opened it, rather than sending it straight to their spam folder? Of those people, how many clicked on the coupon you included? How many clicked the link for more information on your big announcement? And on social media, how many of your followers are sharing your content with their friends, and how many of THEIR friends are clicking and sharing?
But of course, the most important question of all is, in the midst of all these clicks, how many people are actually buying your product? And what’s the content that’s most effective in getting them to do so? Knowing this can help you refine your marketing strategy to get the most out of your content. And it can show you exactly how much you’re getting back from the time and money you’re putting into a campaign. That way there’s no doubt as to whether or not it’s worth it. It’s all there in black and white.
