With every business expense, you’re trying to estimate the associated return on investment (ROI), and some are easier to calculate than others. You know that success for your marketing is rooted in content marketing, right? (Read all about it when you download our white paper). But do you struggle in measuring your ROI for content marketing? How do you know whether the series you posted on little-known uses for hot glue is impacting traffic on your online craft store?
Calculating your ROI for content marketing can be done with an understanding of organic search traffic. Organic traffic comes from a person who conducted a search on products or services related to your brand and arrived at your website.
Calculating Your ROI: What does that have to do with content marketing? Well … everything. That’s because your search rankings are the result of your efforts in search engine optimization (SEO), which is achieved through strategic content creation, complete with keywords and other elements that make your content attractive to search engines (such as including video and regularly producing new content).
You can easily track your organic search and be confident that this type of traffic is coming to you compliments of your content marketing efforts using Google AdWords. Next, you can compare your organic traffic with the cost of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which comes with an easily-measurable cost. Sites like SpyFu make it relatively simple to estimate the PPC cost of similar traffic.
Gauging Engagement: There are other ways to determine whether your content marketing efforts are paying off by engaging your audiences. Without a single math problem (we hate those, too), you can figure out how many times your content has been shared, commented on or downloaded. You can also look at your email subscription list and determine how many people were willing to subscribe in order to get a copy of your eBook.
The title of this blog promised you a secret, and here it is: most companies quit too soon.
One of the biggest benefits of content marketing is the building of your reputation as an expert. But just like your teenage son who just discovered grunge music on Tuesday and crowned himself a Nirvana superfan, you’re just not credible when you’re new on the scene. It takes time to get your brand out there as a reliable source and the go-to voice in your industry.
If you’re still questioning whether your content creation is worth all the trouble, let’s sit down with some coffee and a few numbers. At SJC Marketing, we know the impact of content marketing, but we also know that the numbers tell the story. Contact us to find out more about creating a sound content marketing strategy and options for turning the whole process over to us.