How do you measure your ROI?

03-Aug-2016 04:34 PM Digital Marketing

Content marketing is being used extensively by most firms or businesses and indeed, it will continue to be used to a great extent because of its smart techniques. Content plays a crucial role in this marketing act; but its efficiency as a marketing tool can only be assessed if its impact can be measured.

The first step is to generate quality content. The content should be compelling enough for a customer to forward it to others. Also, it helps to create a community or  bring people around the product or service, so that the customers also become the marketers of the firm. If a firm follows these general rules, the content it creates will be very efficient and valuable. As to how valuable and efficient it will be, is the question.

Before starting as to how to measure the ROI of the content, let us see what metrics are.

Metrics are like parameters that are used to quantify the performance of a firm. In simple terms it is used to measure a firm's performance and behaviour. Now, these metrics cannot function without Key Performance Indicators (KPI) which is established at the beginning of a content marketing strategy. Following metrics need to be analyzed and understood to get a picture of the content's impact and effectiveness:

Consumption Metrics

These are metrics that try to find data that can help decide how many times the content was read or used and also to determine what paths lead the readers  to that particular content. Total visits, unique visits, downloads, cost per visitor, bounce rate etc are few KPI metrics which can help in this aspect.

Social Media Shares

Social media shares and consumption metrics share similarities, but social media that already has a huge impact on people can directly influence KPI metrics. This in turn can help you measure other metrics .

Lead Generation

This is another aspect related to ROI. The site can decide a lead value price or the amount of leads that need to be generated to meet the target of the firm through this metric. So, for example, if a firm spends INR 1000 on content and another Rs 2000 on promoting the content and if the lead has a value of INR 25 then the number of leads that the content must generate is 120.

Sales Metric

This is yet another way of determining the ROI. Sales conversion rates are the most effective tools to  know whether the content is paying returns or not.

Last but not the least is to analyze the metrics and then modify our content accordingly to increase the profitability of a smart strategy. Content marketing is in itself a very result-oriented marketing tool, but it is important to also know its impact to determine whether it gives a good ROI or not.