{"id":11301,"date":"2017-03-15T20:21:26","date_gmt":"2017-03-15T20:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mediashower.com\/blog\/?p=11301"},"modified":"2017-04-18T19:42:59","modified_gmt":"2017-04-18T19:42:59","slug":"content-marketing-roi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mediashower.com\/blog\/content-marketing-roi\/","title":{"rendered":"Defining Content Marketing ROI in 4 Easy Steps"},"content":{"rendered":"

If there’s one buzzword that frustrates marketers more than any other, it’s\u00a0ROI<\/strong>.\u00a0Ever since digital marketing popped its head up years ago, marketers have struggled to measure the return on investment of things like email marketing, social media, and content marketing.<\/p>\n

\"Measuring<\/p>\n

Measuring content marketing can be frustrating, but is possible!<\/em><\/p>\n

Some of these are easier to measure than others, naturally. But content marketing? It’s challenging to determine what kind of return you get, simply because people who read your blog may not make a straight line to buy from your site.<\/p>\n

Brand recognition and loyalty play a large role here, just like they do with any marketing component that doesn’t result in immediate sales. Simply being known as a thought leader in your industry has tremendous value, even if you can’t assign a dollar value to it.<\/p>\n

Still, you\u00a0can<\/em>\u00a0measure your content marketing ROI with these steps.<\/p>\n

Step 1: Determine the Cost of Your Content<\/h2>\n

Every piece of content you create has a cost, even if you develop it in-house and consider it “free.” If that’s the case, you can break down how long it took an employee to develop it and multiply that\u00a0against\u00a0her hourly rate.<\/p>\n

If you outsource content, you’ll know exactly what it cost to create it. But don’t overlook other costs, such as those for stock photos added to the post, or the time it takes to upload the post to WordPress.<\/p>\n

As an example, let’s say it costs you $100 to create a blog post. Now let’s move on to the next step.<\/p>\n

Step 2: Decide What You Want to Measure<\/h2>\n

The issue in this step is that everyone assumes that “new customers” is the obvious thing you’d want to measure, but as I said before: there’s often not a straight path from your content to a sale. So consider other useful metrics like engagement. What does engagement look like?<\/p>\n