Content marketing has become a vital strategy for many B2B manufacturing companies today.
While B2B marketers increasingly recognize content marketing as both popular and necessary, 47% still don’t measure their content marketing ROI.
Among those who skip ROI measurement, 38% say there’s no formal requirement to do so, another 38% want a simpler measurement process, 27% don’t know how to measure it, and 21% find it too time-consuming.
In this article, we’ll explore why measuring ROI is crucial for B2B content marketing campaigns, identify the key metrics to track, and explain how to calculate content marketing ROI.
Why You Need to Measure ROI
In today’s fast-paced digital marketing landscape, marketers often focus on implementing new tactics and trends while neglecting ROI measurement. However, tracking ROI is essential—it justifies your marketing budget and demonstrates how effectively that money is being used.
Measuring ROI helps you…
Understand what’s working and what isn’t. Without measuring ROI, it’s challenging to determine which campaigns are effective. Even the most engaging content or an optimized website won’t deliver results if it’s not reaching your target audience or generating sufficient traffic.
Calculate client acquisition
ROI measurement transforms abstract concepts into concrete data. It reveals exactly how much you’re spending on content marketing and how many new clients you’re gaining. While ROI data offers various insights—from identifying successful channels to optimizing marketing budgets—tracking cost per client acquisition is particularly valuable for assessing performance.
Prepare for the future
ROI tracking generates valuable data that guides future marketing decisions. While mistakes are inevitable, proper data analysis helps prevent recurring ones and enables smarter, more informed strategies.
A Simple Guide to Measuring ROI
Determine the costs
Depending on the scale of your content marketing campaign, there can be numerous factors involved in determining the cost, including…
- Production costs: for writers, artists, and photos
- Distribution costs: for PPC advertising, paid social
- Cost of special tools: for producing or distributing content Set the metrics
To effectively measure your content marketing’s ROI, you need to determine what your specific goals and objectives are. Are you looking to increase brand awareness or generate qualified leads? Or are you trying to establish your brand as an expert by providing in-depth 10x content?
Once you’ve determined those goals or objectives, you need to set the metrics that you’re going to be measuring. Here are some key metrics you can focus on if you’re just starting to measure your ROI.
Demographics and Behavior
Ask yourself the following questions:
Who are the members of your audience?
What channels do they use?
How often do they engage with your content?
As per my experience, Google Analytics is an excellent base for measuring demographic and behavior metrics, including…
- Demographics
- Pageviews
- Unique visitors
- Average time on page
- Bounce rate
You should track the progression of each metric over time, which will also allow you to get insights on which types of content resonate with your audience.
Social and Sharing
The most basic elements to monitor for social media content are the following:
- Shares. Share counts indicate how much your audience values your content. Platforms such as Hootsuite enable you to track social shares, schedule posts, and find relevant followers.
- Comments. While negative comments need addressing, remember that engagement—whether positive or negative—shows your content is resonating (except for bot activity). Content that sparks discussion is often doing its job.
- Follower growth. Since content marketing ROI develops over time, follower growth rate matters more than total follower count. A correlation between increased content publication and follower growth suggests effective content strategy.
These metrics reveal which content pieces are being shared, who is sharing them, how they are being shared, and how often.
Lead Generation and Nurturing
Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) consist of those who have expressed interest in what you’re selling by engaging with your content in some form (downloading e-books, consuming product demo videos, filling out contact forms, etc.).
Once you’ve identified your MQLs, you can then move on to measuring subcategories, such as…
Clickthrough rate (CTR). CTR shows whether your content captured your audience’s attention and whether it was compelling enough that they positively responded to your CTA.
Email open rates. Tools such as MailChimp and Pardot allow you to monitor email open rates. If you find that your open rates are low, you can make the copy more appealing, change the subject line, or adjust frequency.
The Formula
The simplest way to measure what really matters to businesses (revenue) is with this basic formula:
If the ratio is greater than one, your content was profitable from a sales perspective. The formula can be scaled for an entire campaign or for all content marketing activities.
But it’s not always that simple. Depending on your parameters, it can also be tweaked to:
Example: ROI = (INR 500,000 worth of MQLs – INR 10,000 content production and distribution costs) / INR 10,000
You can measure various factors (traffic, conversions, brand awareness, etc.), which require attaching a dollar value to the respective element you want to measure. Determining your parameters from the onset allows you to focus on which ones to measure. The content markting game is just getting started. As a Business owner, you should know what should be the parameters to measure and allocate budgets accordingly.
