Increase Your Marketing ROI with Proven Content Development Strategies

Whether you’re working with a marketing company or you’re launching a startup and trying to wear every hat, each decision you make triggers a chain reaction that can make or break a brand. Every step you take to grow your business has to take into account the marketing ROI (Return on Investment), as in, “How much ROI am I getting out of this marketing activity?”

Problem is, digital marketing has become so complicated that it’s difficult to know when and where your efforts are paying off. In some cases, measuring ROI isn’t as simple and straightforward as adding a tracking code to a coupon or querying customers about how they became aware of your brand.

Why?

People don’t constantly interact with brands in a linear fashion. They may become aware of your brand via social media content or through search.

Maybe your chosen social media platform is the best way to get website traffic, but that traffic came to your account from a website you’ve never even heard of. The owner of the site just glommed on to and appreciates the types of social media posts you’re putting out. Your recent client acquisition actually came in because they were following the first site.

How on earth do you track that?

In other words, how do you find out your Return on Investment, your ROI, and defend your marketing spend?

One very effective way is by paying attention to the type of content you put out and how good it is at driving converting traffic. Let’s talk about it.

What is Marketing ROI?

As many of you already know, marketing ROI is the return you get from budget allocations in relation to business goals like growth, sales, and lead generation/customer retention. How much time and money is invested in marketing, and how much revenue did those efforts generate?

The basic formula for calculating ROI is also fairly simple, on the surface:

ROI = (Revenue — Cost)/Cost

For example, if your company generated $100,000 in sales, and it cost $50,000 to generate those sales, your ROI for that investment is 100% [ROI = ($100,000 — $50,000)/$50,000 = 1.0]

That’s a pretty healthy return if you always deal in whole numbers and one-to-one cause and effect.

Things aren’t so simple in the real world. Like many smart, diversified investment tactics, your marketing strategy is going to have some elements that pay off right away, some that pay dividends over time, and some that flat line or end up losing money.

The trick is to find and use tactics, tools, and techniques that help you:

• Craft a viable marketing strategy
• Match the elements of your strategy with the right audience and platforms
• Measure the value of your marketing investment

These will provide you with actionable insight into where your time and money are paying off so you can cut unprofitable elements of your marketing plan and double down on what’s working.

Note: Be aware that marketing ROI isn’t just measured in sales or increased traffic. It’s also based on things like social proof, engagement, customer retention, brand awareness and loyalty, and other sometimes intangible elements where the payoff isn’t immediately or readily apparent.

Why Focus on Improving Content Marketing?

Drawing the connection between boosting content and increasing your marketing ROI can seem difficult if you don’t put any thought into it. However, when you consider what your marketing consists of, it begins to make absolute sense.

What do you use to drive traffic to your site?

• social platforms?
• video content?
• blog posts?

The fact is that your marketing activities — no matter what they are — depend on content:

• Videos: You’ll need a script, and a video is content.
• Blog posts/Articles: content
• Website pages: content
• Television/radio ads: Again, you’ll need a script, which is content.

In fact, I challenge you to show me a type of marketing that doesn’t include content in some way. With the sheer amount of content in any given sales funnel, it becomes increasingly clear why boosting your content marketing game is a must to increase marketing ROI.

Your Brand is the Destination, but the Journey Matters Most

The first and best way to leverage your marketing budget right away is to narrow your focus on your target audience. This goes beyond your target market as a whole; ideally, you would further refine your audience with distinct buyer personas. After all, no two audience members are on the same page at the same time.

Visualize your ideal customer. Who are they, how did they find your business, and how do they interact with it once contact is initiated? Is there a common point of conversion, and how can you optimize various touchpoints to move each lead further along on their journey?

Analytics can help answer some of these questions, but having that ideal buyer in mind and being able to anticipate their wants, pain points, and activity will help you to target your budget to the right content and platforms.

For example, an older or more conservative audience might rely on social proof or friend recommendations than social media engagement when looking for a brand. Busy professionals might be searching for a brand on the fly from a mobile device. Someone with a limited budget and tons of choices might be more inclined to take their time and comparison shop.

The same product can have a range of audience members with different needs. Are you marketing snack foods? Moms might be concerned with nutritional information while teens only care about the taste.

Where and how do you reach these disparate target audience segments without throwing your money away in the process?

By:

• Knowing your audience, understanding their pain points, and meeting them where they are
• Creating high-quality, relevant content that connects on a meaningful level
• Consistently providing what keeps them interested and engaged

Identifying, segmenting, and refining quality leads will shorten the odds of wasting time and resources. But, you still need to know how to calculate your investment and maximize returns.

Common Challenges That Hinder Accurate Marketing ROI Calculations

As I said before, it’s not easy to peg exactly where leads or sales are coming from in a dynamic, ever-shifting online consumer environment. The social media post that had high engagement may not necessarily lead to sales. You might have plowed a good part of your budget into a highly stylized video marketing campaign that just lays there for a few weeks or months and then suddenly goes viral.

If we could predict these things, we’d all be billionaires. But, the best we can do is plan, assess, recalibrate, and renew.

Knowing some of the challenges you’ll encounter can help diminish their impact on your bottom line.

The most common are:

• Time: Few of us have the time to sort through the numerous marketing channels, content types, and agencies that claim to have the answers
• Skill: Maybe you’re a marketing savant or social media marketer, but how much do you know about technology and finance? How many financial wizards are also great at marketing?
• Tools and analytics: Do you have the tools you need to gather and analyze data? If so, do you have the ability to understand the data or what to do with it?
• Approach: How do you analyze the data to determine monthly and annual ROI over various platforms and techniques?

There are also multiple touchpoints and channels. Some customers might go back and forth before making a decision, while others are converted right away on the strength of one ad.

You should also consider timing, especially in relation to non-linear customer journeys. If you try to measure the ROI of your blog post or newsletter too soon, you might not have an accurate picture of its impact on your revenues or conversion rates.

It’s also difficult to calculate the influence a piece of content has on ROI. A video might increase engagement, but not necessarily have a direct impact on sales. An article may not have a lot of engagement, but be the deciding factor for a sale.

Identifying and overcoming these challenges and deploying content marketing best practices will help ensure a solid, sustainable ROI.

Case Studies in Excellence

If you want to be a leader in your industry, follow the example of brands like Cadbury. The chocolate company has been around for generations, but they were able to read the writing on the wall and update their strategy. Calculating their digital marketing ROI allowed them to experience revenues 4 times higher than with traditional TV and print advertising.

The marketing team at Level343 provides SEO consulting services that have quite a history of success. One client touts an average increase in organic traffic of a whopping 300%. What’s more, they helped that client nearly double their revenue within six months. For these companies, the cost of investing in marketing brought about huge returns.

Final Thoughts

One of the best investments you can make in your business is a strong, targeted marketing strategy. Without it, even the best product won’t reach its audience. With budgets shrinking, new competitors emerging every day, and marketing platforms proliferating, it’s essential to put your money where you’ll get the best return.

Start by turning your branding over to a team of specialists with the tools, tech, and training to optimize your marketing strategy. Partnering with an effective, experienced marketing team will help grow your audience while you focus on building customer relationships.