Tracking the ROI of Your Content Marketing Campaign

 In Marketing

Content Marketing Plan 

A Content Marketing Plan is the development and distribution of content that’s valuable to your customers.

Today’s media-savvy customer wants digital information. Sharing informational content establishes you as an expert. Use that content to build relationships so that consumers buy your product or service.

Define Your Goals

Successful content marketing plans begin with goals. Usually, it’s all about making a sale, but there are smaller goals within that overarching target.

Establish Tactics

Content marketing is multi-channel; it could include everything from PR to direct mail to social media.Your tactics are only limited by your creativity.

Measure the Success of Your Campaign

Let’s take one piece of your content marketing plan and define some ways to track ROI.

Social media is the best way today to reach consumers: 56% of Americans have a social networking site profile and 47% say Facebook has the greatest influence on their buying.

Tracking the ROI of social media in your content marketing plan doesn’t have to be unnecessarily complex.

Any successful content marketing plan needs to track three areas:

  • Brand Awareness
  • Customer Engagement
  • Conversion Rate

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is simply the extent that customers recognize your business. One way to measure brand awareness is to track website hits.

Google Analytics is an easy place to start. It tracks traffic and time spent on each area of your website. Traffic is measured in a simple graph and you can correlate increased website activity to your campaigns. A blog post that has a high view rate coupled with high length of time spent, has good ROI.

You can track referral traffic from other webpages, which tells you where your business is being mentioned. If a visitor to your website comes from Facebook,  your posts are working.

There are hundreds of social media spreadsheets that allow you to track ROI. Spend time researching these tools then figure out what works best. Sometimes less really is more; you can get lost in social media analytics.

Customer Engagement

Are your customers downloading white papers from your website? Are they watching your YouTube channel? These activities signal a customer engaged with your business. Much of this engagement happens at the social media level; today’s digital customer is constantly commenting, posting status and writing reviews. Tracking the number of times consumers liked your Facebook page or how often you were retweeted is an indicator of customer engagement.

Conversion

The real measure of a social media campaign is the conversion rate. That’s  how many customers completed your targeted behavior. It’s easy to track ROI if your goal is to increase sales. If your goals are to increase web site hits, or have customers download a white paper or even, to drive more traffic to your retail store, then these are all measurable behaviors within the content marketing plan.

Conclusion

While we’ve focused on tracking ROI for social media, remember the best content marketing plans include tactics across multiple channels. Setting up tracking for each channel ultimately reveals what’s working – and what  to discard.

We’d love to speak with you about ways to design and successfully measure your content marketing plans. Simplemachine helps businesses increase website traffic through technology and smart marketing techniques that build your business.

So yyou wrote a good article for your website, but you are unsure of the next step.The key to having a succesful marketing campaign is to track it! CALL NOW