Making great content has become indispensable to succeed in the online marketing world but how to ensure that you get the returns in the expected direction? Knowing and determining the ROI is important to ensure that you know that your content marketing efforts are going in the right direction. As per Sally, who works with Lifesaver Essays, an essay writing service in the US, whether you are an individual or a small scale business, a corporate or an educational institution advertise their opportunities to target students, quality content marketing is a must
What is ROI?
Return on Investments is used to refer to the returns you obtain on any investments you have made. Investments could be in terms of funding or buying a building or a property and then developing it to obtain revenues. A business venture is successful when its ROI is higher than the original investment made. Businesses, marketers and advertisers need to track their ROI to check whether they are making profits or remaining profitable. Since a company may have multiple advertising or marketing campaigns, it makes sense to track the ROI individually for each, so that the success and failure of these can be assessed; companies can then make the decision to discard the non-performing campaigns or strategies. Dedicated ROI monitoring, can help the marketing team identify flaws and weaknesses in their marketing strategy.
What makes measuring ROI challenging?
ROI is essential to business success but many businesses shy away from determining it, owing to its complicated nature. The results are disastrous. A survey conducted in 2013 showed that nearly 70% of marketers failed in their marketing efforts and a significant factor contributing to this was that, they had failed to monitor their ROI policy. The problem with that is that marketers use their own judgement every time while shaping new marketing strategies and end up repeating similar results. When you measure ROI for the campaigns, you get an insight into the audience interests, tastes and demands and you can choose to create campaigns based on that.
One of the major difficulties in measuring ROI is the difficulty in analysing data across multiple channels. Because so many parameters are available for measuring and many measure abstract values, it becomes difficult to make accurate insights. Despite this, there are several ways available at present, which can be used to help determine your ROI and monitor it.
Brand awareness
Determine how much of your target audience really are aware of the brand and how much do they know. That is an indicator of your ROI. If your marketing campaigns have been successful, the level of awareness of your brand should also be high. While precise values may be difficult to be obtained, as there are no direct formulas available; one can obtain a rough idea of this. You can use Google Analytics to measure brand awareness. Through Google analytics, you would be able to obtain information of two kinds related to web traffic- how much direct traffic your website is getting and how much traffic you are receiving through search engines as a result of your brand name? If there is a spurt in the metrics related to these, you can be confident that there is a ROI you are obtaining.
Use online video content
Online video content is getting increasingly popular and to be the most widely used content. Unlike other content, regardless of the kind of channel you are using to view the content, you can access the metrics for this as the content plays in players or containers. Unlike text content, you can determine how exactly this content engaged the audience. You can determine how effective your video content is in engaging audience by determining the attention span- how long the video succeeded in engaging the audience? This can be done by using a video marketing platform to collect video engagement data and check how well the assets are performing. If a video engages less, than one can remove it from the campaign and analyse the possible reasons behind its failure.
Measure conversions
While every visit may not produce a conversion, ensure you have enough conversion “hooks” to increase chances of your consumers engaging and connecting with you. This can be as simple as adding links to join a subscription list or email list ; adding lead generation forms on your blog and Slideshare, infographics and presentations; addition of calls to action for purchasing things which you offer from your site. By tracking these conversion hooks and the performance, you can get an estimate of the ROI and whether the particular package is working or not.
Social Media monitoring tools
There are many affordable tools which can be used to evaluate and monitor your content management strategy. As for example, Hootsuite. These tools facilitates your efforts to improve the ROI by ensuring that processes for distribution are smoothened and more accurate and take into account audience behaviours. Sproutsocial helps you to engage the power of community in driving up engagement and subsequently ROI in your marketing efforts.
Through all these and many more social media strategies, one can definitely get an idea of the ROI and use that to tailor subsequent marketing strategies.