ROI is an important marketing metric, but how much ROI can content marketing produce?
Content marketing is heralded as one of the greatest online marketing strategies around in part because of its high ROI–return on investment. ROI is a measure of how much revenue a strategy brings in for your company, versus how much money you’ve spent on it. Essentially, it’s a measure of profitability.
So how much ROI can you expect from content marketing?
Two Problems
It’s actually hard to calculate ROI from content marketing, for two main reasons:
- Benefits are multifaceted and hard to measure. Content affect a ton of different areas, so it’s hard to reduce to a single statistic.
- Results compound over time. Results from content marketing tend to accumulate and grow exponentially with time, meaning ROI at the start of a campaign is drastically different from ROI at the end of one
Still, we can look at some of the main areas of content ROI to get a ballpark for its effects.
Reputation
First, every piece of content you produce will directly or indirectly improve your brand’s reputation, which is necessary if you want more conversions.
Traffic
Content boosts your search rankings, encourages more social media followers to join you, and passes traffic to your site via referral links. Even after a month of effort, you’ll start seeing enormous value here.
Strategic Harmony
Content has a ton of synergy with other strategies your company is pursuing; it improves SEO, social media marketing, and can even be used as a form of advertising. In some cases, you can even sell the content you write for an extra line of revenue.
Permanence and Growth
Remember, content’s strongest benefit is that it lasts virtually forever, and continues passing value to your brand over time. This means it’s possible for your ROI to increase even if you stop pursuing the strategy at some point.
It’s impossible to generalize an ROI for content marketing since there are so many variables. However, the more you invest in your strategy, and the longer you invest in it, the more return you’ll eventually see.
