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Follow These 4 Easy Steps and Showcase The Value of Content Marketing To Your Boss
Content marketing is a tricky subject, and even more tricky is the part about explaining the value of content marketing to someone who cannot find the difference between a blog post and an article. While there are advocates of content marketing, some might argue that there are better ways to market your brand.
If your boss or CMO advocates that the value of content marketing is solely determined by the sales or retention it generates, it can be a struggle to translate your performance into real business value every time you try to prove them your content marketing strategy’s success. ROI is an obscure idea, and there is no hard and fast rule to calculate the exact content marketing ROI generated either.
But what do you do when time-on-page, page views and organic traffic is all that your boss really cares about? How do you translate the metrics into real business value to paint a clearer picture of your performance?
While investing in reliable content marketing services can prove to be helpful, you can always raise your game to increase the engagement and revenue generated from your content. Listed below are the four pivotal rules that are paramount to increase the value of content marketing.
1. Chalk Out Your Content Marketing Goals
Figuring out the goal you’d like your content marketing strategy to work towards is important. You have to fix an achievable goal before starting marketing campaigns, and not just for the sake of it. You need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and through whom – that is, your target audience.
The goals can be as simple as wanting to increase the organic traffic by a percent this month, creating brand awareness by propagating its mission clearer through your content, or increasing conversions or MQL’s.
If you’re at a loss and have no clue where to begin, reviewing your site on Google Search Console or Google Analytics can help. Sites as such can really help in increasing the generated value of content marketing.
The effectiveness of content marketing strategy can be determined by the number of goals it achieves. If your marketing strategy checks just a third of the goals that you set, maybe you need to change the strategy itself. And let’s be honest, if one does achieve one’s set of goals, chances are, it will increase the revenue generated as well.
2. Report and Refine the Metrics
Even the most effective content marketing strategies can have underlying loopholes that might be hard to detect. And this, in turn, might affect the generated value of content marketing or revenue, and the worst part is you’ll have no idea how or why.
So the goal here isn’t to baffle yourself trying to figure out the subtle drawbacks that you might be missing out. The point is to focus on what is making your content successful in the marketing world and strengthening it further. It’s important to continually review and analyze your content to find out what draws the audience towards it.
For example, Twitter, after repeated reviews and refinements, figured out that the blogs on “top ways” or “top things” attracted way more organic traffic than the others. So, they started incorporating such articles more into their blog content, to market their content better.
If you focus on the plus points of your content and highlight them more, it will automatically increase the amount of organic traffic and retention. This in turn shall increase the content marketing ROI generated as well.
3. Measure Your Content’s Performance
The holy grail of effective content marketing is identifying what your benchmarks measure should be.
You can view your measurements from two perspectives:
- Awareness and Engagement: Like increasing organic traffic, growing your target audience, getting more people to subscribe to your blogs and download your content.
- Business opportunities: Obtaining more sales leads, increasing the conversion rates and total sales, and so forth.
Metrics to Measure Brand Awareness
To measure the value of content marketing your marketing strategy might generate, it’s important to determine the amount of brand awareness it’s creating in the first place. Track the social shares, mentions, impressions, and traffic that visitors visiting your website for the first time are creating.
Log into Google Console and check the number of clicks, rankings, and organic impressions that your website is receiving.
It might be daunting to do it all because let’s be honest, no one likes to know that their site’s ranked lower than before. But it’s important to know why, and how. In the same way, if it’s ranked higher and is successfully creating more traffic and awareness, you need to know its how’s and why’s as well.
Once you do, you can go ahead and incorporate the factors into your upcoming content. Dig deeper and find out the new keywords for which your content is being ranked, and where. Analyze the changes, figure out why, and try to focus on them more. You might have to walk an extra mile to scheme it out, but it’s worth it. Constant reviewing and refining can help create a more effective content marketing strategy.
Measure the Traffic Generated and Overall Engagement
Analyse the amount of time for which your audience stays on your website. Do they justview one single page and instantly leave your site, without viewing other pages? How much time do they spend on every page?
If you go through these numbers, they can help you help get a ballpark figure of the amount of engagement your content is creating. These vanity metrics or parameters can give you a deeper insight into the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy.
If you individually analyse the average session time of each webpage, you can figure out the common attributes that make your audience stay on your page longer.
To increase the value of content marketing generated by your strategic marketing layout, aim to increase the blog page views, and time on page. You can also extend the video view length so that people stay on your page for a longer duration. Try to decrease bounce rates as much as possible.
Lead Metrics and Conversions
Increasing the volume of responses and leads generated from gated content assets is crucial to growing the generated value of content marketing. An effective content marketing strategy is one which aims to increase the conversion rates on your landing pages, and the percentage of marketing pipeline generated.
Conversions are basically the content marketing results that can generate more content marketing ROI. This means tracking form fills, number of subscribers, and MQLs. Sites like Google Tag Manager can recognize and trace these events, and help you determine how your content is affecting the conversions.
Try setting benchmarks based on the data you just collected. Record the data every month to check whether you’re exceeding or staying behind your set goals.
Also, don’t forget to record the pieces of your content which are standing out every time. It will help you create an effective content marketing strategy based on the type of content you need to attract more traffic.
Retention and Loyalty
All of the aforementioned factors might help you increase the value of content marketing of your brand, but try not to forget that retaining your previous visitors and working for their loyalty can majorly add to the company’s content marketing ROI.
Keep modifying your content to increase the number of returning visitors to your site and pages to increase engagement. Growing your content subscription database and retaining the ones who have already been loyal to your site is important to increase the value of content marketing your brand receives.
And if all of the above factors are something that you’ve tried out but to no avail, seeking professional help from reliable content marketing services can shed some light on where you are lagging behind.
4. Educate Your Boss or CMO About The Value Of Content Marketing
Your boss or CMO might be most concerned about the sales generated, savings, or time on page and factors of such sorts. While these are some pretty good measures to determine the value of content marketing generated through your content’s performance, translating it all together into sales and revenue can be hard.
Perhaps you can start out from determining the amount of form fills or MQLs that your content has generated. Or how many deals has your content helped the sales team close. Gather the numbers, and determine the value of content marketing generated based on the closure rates of your sales team.
Also, you can perform a comparison of the likes, mentions, and special shares of your content to that of others. If you are consistently on top, it’s a given that your efforts in increasing the effectiveness of content marketing are better than theirs. If not, try to find out the points where you’re lagging behind, and focus on them harder.
Follow the aforementioned points and you’ll undoubtedly be successful to prove your boss or CMO the value of content marketing. Sometimes, the value of content marketing does get lost in translation, but that shouldn’t hold you back from striving harder to prove your boss and peers otherwise. And if all else fails, investing in reliable content marketing services can be of great help. They’ll offer you professional guidance to market and endorse your brand’s content better.
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