No matter what type of companies you target or what product you sell, B2B content marketing is a strategy that takes a lot of planning, analyzing and follow through. It’s not something that happens overnight, but great campaigns can have a lasting impact on a company’s success. As marketers, we’re constantly trying to prove the greatness of our campaigns, and to do that we have to measure the return on investment (ROI). Here’s how!

Traffic

A good (and fairly obvious) way to measure the ROI of your B2B content marketing campaign is by looking at the overall traffic to your website or designated landing page. No matter what type of content you’re producing (blog posts, videos, ebooks, infographics, etc.) the goal is to get people to see your content. So, are people viewing your content? Or do most of your website hits come from you checking up on your own site?

Here's a tip: There are several different tools you can use to measure web traffic. For free or inexpensive options, try Google Analytics, SimilarWeb or Alexa.

Leads

Lead generation is a metric that goes hand-in-hand with traffic. The more traffic your website gets, the more opportunity there is for your company to generate leads. You may get hundreds or thousands of website views a month, but if you're unable to gather leads then you’re not doing your job as a marketer.

Here are some basic metrics you should keep in mind when measuring lead generation:

• Number of leads generated
• Quality of each lead
• Number and dollar amount of sales won by leads
• Number and dollar amount of lost sales from your leads
• From what channels your leads come

You should also consider measuring leads based on which sales territories they came from. Which brings us to the next point.

Sales

Are you making money? Website traffic and other vanity metrics are important when measuring ROI—but if your company isn’t bringing in any money then those metrics mean nothing. Take note of where your sales are coming from—What links have the most traffic? What content is the most popular? Learn from your B2B content marketing success and failures, and make necessary adjustments when needed.

Free resource: Check out this ebook on advanced marketing metrics when aquiring customers.

Valuable Content

Everyone loves content! Without content the internet would just be an endless digital space of nothingness. But the content that your company is crafting must do three things:

1. It must have a purpose and align with your company's B2B content marketing strategy.

2. It must appeal to your target audience.

3. It must bring prospects and customers value.

If your content accomplishes all three of these things then you’re doing something right. If you are unsure, or just getting started with your content marketing strategy, a great way to find out is to ask your customers. Send out a social media blast, interact on the comment section of your blogs, send an email or survey to your regular customers, or talk face to face if you can. You’ll never know if you don’t ask!

I run into a lot of people who think content marketing is something that anyone can do, and I guess in a way they are correct. However B2B content marketing campaigns definitely take a lot of time, hard work, strategy, analytics, planning and a desire to follow-through. Anyone can create content, but without the strategy behind it, it's not nearly as effective.

What other ways have you measured the ROI of your content marketing campaigns? Let us know in the comment section below. Are you interested in B2B SaaS marketing? Check out our B2B SaaS Marketing ebook!