Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

According to AdAge, 93% of CMO’s (so…basically all of them) are under more pressure to deliver measurable ROI (Return On Investment).

Additionally, 81% of marketers would increase spending across channels if they could better track ROI.
 
At content marketing analyst Rebecca Lieb‘s Content Marketing World 2015 session: “Less-than-obvious Content Metrics You Need to Pay Attention To,” she argues that just using sales to justify ROI is measuring content marketing ROI far too narrowly. 

She says part of this is due to the fact that content marketing ROI analytics in the space are still incredibly nascent. There are no standards for measuring content marketing ROI and since over 50% of brands lack a defined content marketing strategy, it’s difficult to know what they’re trying to achieve and how to measure that success. 

As metrics and KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) evolve in tandem, the result is an excess of volume metrics (like, shares, traffic, etc.) that don’t reveal true business impact and content marketing ROI. According to Lieb, 43% of marketers feel they have unmet needs in measuring content ROI. Through careful and extensive research, she has formulated six tenets to developing a more holistic content marketing ROI measurement strategy....

Simply put, if you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.

In fact, if you’re whipping up blog posts and infographics without business objectives, you’re basically partaking in a very expensive version of arts and crafts.

Your job as a content marketer is to show your boss the money — not traffic, not links — mon-naay.

Let’s talk about how to get started effectively measuring your content marketing efforts....

Content creation is not cheap. As content marketers, we may have brilliant ideas for content that meets the needs of customers and prospective customers, but ideas alone don’t convince stakeholders to invest. We need to back up our ideas with data. We need to show that our suggestions align with the needs of our target audience segments.

To make this effort easier, I have created a tool that does this aligning literally – across rows in a spreadsheet. I call it the multichannel content marketing planner. This planner provides an easy-to-use, easy-to-share place to capture the data and data-related insights that lead to a strategically solid content marketing plan....