Today, most businesses have caught on to the content marketing game and understand its marketing value. However, while many businesses realize the importance of creating content, they may not know exactly why it’s so important.
One of the top benefits of creating quality content is it seamlessly demonstrates your organization’s expertise without a pushy sales pitch. You’re able to build a valuable relationship with your target audience while becoming a crucial source of information for potential customers.
Research shows that 61% of online buyers have made a purchase after reading recommendations from a blog. You want people to see your organization as a trusted source for advice.
High-quality content is also proven to increase lead generation, and what business doesn’t want that? When a visitor comes to your website and can find the answers they’re looking for, confirm your industry expertise and easily contact you, they’re more likely to convert.
Additionally, content that is properly optimized for highly searched keywords and organized to meet the needs of search crawlers helps you increase rankings and boost domain authority. Google prefers high-quality content that maintains your visitors’ attention and adheres to SEO best practices.
By posting great content on a regular basis, Google will start to take notice. And as your rankings increase over time, so should site traffic.
You now know why content is so important, but how exactly do you demonstrate that your content strategy actually influences the bottom line? Linking content to revenue is not always obvious – unless you know what you’re looking for.
While developing a content strategy, you shouldn’t simply focus on increasing SEO or churning out content. A great content plan needs to have a clear path to how it’s impacting revenue.
This means creating content that is aimed at the right people, so you’re generating the right leads. It also means tracking and measuring content performance, so you can adjust and evolve your strategy over time.
A great content marketing machine influences revenue by building trust with your visitors. The better the content, the more leads convert, leading to a bigger sales pipeline and (hopefully) more deals closed.
Creating content for the sake of creating content isn’t enough. Search engines are looking to promote high-quality content. Algorithm changes through the years have devalued simply posting a new 400-word blog every day with stuffed-in keywords and no substance.
Today, your content is competing with millions of other sites, so yours needs to stand out above the rest.
The content you write – including your website copy, blogs, e-books, whitepapers and emails – needs to be focused on the buyer and providing them with what they need. But how do you know that you’ve hit the content sweet spot?
The only concrete way to prove your content is doing its job is to measure performance. While developing your content strategy, you should determine what content metrics you want to focus on, how often you’ll be analyzing the numbers and how you plan to tie your results to marketing ROI.
Also, try to outline some basic goals or milestones you’re hoping to hit, so you can report on your progress and spot winning messaging and areas of concern early on. Statistics from HubSpot show that marketers who calculate ROI are 1.6 times more likely to receive higher budgets.
To have the most leverage when convincing business leaders that your content marketing strategy is working, you need to highlight metrics that prove a solid ROI. No matter what tools you’re using to measure your content success, there are always dozens of key performance indicators (KPIs) to weed through to find the right numbers to inform your progress.
It’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics, or those that don’t serve any purpose. These numbers only scrape the surface and can be manipulated to tell almost any story you want to tell. Vanity metrics usually describe engagement or visitor behavior but have almost no impact on revenue or lead conversion. Examples include:
On the other hand, if you know where to look, you’ll find content metrics that can give you the conversion or revenue insights upper management is looking for. These nine metrics in particular matter to your bottom line:
By measuring these content metrics, you’ll be able to optimize your strategies based on real data and analysis. Once you’re looking at the right data on a regular basis, you should be able to tie a dollar value to how your content influenced a new customer, and get the marketing buy-in you’ve been striving for.