One complaint that many marketers and business owners have about social media and content marketing is the lack of definitive metrics and methods to determine ROI. Especially because you’re not going to see a quick turnaround of results. Content marketing takes time…and time is a difficult metric to gauge.
Don’t lose hope, though. Just because it’s difficult to measure content marketing ROI doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. Here are some tips and tricks for gauging the ROI from your social media and content marketing.
1. Measure Exposure
To measure exposure, you’re going to need to check out your Google Analytics. The metrics that you’re going to want to measure most are Pageviews and the Pageviews by Landing Page to see which of your blog posts are performing the best.
2. Measure Social Shares
Install a plugin onto your website that counts the number of social shares each of your blog posts gets or use a tool like BuzzSumo. This is called earned media and is the best way to get exposure–someone loved your content enough to share it themselves for all of their friends to see. Regularly check to see how many social shares your blog posts are getting.
3. Measure Links
Link building is important for any good content marketing strategy and is a great way to help your content rank better in Google search. Use a link building tool such as Open Site Explorer to check out how many times your content has been linked back to in other content.
4. Measure Leads & Sales
Although you may think this is the bread and butter of your business and the only thing that matters, the first three are also essential parts of measuring your content marketing ROI and they do mean success. But, of course, leads and sales are what make your business, so we understand that this is important to you. Do this by setting up a conversion pixel or by creating a goal in Google Analytics with a goal value to determine when those leads and sales are made.
Contact us today to get started measuring the ROI of your content marketing campaigns. Or, even better, let us manage them and ensure their success for you.