How to Measure the ROI of Your Content Marketing

Rarely will a potential customer read one blog article, click on the big call-to-action button at the bottom and become a customer.

They might read one blog post, then bookmark it. Then come back to it at a later date, and look through your other content.

Then watch some of your videos, and then subscribe to your newsletter. Then 2 weeks later, a friend mentions something related to your product and the potential customer remembers your company. They decide it’s time to take the leap: they go to your homepage, and sign up.

That first blog post was the first point of contact, and played an important role in the customer acquisition process. But that’s difficult to track.

Does that mean that content marketing results cannot be tracked? Will spending all this money and time on writers, SEO experts and content strategists be worth it? Will it bring in quality leads and sales, and will it bring enough to justify the cost?

Or put simply: how can we measure the ROI of content marketing?

It’s a very valid question. Although answering the question might not always be straightforward or easy, I think it’s important to still try (more on “why measuring content marketing ROI is difficult” below).

In this post, I’ll outline how you can calculate the ROI of content marketing and, hopefully, help you ensure it’s giving you the results you want.

The formula

There is a content marketing ROI formula that my friend Dom put together, which I think works well. It’s similar to the one used to calculate marketing ROI:

(sales growth – content marketing cost) / content marketing cost = ROI

So, say you got £3,000 worth of business through content, and that piece of content cost you £1,000; you’ve got an ROI of 200%.

(3000 - 1000)/1000 = 200%

Seems pretty simple, right? But really, the difficult part is figuring out those exact numbers. Let’s dive into how we can do that.

Typical content marketing expenses

Let’s start with the marketing cost. How much does it cost to do content marketing? It’s rarely a clear cut £1,000 since there are usually quite a few different factors and multiple people involved in creating content.

I’ve grouped content marketing expenses into:

  1. In-house talent

  2. Tools

  3. Freelancers/ outside consultants

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1. Marketing manager/CMO/in-house person doing the content

One of the main people who will manage your content marketing might be a marketing manager, CMO or head of content.

If your person is someone who is in charge of several aspects of marketing, ask them to track how much time they are spending per week on content. Things to factor in include:

  • Managing a content team: writers, strategists, etc.

  • Distributing content via email, social media, etc.

  • Working on content strategy

  • Uploading content on a CMS

This could range from as little as a couple of hours to over 20 hours if content is one of the main drivers of your marketing activities. It might also change from one week to another, so really you’ll be getting a rough average.

If your marketing manager spends 5 hours per week on content and works a 40 hour work week, that means content accounts for 12.5% of their time. You can then use that percentage of their salary to calculate how much content is costing you. When several people are involved, do this for each person.

If you have a head of content or content manager who’s in charge of content, then you would just use their entire salary.

Example: say you have a marketing manager who spends 10 hours per week on content and has a salary of £45k for a 35 hour work week. After doing calculations, your total cost would be approximately £1087.5, which we’ll round up to £1,100 per month. So far, your content marketing efforts are costing £1,100 per month for that employee.

2. Content marketing tools

These are the SaaS products and tools that you use to manage your content, such as Ahrefs, SEMRush, Hubspot and Clearscope. These might range from keyword research tools, to search engine optimisation tools. Make sure to factor in those expenses.

Say you have Wordpress and pay for a couple of plugins (e.g. Elementor), and also use SEMrush. That might cost £240, bringing our monthly total to £1,340.

3. Freelancers

The next thing to factor in is outside help: freelance writers, editors and consultants.

Good freelance writers cost a minimum of £350 per 600 word article, so the costs can quickly add up. You may have someone in-house doing the editing or use a freelance editor. You might also hire a freelance content strategist to help you build your content strategy (that’s what I do!).

Ideally you have someone to work on writer briefs, content optimisation and all the rest. That could be a freelance editor or someone in-house. To keep things simple, say you have someone in-house to edit, optimise and upload all the content, and you have a long-term freelance writer on board to do the writing.

With your plan and strategy, you’re publishing 4 articles per month (although this depends on the month) which you give to your freelance writer to handle.

If articles are £400 per article, then that’s a total of £1,600 per month.

In total, our content marketing costs come to £2,940.

But that’s just one way to do it. Some companies hire freelance editors for 1 day per week. Others hire a freelance content marketer who works a couple of days per week to edit, optimise, upload and distribute content.

Read more: Why Fintech Companies Need to Consider Content Distribution

It really depends on how you’re using content. If you’re a company that relies mostly on content for acquisition and retention, then it would make sense to have several people involved in your content efforts and therefore a higher budget. If you are more sales or ads driven, then you might only need one freelance writer who would be creating content to support your sales team. As we love to say in marketing “it depends”.

However, it’s also useful to see how others do it. I’ve asked a couple of fellow content marketers to write about their experiences managing content for clients:

Dominic Kent, founder of UC Marketing, charges based on the value of the output rather than the hours it may take to create something.

“With customers, those who understand content marketing are happy to pay for the genuine value of the content. For example, a high volume + high conversion blog post could be worth £1,000 per customer. So, paying £1,000 for the blog post is great value.

For the creator, while some blog posts may take a few hours to complete, the years of experience, connections, and knowledge that made it happen must be considered. If you’re an SME in your area, you have every right to charge more than a novice who knows nothing about the topic.”

Teresa “Sam Houghton, Chief Nerd at the Modern Health Nerd, takes a double-pronged approach to content.

“Strategy and content creation need to go together. Many companies seem to realize this but don’t understand how to lay the strategic foundation. By starting with strategy, they are better able to streamline their approach. This allows for more high-quality content creation regardless of budget, and it results in a greater ROI overall.“

Hopefully, you have an idea of what your content marketing expenses are now. Let’s look at sales growth.

You may like: Case Study: How I Grew this Fintech’s Organic Traffic by 1,619%

How to measure sales growth

Measuring leads and customers that come through your content is notoriously difficult, but, as with many things in marketing, your goal is to measure as much as you can to the greatest possible extent.

Measuring sales growth depends mostly on how your website is set up and what kind of product you’re offering.

If you acquire customers via the website and it’s quite hands-off (no onboarding, no calls with the sales team, etc.), then you can set up all your attribution and sales growth via Google Analytics, Data Studio and your product management tool.

This is what I do with fintech clients: We set up a dashboard with Data Studio to track weekly and monthly results. Once you attribute a specific value to your customers, you’ll also be able to see how much money your customers are generating. So for example if the value of one customer is £30, then your dashboard will show the total amount of revenue generated by customers that day.

If you have free trials or multiple plans, it can get a bit more complicated. In that case, you can choose to track each conversion individually or pick one number that works as an average of all your various plans.

Typeform’s multiple plan choice…

Typeform’s multiple plan choice…

If you are B2B, for example, and customer acquisition happens through a sales channel, then it’s a matter of keeping track of those who find you organically. I have a small question in my contact form that asks people how they found me. If they say Google, then I know it’s my content marketing that’s doing the heavy lifting. Tracking contact form submissions that come from the blog is another way to monitor growth.

Yes, it can be time consuming to set it all up -- but it’s essential in order to track your content marketing efforts. In order to track sales growth, you want to be tracking conversions, finding out which pages these conversions come from, and which ones are organic and non-organic.

Every week, you should be able to see how many conversions you’ve made via your website and via the blog.

And that’s a number you can use as “sales growth”.

So, if your product is an investment app and your customers pay £9.99 per month to use it, you would need 294 customers to cover the cost of your content marketing efforts every month (using the £2,940 we used before for content marketing expenses).

Of course, on the backend it is a little more complex than that: you want to be factoring in churn, lifetime value, other sources of revenue, in-app purchases and the quality of your customers. But for the sake of simplicity and this example, we can now see how many paying monthly customers you need to cover your content marketing expenses.

If your content brings over 294 customers that pay diligently month per month, then your content marketing ROI is positive. Any conversion above 294, and you’re doing well. Below 294, and your ROI would be negative.

However, that might not always a bad thing. Why? Because it’s not always about numbers.

Let’s look at why.

Why is content marketing ROI hard to measure?

To be fair, content marketing is a lot easier to measure than other marketing activities such as advertising, TV or sponsoring.

But there are some aspects to it that cannot be measured.

Here are some benefits that content marketing brings, that are harder to measure:

  • Brand reputation, awareness

  • Partnership opportunities

  • Community

  • Customer retention

  • Brand loyalty

  • Expertise

Imagine you’re a Wealtech company, and you write an article on “how to choose an investment advisor” that ranks on the first page of Google. An investment podcast host comes across that article while searching for tips on finding investment advisors, and thinks it would be a great idea to have your CEO on the podcast.

Your CEO gets on the podcast, which helps promote your product into the ears of 500 people. One of those people is the director of investment brokerage, and reaches out to your company to discuss partnering up. That partnership helps improve your end product, bringing in hundreds more customers.

That article could possibly bring in £1000s worth of sales — but it’s difficult to track. It also demonstrates other powerful aspects of content. Unlike a salesman, content works for you 24/7, can reach every corner of the internet and will bring in hundreds of leads and opportunities that you might not have even thought of, for years and even decades to come.

That brings me onto my next point: a content driven purchase is not a straight line. If you read the example I put in the introduction, you can clearly see that people don’t follow a clear pathway when it comes to purchasing a product. That makes it difficult to track.

The other thing to mention is that SEO and content does take a while to produce results. That’s why it’s perfectly normal if your website is relatively new to have a negative content marketing ROI for the first year or so. Ranking on Google takes time!

The best we can do is track as much as we can, and make sure we are actually publishing content that people find useful.

With this approach in mind, hopefully you can go away and calculate the ROI of your content marketing efforts — whether it’s for you, your boss or your boss’ boss. If it’s negative, find out what can be improved and how (time to work on increasing conversions!). If it’s positive, then you’re doing a great job and keep going!

And if you’re looking for help with the sales growth side, that’s where we come in at Mint Studios. With our framework, we produce content that is optimised for leads and conversions — rather than just impressions. We write in-depth, interview-based content that focuses on customer pain points and bottom of the funnel content.

Want to learn more? Read about the Mint Studios framework

Financial Services Content StrategyAraminta Robertsoncontent marketing roiComment