The Difficult Search for ROI in Content Marketing
Does content marketing pay off at all? And if it does: how does it pay off? A few ideas for those who have always struggled with the term ROI in content marketing.
What I still sometimes have trouble with is the strong discrepancy between self-perception and external perception in content marketing. For yourself, you undoubtedly believe that you are a direct descendant of a multi-talented Michelangelo, who so skillfully applies every brushstroke that a fascinating painting of colorful content is created - with an impact-oriented content strategy as the result.
For some customers, however, you're just the sign painter who designed a brightly colored sign in front of a restaurant and whose success is measured by how much beer consumption has increased in the pub and how quickly the fee for the sign has been amortized in this way.
In fact, in such cases, one is inclined to tell the clientele that it also took a few hundred years for the Mona Lisa to pay off as a crowd puller for the Louvre. But we also know that an ROI perspective stretched over several hundred years is not really a seductive argument for customers.
Tim Soulo, marketing director of the SEO tool provider ahrefs, found a simple formula for the search for ROI some time ago, which I would like to translate as follows: Forget it.
Because a content strategy works in so many different directions that it would be sheer nonsense to view content marketing as a slot machine, where you put in a coin at the top, pull a lever, and lots of coins come out at the bottom.
Soulo writes, "We're not going to track how many leads we get organically from our articles, let alone what the CPA is for paid traffic to our articles. Measuring these things would only be the tip of the iceberg." And Soulo cites how content marketing works without needing excel proof of that impact: Content leads to a constant stream of leads at ahrefs because of good SEO work; Help Content makes user:s feel more comfortable with the nevertheless complex product, use it more professionally, thus better achieve their goals and continue working with ahrefs; Content helps convince users to upgrade their existing ahrefs subscription because they discover new features; Content is a wonderful tool to reinforce the "Mere Exposure Effect," that is, to create a sense of familiarity with the product through constant contact with ahrefs' content across multiple channels.
So how can you measure the feel-good factor of your target groups, how can you quantify, for example, how much content contributes to your customer making a paid upgrade to your SaaS offering somewhere? Sure: you can track click streams, create models to calculate the direct interaction between content and economic goals. But even that remains a poorly lit angle when considering ROI. The truth is: whether content works or not is revealed to some companies only after they have given up.
Maybe it's true: content marketing has a price. But its value is sometimes only discovered when you let it go.
Here are my recommendations for a good read:
Content Marketing ROI: How To Measure Your Success
It's complicated with ROI and content marketing. There is no simple formula. And here's why there can't be.
45 Statistics That Prove the Long-Term ROI of Content Marketing
Sometimes you have to convince the customer or even the skeptical controller in your own company with an avalanche of numbers. Here is the avalanche.
Most Companies Measure Content Marketing ROI Incorrectly. Here’s Why (and How to Fix It).
As an agency, yes, you are sometimes compelled to prove that what you do pays off. This article describes exactly how an agency tracks ROI in its campaigns.