Content is an essential part of every marketing strategy. It’s the thing that attracts and connects with the audience, informs and moves people down the funnel towards making a purchase decision and convinces users to convert. However, because the user journey isn’t always linear, and sometimes happens over a long period of time, the importance of content to actual ROI is something that is often overlooked.

In this guide, we look at how you can plan your content strategy to tie in directly with business revenue and maximise the value it delivers.

Plan before action

It’s easy to jump the gun with content marketing and start creating before you’ve properly planned out the full strategy and the KPIs and benchmarks that you can use to measure success. The danger with this is that you’ll end up spending time and resources on content that isn’t fully aligned to your business goals and may also miss opportunities to maximise the impact and return.

You know that you want to increase ROI, but in order to do this consistently and sustainably, you need to make sure you’re looking at your return in several ways.

Assess your ROI

To get a good handle on the ROI of content as part of your wider marketing strategy, you need to ensure you look at lifetime value (LTV) for your customers as well as the more direct average order values (AOV) and the performance of specific campaigns or individual pieces of content. This will help you to put a more accurate value to certain metrics.

You need to ensure that you have an accurate record of the costs involved in the content, which includes ideation, planning and strategy time as well as content creation and promotion. If you’re also building links to your content through digital PR or outreach, the resource used for this also needs to be factored into costs.

You also need to bear in mind that content isn’t just a short-term strategy, so ROI needs to be given an appropriate amount of time to materialise. For example, if you’re trying to measure performance for search-driven content, you need to factor in that the content will take time to start ranking in the SERPs and driving organic traffic. Measuring ROI after a month isn’t a fair assessment for this type of content. Depending on your starting point (domain authority, how well it meets the E-E-A-T framework, which other websites/content are already ranking for what you’re targeting etc), it could be 6-9 months before you start seeing tangible results.

Attribution also plays a major role in how you calculate ROI from content. Finding an attribution model (or several) that works for your business and audience journeys can be tricky and you may end up going through several iterations before you land on a solution that is a good match.

Successful attribution starts at understanding your audience and their buying journey.

Understand your audience

Understanding your audience sounds like a straightforward idea, but the reality is that you need to dig so much deeper than top-level personas to really get under the skin of your target market.  Some of the many areas to consider for each distinct audience segment include:

• What are their ultimate goals?
• Where they go to find reliable information?
• What challenges do they face in reaching their goals?
• What motivates them?
• What frustrates them?
• What are their main pain points?
• What types of content resonate best with them?
• What platforms do they use?
• What do they need to know in order to make a buying decision?
• How can you make their life easier?
• What do you need them to do in order for you to meet your business goals?
• How can you inspire them to spread the word about you once they have purchased?
• What does their buying journey and timeline look like?

Determine your content marketing attribution model(s)

Attribution is a huge topic in its own right that we can’t cover in its entirety here, but it’s an essential part in understanding content ROI and benchmarking to help show growth.

Assigning credit, and a tangible monetary amount, to various content touchpoints along the customer journey will provide you with a wealth of information to help refine your content strategy as you go.

Different types of content and user journeys often better suit a certain attribution model, so the chances are that if your content marketing strategy includes a wide range of pieces with different objectives, designed for various parts of the funnel, you’ll need to apply more than one attribution model to get the most useful data and insights into performance and ROI.

Types of digital marketing attribution models

As a very top-line overview, the models you may want to consider and test could include:

• Single-touch (or first-touch) attribution – where 100% of the credit for the conversion is given to the first content the user interacts with.
• Last-touch attribution – where the final content touchpoint gets all of the credit for the conversion/sale.
• Linear attribution – where the credit is spread evenly over all touchpoints leading up to the conversion.
• Time-decay attribution – where more credit is given to touchpoints closer to the conversion point.
• Position-based attribution – where the most credit is given to the first and last content touchpoint, with 20% spread across the content viewed or interacted with in the middle of these.
• Multi-touch attribution – where various percentages of credit are given to multiple content touchpoints along the customer journey, as determined by you.
  
  

As with any of your content marketing planning and strategy, the most important factor when choosing an attribution model is making sure it’s aligned to the business goals you have for your content activity.

For example, a first-touch attribution model can be a good fit for top-of-the-funnel content that introduces your target audience to your brand. However, for content intended to drive conversions over a longer timeline, multi-touch attribution can give a clearer picture of how the audience engage with content throughout their journey.

If you don’t already have one, you’ll need a third-party attribution tool to help you track and distribute credit to different content touchpoints, which you can set up to report automatically, using the model or models of your choice.

Define your content goals clearly

As previously mentioned, content planning has to be centred around your business goals to ensure your efforts are focused on things that will bring a meaningful return for the business.

You’re likely to have different goals associated with different content activity, which moves the audience down the funnel towards a conversion and beyond. However, all of this needs to tie into the overarching goals and metrics too. Having clarity on what those goals are will help your planning process, as all elements of your content strategy will need to contribute towards them to make the cut.

For example, wider marketing goals for the year might include a metric for an increase of online sales. Your content strategy will need to ladder up to this goal, with your content activity supporting the various stages of that journey. You’ll need to look at things such as:

• How your content is found (e.g. SEO, promotion on other platforms etc)
• How your content moves the audience along the buyer journey
• How you can convince the user to convert through the content
• How your content strategy caters for previous customers who may buy again
  
  

Benchmark your metrics

Understanding what ‘good’ or great’ looks like, in terms of content marketing performance, is essential.

You can apply KPIs and metrics to your content strategy as a whole as well as the individual components that make up your activity.

For example, if you want to increase online sales by 30% as a business goal, looking at how you have achieved the current level of sales is important for helping direct your strategy. Look at the channels that brought converting users to your website and the pages they landed on.

Look at your conversion rates (CVR) on various areas of the website and do the sums on what a small increase in CVR could do towards your 30% uplift goal. You can also look at how many new users you would need to bring to the site to hit your goal if the CVR stays the same. Should part of your content strategy be focused on improving the conversion content on your site as well as attracting new relevant visitors?

Of course, the specific content marketing metrics will vary, depending on what your goals are and the types of content you want to use for your target audience.

Benchmarking various metrics to understand your starting point before you fully plan a new content strategy will make it easier to see strategic opportunities for improvement and give a great foundation for tracking and reporting on performance.

It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway), that your content should fulfil the framework that Google has provided for helpful content. This will help it to reach its potential in organic search.

Plan your content marketing budget

Planning a content marketing budget can be tricky, as it will tie into your specific goals and your overall marketing budget. The reality is that the most effective content marketing doesn’t have short cuts – producing great content that meets its objectives takes time, specialist skills and a well-executed plan. 

The pay-off is that great content marketing will bring long-term rewards, often for a longer period of time than your current budget covers, as it continues to contribute to site success and performance into the future.

How much budget do you need for content marketing?

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all rule for this, and there is often crossover between channels when it comes to content. Assets used as website or blog content can also often be utilised in terms of SEO, social media and digital PR, as well as email marketing and advertising, but having a standalone content marketing budget can be helpful in measuring ROI.

The components you’ll probably need to factor in to your content marketing budget include:

• In-house staff salary costs for your team if they are using their time to plan, create, implement, promote and report on your content marketing strategy
• Any freelance content, video, PR or design or development costs
• Any paid software or tools used in planning, creation and tracking/reporting
• Any advertising costs if you’re using paid promotion for your content
• Influencer costs if you’re going to be working with any as part of the strategy.
  
  

A rough rule of thumb (which can certainly vary by industry and audience) is that spending up to 40% of the wider marketing budget on content marketing is a good starting point. For brands and businesses that rely heavily on content to attract, nurture and convert users online, this may need to increase.

Allocating budget to specific content activity and campaigns

So, you now have your wider content marketing budget, but how do you know how much of it to allocate to specific campaigns or activity to bring the best return?

You have to check out what I call the ‘ROI feasibility’ of a specific content marketing activity or campaign before you commit to it. Essentially, you’re looking into the realistic potential it has to bring a return to the business.

• You’ll need to work out roughly what it will cost you to produce, publish and promote that content as per your main objective for it and the strategy you have to attract people to it.
• Then look at any different channels you can use that content on, aside from the main objective e.g. is it something that you can promote as part of your email marketing strategy too, to a slightly different audience or segment?
• For every channel you’re planning to use, check out your analytics data to view the average conversion rate and the financials associated with conversions from them.
• That will give you an idea of how many users you’ll need to convert in order to bring in more than the content costs you to develop – and how many you’ll need to attract in the first place for each conversion.
• Your content marketing activity will need to stand a good chance of achieving this figure in order to make it worthwhile as an ROI-driver. You’ll need to evaluate this feasibility based on the data you have and your attitude to risk.
  
  

By running a quick ROI feasibility check on your content ideas, you can determine which of them stand the best chance of bringing a tangible return that contributes towards your wider marketing and business goals – as well as roughly budgeting how much it will cost to achieve that. You can then allocate your content marketing budget accordingly.

It can be very tempting to put the bulk of your budget into the flashy and exciting creative content ideas (it’s only natural, because it’s what usually makes us tick), but that might not always be the best use of the money available. Finding a balance between proven activities and some testing of new content types and ideas can be the better option maximising ROI while also trying to innovate, stand out and break new ground.

In summary

Maximising the ROI from your content marketing strategy is as much about your planning as it is the actual content itself. Using audience information, analytics data and past performance can inform your decisions around the most effective content types to incorporate in order to achieve your marketing and wider business goals. Also looking at how to best attribute conversions to your content, what other metrics to track and investigating how to spread your budget for the best return will give you a great foundation for lasting success.

If you’d like to find out about how our content marketing services can help your business to hit your goals, or chat to one of our experts, get in touch using the form below.