In our last blog, we discussed the common metrics for metrics for measuring content marketing ROI. Before we discuss how to measure the return on investment of your content marketing in this blog, be sure to read that first blog if you haven’t already, to get a good baseline understanding of the common metrics associated with content marketing ROI.

What should you measure?

We discussed many potential metrics in our last blog, but does that mean you should measure all of them? Not necessarily. You want to choose the metrics that are most relevant to your business and most indicative of success.

What does this mean? Ideally, you’ll want to measure new sales (revenue) resulting from your content marketing efforts, new leads attracted by your content, and how much you’re spending for each of those new leads and customers. You may also decide that a few other metrics are important to your business results or your management team.

From this information, decide on a set of KPIs (key performance indicators) that you will track on a regular basis. This will help you establish a process for measuring your content marketing ROI over time, so you can evaluate your effectiveness and adapt as necessary.

Some specific equations

Once you’ve decided on your KPIs, you need to know how to measure them. You can easily track how many people download a particular piece of content, but how do you measure the cost to acquire each new lead? ROI equations may seem intimidating, but they actually are not. We’ll overview a few of the basic ROI equations here, and if you’d like to review them in more depth, be sure to download the ebook mentioned at the end of this blog.

• Basic Return on Investment: To measure the return on your investment in turns of revenue, you subtract the cost of your content marketing from the revenue generated from the content, then divide that number by the cost of your content marketing. This will give you a general ROI metric.

• Cost per Lead: You can calculate this in two different ways: either by looking at the cost of your overall content, or the cost to produce each specific piece. Either way, this is another important measure, as you want to know how much you’re spending to acquire each new lead.

• Lead-to-Customer Ratio: While leads are important, your ultimate goal is turning those leads into paying customers. That’s why it is vital to track both your leads and customers for each piece of content, so you know which content is most effective at generating revenue.

• Customer Acquisition Cost: Similar to cost per lead, you want to know how much you spend to acquire each new customer. This metric helps you evaluate the success of your overall content marketing efforts, as well as the effectiveness of each individual content piece.

Your turn

What ROI metrics are your currently tracking to evaluate your content marketing efforts? How are you using those metrics to make decisions about your content marketing initiatives? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

If you want to learn about ROI metrics more in-depth, be sure to download our latest ebook, Make Your Investment Count: Measuring Content Marketing ROI. And if you’d like some support with your own content marketing initiatives (or help measuring your content marketing ROI), contact Milwaukee marketing agency Accelity Marketing.