Content Marketing: Success Through KPIs and ROI

What are KPI and ROI?

Key performance indicator/index (KPI) is a measure that helps a company or firm to evaluate and measure its success rate. Not just this, it also allows your company to make smart and calculated decisions to move a step ahead. However. Return on investment (ROI) serves the purpose of acting like a ratio between the net profits and the cost of investments. A high level of return on investment implies that the cost of the investment is allowing more gains. Here it can be represented as

Profit > Cost

All in all, ROI is used to measure the efficiencies of several different investments.

When a firm gets a hold on both the KPI and ROI, it allows them to see the favorable and unfavorable parts of a business, assisting the company in making calculated decisions.

Let's talk about a few KPIs that you can measure on your website.

Unique page visits

A simple way to measure the quality of your content is to see the traffic it receives. Check the visits on your website to see how many individuals on a recurring basis are accessing your website. This will help you understand if they like your content or not. If not, it may be time to change your content marketing strategy a bit.

Time on page

Visiting a website is one thing. However, if a viewer stays on your site for a longer period of time, fills forms, and reads the articles, it says a lot about the content on your website. This means that your content has been of sufficiently high quality to warrant further attention.

Inbound links

Do you find people linking your website in their blogs and articles? This implies that your content has increased the validity and authenticity of your website. As more sites begin to perceive you as an authority, this can increasingly generate traffic on your page and assist you in reaching a higher search ranking spot.

Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Lead (CPL)

While all the other metrics may be useful, this one is most appreciated by most people. To measure these metrics you will need some indicators to help you evaluate what you have earned from your website. If you promote your content through pay-per-click advertisements or sponsored social posts, track your costs per click for those initiatives to see your return on the investment.

Likewise, cost per lead is yet another useful metric for measuring your content marketing ROI.

Lead generation

For several businesses, content marketing is mainly a lead generation tool, used through web downloads to gain leads. Keep records about how many leads come to you from content marketing, so if the deal closes, the content will get credit for that sale.

Conversion rates

When it gets down to content marketing, you will want to make absolutely sure that at every chance, you optimize your conversion rates. If not, you end up losing important leads that you could have converted.

You can use these KPIs to improve your content marketing strategy. Once you have knowledge about all these variables, you can implement them to see what is causing you setbacks and how can you earn more for your business.

Let us dig into ROI to know how you can evaluate your content marketing strategy a little more.

Examining your websites contents ROI is slightly different from measuring the ROI of a banner ad or Facebook ad campaign. That's because it can take multiple weeks or months for search engine results and your viewer to find about you and your content while you work on the website. However, if you already have a reader base, things may be different for you.

Simplify the Value of Content Marketing for 'Outsiders'

Rather than just assessing the content to validate it, with one simple calculation, you can also use cost tracking to continue making your content marketing black and white with one analysis.

Record the price of each piece of content that you are creating. If you are working with someone else, you might need to keep a record of the expenses you have incurred. Moreover, don’t forget to consider the time and effort spent on the website.

You should review the cost-benefit of your content. For instance, what are the total cost of your content in a year, or what is the weekly average? Then, to calculate your content marketing ROI, you can refer to your expenses and revenues.

Building the Business Case for Content Marketing

Content marketing is not conventional marketing or advertisement and involves an entirely different customer-centered and value-led attitude and approach. It's a different strategy to what is used to by conventional advertisers. Building a case will help you evaluate what you have done, what you have to do and what you should do. It provides a guideline for you to move forward.

Calculate Your Conversions' Value

This may be an easy calculation to consider for many companies— particularly those in e-commerce. Let's presume you're an online accessory store and have just launched your Thanksgiving campaign in November to market your diamond ring range. To a certain end, you introduced a content marketing strategy involving videos, a news release, and a blog post that earned some support from Facebook through your wise strategy for social media.

It is very simple, calculate the average purchase price of the overall sales of the rings. This would be your mean value as all of your revenue comes from your internet presence. It may become more difficult when there are more factors, such as a physical shop.

These content marketing calculations can be very beneficial for you to understand where you stand. It will help you asses what step should you take and if you should spend on a business or not. KPI and ROI may be the backbone of your business.
If you want to learn more about Digital Marketing KPIs (only in German), we recommend our guide: