Check if You Are Meeting Your Business Objectives
Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Officer of the Content Marketing Institute raises a very pertinent question in this article, “Is ROI Really What You’re Looking For?” While explaining why ROI is a flawed metric for traditional, campaign-based marketing, he also says that a new look at ROI is essential if we want to evaluate the content marketing efforts of a company.
Measuring marketing performance has always been a challenge. ROI starts to appear as a dominant marketing metric starting in the 1960s, a.k.a. the ‘Mad Men’ era. It is at that time we started to truly look at ways to measure the return on marketing investments made. The scope of ROI is generally short-term. It is used to measure the short-term effects of marketing campaigns and mostly in terms of revenue realized because of a particular campaign. For example, if $100 were put into a marketing campaign and that resulted in $150 in revenue, then ROI of the marketing campaign is 50%.
Content marketing is a practice completely new to a lot of companies who have relied on traditional marketing campaigns until now. Through your content marketing efforts, you are creating assets for your company. Blogs, print magazines, whitepapers, webinars, TV series, etc.; these are all assets through which you are generating value for your company over time.
You may ask yourselves a lot of questions while building a business case for your content marketing initiatives:
- How would a whitepaper and its associated video enhance a direct marketing campaign, the release of a product as well the relationship with a particular customer community?
- What is the value per subscribed audience member and how does it increase over the long term?
- What is the predicted rise/fall in the value of the content assets in the long term?
- How do media-related products increase the value of your company and make it stand-out as a leader in the industry?
All these questions make you ponder over the long term implications of content marketing on the profits and fortunes of your company. This is the fresh new look at ROI that Rose is talking about. He states that “Campaigns are a cost that provides value at a moment in time. Content marketing is an investment that, if done well, provides increasing value over time.” Thus, the effects of content marketing may have short term benefits, but the true value of a content marketing strategy fully comes to light when we monitor and measure the business objectives that it has helped your company to achieve.
Is your content marketing strategy helping to meet your business objectives? Or are you only measuring short term ROI and missing the forest for the trees? Talk to us at MintCopy and let’s discuss your current content assets, how they can be utilized for longer term business results and how to plan future content deliverables to contribute to your business performance overall. Give us a call at 888-646-8003 or send us an email.
Sheetal Pinto is the founder of MintCopy, a content agency that has been helping businesses communicate effectively since 2008. With a passion for words and a knack for SEO, she’s worked with companies around the world to craft copy that not only engages but ranks. Whether it’s blog posts, website content, or social media updates, Sheetal has a talent for turning complex ideas into compelling stories. When she’s not optimizing content or editing for clarity, she’s probably daydreaming about the perfect headline or debating the Oxford comma. With over 16 years in the business, she’s seen the digital marketing and SEO content landscape evolve and grow. Sheetal’s mantra? Fresh copy, refreshing results!
