How do you measure the ROI of content marketing?

According to this Marketing Land article, nearly $ 16.6 billion was spent in 2011 on content marketing. If you’re wondering why I’m referring to such an old link it’s because finding such a link wasn’t my intention, I just came across it. Anyway, a relatively new infographic gives a roundabout budget of $ 135 billion for 2014. But the point is, big money is being spent on content marketing. If so much money is being spent, then you must be interested in the ROI – how much money you earn back by investing money in content marketing?

Content marketing is obviously different from conventional advertising. It is not a campaign whereas conventional advertising is. In conventional advertising you run your ad in a newspaper or on TV and then you get a response. Suppose you spend $500 on an ad in a local newspaper which generates, let us say, 300 queries and you’re able to do a business of $15,000. You can easily calculate the ROI here.

Content marketing is an ongoing process so ROI is indirect

It is difficult to find the ROI of a single blog post although websites with lots of traffic can do that. I often tell my clients that it may take them around 6 months to make sense of the ROI on content marketing or at least on the content I am writing for them. The reason is that when you are routinely publishing content on your website, on your blog, and elsewhere, every new blog post, every new article, every new eBook or white paper and every new social update, is a brick and you’re using multiple bricks to build the platform from which you promote your business. Yes, some bricks are more effective than other bricks (some of your blog posts and social updates may go viral beyond your imagination) but mostly it is the sum total of all the content you have published on your own website or blog and elsewhere, that eventually begins to give you an ROI.

In order to get a sense of your return on investment you need to be very clear about your KPI’s – key performance indicators. Not every content marketing strategy aims to increase your sales (fine, by the end of the day, what matters is how much you have sold). Every business has different key performance indicators. Some simply want to raise awareness. Some want to increase their email and blog subscribers. Some want to improve their search engine rankings. You may want to enhance your personal brand that in return will get you more business or opportunities. You may want to generate more leads. And so on.

One way of calculating the ROI of content marketing

If you want to use content marketing to improve your search engine rankings then make a list of keywords for which you aren’t ranking well but would like to rank well. Then initiate your content marketing strategy. Provided you are making the right moves you should see an improvement within a couple of months. You can compare the expense you have incurred getting your content written or produced and your search engine rankings to calculate your ROI.

Another method would be to note down your current sales and your current content marketing expense. Then start observing your sales performance while keeping the content marketing expense the same. As I have already mentioned above, you may not notice a difference for a few months, but eventually (provided you do everything right – that is VERY important) you will. Surely the ROI will be negative initially but soon it will improve with every month.

Is it important to know the ROI of content marketing?

Obviously. This is the only way to know whether your content marketing is working or not. There may not be a direct method of knowing the ROI specifically due to the nature of your business, but there has to be a point A and then a point B and you should be able to know that how much content marketing has helped you reach from point A to point B and preferably, more effectively compared to other means of marketing.

How to create brand loyalty with content marketing

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This nice blog post on Entrepreneur lists different types of content marketing as infographics, newsletters, ebooks, videos, case studies and blog posts and information articles and then goes on to explain how content marketing helps you create brand loyalty.

The problem when it comes to small businesses is that most of the people think that content marketing means improving your search engine rankings. Yes, constant publishing does improve your search engine rankings especially when you don’t go overboard with your keywords and stick to creating quality content, but this is just one aspect of content marketing. This is how the Entrepreneur blog post defines Content Marketing:

Content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy that utilizes valuable and relevant content, adjacent to the business’s mission and brand, to draw in and enhance customer buying behavior and brand loyalty.

Three phrases are very important when it comes to executing a successful content marketing strategy:

Long-term implementation
Valuable and relevant content
Drawing people to your website or blog instead of barging into their personal space

Long-term implementation

You cannot execute a content marketing strategy in a couple of weeks or even a couple of months. It’s an ongoing process. Why is it an ongoing process?

Because everybody is a content publisher these days. You’re competing with 100s of businesses using content marketing as their main marketing tool. They are constantly reaching out to their target audience and if they are constantly reaching out, you also need to constantly reach out. Otherwise you will be left behind – whether you want to improve your search engine rankings or attract people on social networking websites. It needs to be a constant effort because you’re competing with multiple businesses at the same time. If you can outdo your competitors in perseverance, you will emerge victorious.

Valuable and relevant content

There is lots of junk content on the Internet because, fortunately for those who get content marketing, there are very few who understand the power of valuable and relevant content. Most of the people just want to fill up their websites and blogs with lots of content and most of this content is useless. It is mostly created hoping that it would improve search engine rankings. Does it?

In some cases yes, it does, but eventually better content wins. So don’t worry about creating lots of content, worry about creating valuable and relevant content.

Drawing people to your website or blog instead of barging into their personal space

Nobody likes to be disturbed. You must have noticed that now that we can do it, we quickly fast forward ads while watching interactive television. Even on YouTube you must have seen that after 5 seconds there is an option to skip the ad. 99.99% people use this option. It’s like throwing money down the drain. The more you interrupt people to push your product or service, the more averse they get to the idea of doing business with you.

Valuable content on the other hand people want to access on their own. They seek out such content.

Suppose someone is desperate to improve his email marketing conversion rate. He is either looking for someone who can help him or some useful content he can use to improve the conversion rate on his own. Suppose there is a good blog post on my website that explains, step-by-step, how one can improve email marketing conversion rate. Now, even if you stop that person from coming to my website, if he thinks that the information contained within the blog post is really valuable to him, nothing is going to stop him from coming to my website. You may think that he will use the information, improve his conversion rate, and forget about my website. Maybe that will be the case.

How persistent content marketing creates brand loyalty

But the next time he comes across somewhat similar content, somewhere else, from my website, he will immediately recall that help was available on my website when he really needed it. This increases my brand loyalty. The next time if he needs or if someone else he knows needs me he is going to contact me because using my information, he was able to improve his conversion rate.

By regularly creating helpful content you provide solutions to people that they may not find elsewhere and even if they find them elsewhere, the solutions are not as helpful as the ones available on your website or blog. When people come to your website by making an effort, when, as they have expected, they find high-quality, relevant and helpful content on your website, and when they understand that you’re going to provide high-quality content on an ongoing basis, you begin to experience brand loyalty. Your regular visitors become your evangelists. They will defend you. They will insist that people do business with you. They will promote your services and products on their own, sometimes, without even realizing.

Written content: 5 reasons why your website needs it

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You might think that since I’m a content writer I advocate the benefits of written content rather than various other formats of content that you find on the Internet, and basically in every medium. I don’t mind telling you that yes, I prefer written content over video or graphic content because I write and make a living off it.

Does content marketing constitute just written content?

No way. Every format of content has its own place and importance. If that were not the case websites like Pinterest (for posting images) and YouTube wouldn’t have been such great hits. These websites are not just for posting images and videos, they also get lots of traffic for various business websites. So if you hire me as a content marketer I would carefully study what sort of content your target audience prefers and then help you execute a content marketing strategy accordingly. In that sense I’m not biased towards writing simply because I provide content writing services.

Why your website needs written content

There are many people who think that their website does not need written content and they have their own reasons. If they don’t need written content, well, it’s their prerogative and I’m sure they know what they’re doing. Some websites actually don’t need text and they can do fairly well by solely depending on images and videos – it depends on your business model. But since I provide content writing services, my primary focus is highlighting the reasons why your website needs written, textual content.

Improve your SEO with written content: Yes, every sort of content these days gets indexed but there is a reason why you require text to search engine optimize your images and videos. Technology that can rank multiple formats of content mainly by processing visual cues hasn’t been developed yet. The rankings depend on the text surrounding images and videos. If you’re using images on your website, you need to put appropriate text within the alt attribute of the image HTML tags and you need to surround your image with related text to convey to the search engines exactly what the image represents. The same happens with your video. Even if you post your video on YouTube or one of the social networking websites, it’s the text that you use to describe your video that decides what type of rankings it enjoys. Given a choice between written text, images and videos, it’s the written text that enjoys better rankings because it’s easier to process text.
Educate your prospective customers and clients: You can do this even with videos and images and in fact, there is a popular saying “a picture is worth thousand words” but can you create something like FAQs using images or videos? Yes, you can create how-to videos that may look more friendly compared to written content but it’s always easier to follow step-by-step written instructions rather than watch a video, pause it, do what needs to be done, then play the video again, then again pause it, and so on. The written content on the other hand, simply stays in front of you – you can read the instructions and do what you need to do seamlessly.
Create scalable content: Written content is easily scalable. It can be viewed on every possible device including smart watches. The text doesn’t distort no matter how big you make it, which is not possible with images and videos. Text can be easily printed without wasting paper and ink. It can be easily copy/pasted without needing extra software or tools. No matter what width your browser window has, your written content can be easily viewed.
Produce and publish written content easily: It’s easier to publish and also less expensive. I don’t mean to undermine my profession, but you can easily find content writers but it’s always very difficult, and very expensive to work with a graphic designer or videographer. An infographic can easily cost you upwards $350 whereas you can get a blog post or an article of the same quality for $50. You don’t need special applications to produce written content. You can do it even using notepad. Publishing platforms like WordPress are meant to publish written content although these days they also allow you to seamlessly publish videos and images.
Create accessible content: Many governments these days make it mandatory to create accessible websites and this means the information on the websites should be readable by screen readers. These screen readers for the visually impaired can process text but they cannot process images and videos.

As I have mentioned above the intention of this blog post is not to say written content is better than images and videos. Every business has its own unique requirement and if your business does not require written content, I don’t recommend it for you.

How to come up with relevant blog topics for your audience

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Relevancy is essential for meaningful engagement. If people don’t find your blog posts relevant to their needs they are neither going to read them nor promote them.

A successful business blog requires regular posting. Your publishing schedule shouldn’t be intermittent – it should follow a consistent schedule. The problem with following a schedule is you constantly have to come up with relevant, interesting and well-written blog posts.

Many of my clients require me to send them a blog post every day and fortunately, most of them send me their own topics because they want to improve their search engine rankings (of course there are many others who pay me extra to come up with topics on my own). When they are not able to come up with topics they send me a basic idea of the wording and the keywords they would like to feature within the topics and then accordingly I create them.

You should constantly keep this in mind that whatever you publish on your blog it should help the readers. After reading every blog post they should go back enriched in one way or another. They shouldn’t feel like they wasted the time they spent reading your blog post.

How do you come up with relevant blog topics?

One way is to keep track of conversations going on on social networking websites like Twitter and LinkedIn, but mostly Twitter. I have created a separate column in Hootsuite for tracking conversations on all the niches on which I need to write regularly (content marketing, content writing, blog writing, etc., for instance, for writing on my own blog).

This Moz blog post titled 3 Steps to Identify Blog Topics That are Relevant to Your Audience suggests that you can also take ideas from popular blog posts on your own blog, but then of course for that you have to be publishing for a long time and you have to be having some popular blog posts. This is a good way of knowing for what people come to your website and what sort of blog posts they find useful.

Another suggestion is to take hints from your competitors’ websites. Although the Moz blog post advises you to use one of their own tools in order to track the performance of individual websites and links, you can also do this by manually visiting websites and going through the comments section. Normally popular blog posts attract way more comments compared to those that are not very popular. You can also gauge the popularity of a particular blog post if the publisher happens to use some social networking plug-in that shows how many times that link has been shared and recommended.

My favourite way of coming up with relevant blog topics for my audience is to maintain an ideas list. This list comes handy when you need to publish every day. You need to develop a habit of quickly jotting down ideas as soon as they come to your mind. You can use Evernote or any of the note-taking applications freely available. You can also use the voice recorder of your phone to quickly capture your thoughts.

11 essential ingredients for creating great blog posts

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The objective of every blog post that you write and publish should be to get maximum exposure from your targeted audience, and not just exposure, but also sharing love. Maximum number of people should share your blog post link using their social networking and social media profiles.

There are some key performance indicators (KPI’s) that help you decide whether a blog post that you have published is successful or not. It’s not necessary that you fret over every blog post because there are some blog posts that you publish simply for the heck of the pleasure that you derive out of the process and the sort of interaction you have with your visitors, but if you’re publishing a business blog, then it’s very important that you know exactly what you’re doing on your blog and how you define success. A blog post would be successful if

It creates enough buzz to attract new customers and clients to your website
It makes more people click ads if that’s how you make money off your blog
More people subscribe to your newsletter if that was the intention
It helps you get more search engine traffic for your targeted keywords
It increases your longtail keyword traffic
It gets greater attention on social media and social networking resulting in the outcomes mentioned above

There are some fundamental ingredients that you can use in order to make your blog post successful. 11 such essential ingredients are published in this Copyblogger blog post in the form of an infographic, but below is the bulleted compilation of these ingredients:

Create a killer headline that draws people from search engines and other websites to your website. Your headline should present to your audience the central message of your blog post in a most compelling and attractive manner.
Make a great opening. Your headline should be followed by an impressive opening that prompts people to read further. Otherwise all the advantage gained by the headline will be lost.
Use persuasive words. Such words not just give an adrenaline rush they also instil a sense of purpose in the process of writing as well as reading.
Be authentic. It will help you stand out.
Take every sentence seriously. Write good sentences.
Use bullet points to highlight main points of your blog post.
Divide your blog post under various subheadings giving a clear idea of what awaits.
Use the art of storytelling to keep your readers hooked.
Don’t reveal all your cards at the same time. Withhold your information and keep revealing small bits every couple of paragraphs.
Use attractive images to give more meaning to your blog posts.
Make a convincing conclusion so that people are not left clueless.