How much revenue is content marketing adding to your company’s results? According to HubSpot trends — Not Another State of Marketing Report —only 35% of marketers said it is extremely important to understand the ROI (Return on Investment) of their campaigns.
If you also find it difficult to answer, you are not alone: in a LinkedIn survey, only 39% of marketers considered themselves successful in calculating the ROI of their content marketing strategies. Do you know how to calculate B2B content marketing ROI? Keep reading, and we will show you how.
The primary way to calculate your B2B content marketing ROI
With this metric, you can establish more effective strategies. You can use this formula to calculate your ROI:
ROI = (gains from investment – cost of investment)/(cost of investment) × 100%.
It means that you have to measure your results (gains), such as brand awareness, lead, or customer acquisition, and list all of the costs you had to implement for the marketing content strategies, such as team payment, publishing, paid search advertising, tools, platforms, etc.
Measure gains for calculating B2B content marketing ROI
Content marketing earnings are calculated over a longer term. Metrics must be continually evaluated and B2B content marketing ROI is associated directly with each Key Performance Indicator (KPI) below.
Social media performance
You can measure social media ROI by understanding how this channel is performing toward traffic generation for your blog or website, using the Google Analytics tool.
LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, for example, could integrate your content marketing strategy. First, it is necessary to publish a piece of content, like a blog post. Then, you can make calls to this content on social media and track traffic to your site from these channels.
You can also measure your audience engagement by their comments, for example, or by monitoring mentions and the awareness rate of your campaigns.
Landing page conversion rate
It is not enough to know how many people are visiting your website or landing page. You have to identify if they are taking the solicited action or not, comparing the number of your landing page visitors with how many people filled the form to download the eBook available there.
For example, if you have a landing page with 5,000 visitors and 50 people converted, your landing page conversion rate will be the total conversions divided by the number of visitors. So, it will be 50/5000 = 1%.
Lead conversion rate
This metric tracks how many leads are converted and generate results for the business. It helps to know the ROI of your content marketing actions. The ultimate objective of any marketing campaign is to generate sales, thus, by using the lead conversion rate you can analyze small campaign goals:
- eBook downloads
- newsletter sign-ups
- demo or consultation sign-ups
When you measure this, at all customer journey stages, you can understand the course of your leads through the sales funnel, finding critical points when possible and identifying lost opportunities.
You can calculate it using the same formula we showed you for measuring the lead conversion rate: comparing the number of visitors to your website with how many leads filled the form to receive any piece of content.
Email marketing performance
You can also produce relevant content and nurture your leads through email marketing, a very common strategy used by B2B marketers.
Giving out their email does not mean that the lead is converted: it is necessary to measure who is clicking your email (by click-through and open rates) or who are taking the call to action (reading the indicated blog post, for example).
Website traffic
In internet search engines, such as Google, the most relevant results for the searched keyword appear on the first pages. The results that appear without payment configure organic traffic, which proves the growth of marketing strategies.
Even if you have users that access your website often, you must know the correct composition of your audience. By determining the rate of unique visitors, you know exactly how many people visit your site dismissing the frequency they access the homepage.
The bounce rate is another way to estimate the relevance of your content to users. This rate shows how many people access your page but do not continue browsing other areas or do not come back.
Measuring the origin of visits allows you to understand how visitors arrive at your site. They can come from social networks, email marketing, and web search engines.
With this data, you can analyze how many people reached you organically and how many arrived using other strategies, including paid campaigns.
Rock Content: Successful Case Study Examples
Some case studies can demonstrate the effectiveness of the content marketing strategy. Check it out below.
Gennera
Gennera is a Brazilian company focused on creating software for educational institutions and is a pioneer in creating web school management systems. Nowadays, they help more than 750 educational institutions.
Their biggest challenge was to have efficient inbound marketing strategies and generate more leads.
With the Rock Content partnership, they implemented a content marketing plan. Gennera increased its total traffic by 981.4% and 2.692% on their organic traffic, compared to the previous year.
Grupo Casa Magalhães
The Casa Magalhães Group operates in the IT segment in Brazil. They are specialists in POS software development, business management systems, and applications for mobile devices focused on retail and foodservice. They did not have a well-defined content marketing strategy.
The Casa Magalhães Group needed to define a buyer persona and produce quality content for their blog.
Rock Content helped the Casa Magalhães Group to increase in 865% the number of blog readers and in 625% the number of sessions whose organic traffic was greater than 70%.
Liguesite
Liguesite develops high-performance websites, virtual stores, and personalized portals for any market segment. Their challenges were to:
- increase website traffic
- gain more visibility
- generate more leads for the franchise network
- increase organic traffic
- increase the average session time
- reduce their bounce rate
From Liguesite’s objectives, Rock Content created a content marketing strategy: monthly publishing blog posts with relevant content and optimized for SEO strategies. The results were:
- users’ growth number of 2.600%
- organic traffic increased by 2.400%
- 4,200 ranked keywords
A B2B content marketing ROI is associated with the use of appropriate tools, expert help, and long-term goal planning. Find out more about content performance here.
