Ecommerce and retail marketers can close the loop on content marketing ROI with specific goals and diligent measurement.
Even in the age of AI-generated content, writing articles that attract, engage, and retain customers comes at a cost. Content marketing is not free. Therefore, it should pull its own weight, so to speak, and generate a positive return on investment for any ecommerce, retail, or direct-to-consumer business.
Capability
As already stated, content marketing can be used in three ways.
- Attract new customers. Content is a foundation for search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing, both of which can draw potential customers to the business.
- Engage customers. Content builds a relationship between a potential customer and the business, often positioning the company as a trusted expert in the industry.
- Retain customers. Via a blog, email newsletter, or social channel, content helps a business stay in touch with customers between purchases.
Content Goals
The first step toward generating an ROI from content marketing is setting specific goals consistent with the discipline’s capabilities.
As an example, let’s focus on earning web traffic from search engines and encouraging email subscriptions.
We could have two, month-long goals related to content marketing in general.
- Attract 1,000 site visits from search.
- Get 100 new email subscribers.
In this example, the ultimate aim might be to get email subscriptions, while the number of site visits is a leading indicator of success.
Apply these goals to individual blog posts. So, if this is the first time your business has ever written blog articles, and you plan to publish four articles during the month, each post would need to earn 250 site visits and 25 newsletter subscriptions.
- Average 250 site visits per post.
- Get 25 (10 percent) of visitors to subscribe to email messages.
Set a value for each action you plan to measure. In this example, let’s imagine that we know the following.
- Five percent of email subscribers purchase monthly.
- The average order value (purchase) is $125.
Based on this information, 100 new email subscribers should lead to five purchases for $625 in revenue. Now, we can apply a value to each action.
- A site visit is worth 0.625 cents.
- An email subscription is worth $6.25.
Measure Content
Whether your company uses spreadsheets and basic conversion tracking or a full-blown business intelligence suite, you will track the same basic information for your content marketing efforts.
Start with information about the content.
- Title — the customer-facing title.
- URL — the path to the content.
- Topic — the keyword phrase or concept it is about.
- Author — the actual creator, not necessarily the byline.
- Publication date — when the content was originally published.
- Last refresh date — the last time the content was updated.
- Content type — blog post, podcast, video, etc.
These might be columns in a sheet or fields in a database, but they will tell you basic information about the content.
Next, capture key performance indicators (KPIs). These metrics should match your goals. So, for our example:
- Total site visits — the cumulative number of visits since the content was published.
- Monthly site visits — assuming a monthly goal, this would be a monthly tally of site visits.
- Month-to-date site visits — shows the number of site visits for the current month so far.
- Total email subscriptions — the cumulative number of email subscriptions since the content was published.
- Monthly email subscriptions — assuming a monthly goal, this would be a monthly tally of new email subscriptions.
- Month-to-date site visits — shows the number of new email subscriptions.
- Revenue — purchases attributed to shoppers who visited the content, subscribed because of the content, and made a purchase.
Obviously, the metrics tracked will change with different goals. Also, some goals might take more time to measure, for example, a shopper who visited and subscribed on April 15 and made a purchase on May 15 should still be consider a success.
Finally, track how much the content costs.
- Creation — how much you paid for a writer. Add the cost of any refresh too.
- Editing — this might be editing a blog post or a video.
- Graphics — custom images, AI-generated images, photography, and similar.
- SEO — did you pay to have an SEO resource develop keyword phrases or similar?
- Promotion — was the content promoted via a paid channel?
Calculate ROI
Measuring KPIs and costs will make it easy to do a basic ROI calculation.
ROI = Net Return ÷ Cost of Investment
Just remember that the Net Return is Gross Return – Cost of Investment.
So that you could also write this as follows.
ROI = (Gross Return - Cost of Investment) ÷ Cost of Investment
If it costs $400 to create four blog posts, and those posts drive 1,000 site visits, 100 email subscriptions, and finally, $625 in ecommerce sales, the ROI would be 0.3125 or about 31 cents on the dollar in its first month.
If the content produced similar results for a year, leasing to $7,500 in total ecommerce sales, the ROI would be $17.75 for each dollar invested.
Don’t get too excited. This is just an example, and it left out the fact that the content is at the beginning of the buyer’s journey, so we want to share some of the ROI with the email marketing and conversion optimization efforts that also attributed to the sales.
Optimize
At this point, you would know if content marketing was achieving the goals you set for it and if those goals were leading to a successful ROI.
However, measuring how content performs also gives you an opportunity to optimize, raising ROI over time.
For example, if you find that certain content topics lead to more site visits, more email subscriptions, and better purchase conversation rates, you can focus on that topic.
Or, perhaps, you learn that one of your writers is particularly good at generating email subscriptions, so the subscription rate is 20 percent instead of 10 percent. Well, use that writer more often.
Work to make each bit of content successful.
