Rethinking the Narrative: Is Content Marketing ROI Just a Myth?

Exploring the content marketing ROI myth is essential for businesses to understand the true value and impact of their marketing efforts.

Each year, businesses consider what they can afford to spend on content marketing and what they get from it. Return on investment (ROI) is the metric people use to decide if the money they spent has paid off. For example, is the money you put into social media marketing driving traffic to your website while increasing brand recognition and, ultimately, revenue?

The benefits of content marketing can be subtle, though. That can lead many companies to question whether ROI for content marketing is real.

It is wise to routinely reassess your content marketing strategy and ROI for many reasons. First, technology is constantly changing, and your digital marketing must evolve to meet new challenges. It is also vital for your content marketing to remain cost-effective and sustainable.

One thing is clear, though. Content marketing is the best way to build trust with your audience and nurture their loyalty. Loyalty translates into sales and customer retention. This article will examine the myths around content marketing ROI and the proper ways to measure its benefits.

Common Misconceptions: Debunking Content Marketing ROI Myths

The biggest myth around content marketing ROI is that you can’t prove it. It’s true you may not see an instant jump in revenue or sales arise from a few content marketing efforts. But ROI is about more than just making more money than you spend. Increasing monetary gain is the end game of marketing, but that doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Revenue is based on many factors, such as:

• Market acquisition and size
• Pricing
• Customer base
• Product line
• Trends

Of course, marketing efforts are on that list. Again, the benefits of content marketing are subtle but measurable. That is one reason why developing a content marketing strategy is so critical.

When you create a content marketing strategy, one of the first steps involves defining your goals. What is the purpose of having a blog, for instance? It’s not to increase your sales immediately. Blog posts improve your SEO rankings. They help establish authority in your industry, and they engage potential leads.

You don’t measure the benefits of that blog in dollars and cents. You look at your page rankings, website traffic, and social media engagement to see the effects. That is measurable ROI.

Social media marketing has no impact on the bottom line

A large part of content marketing is social media, and calculating the value of that channel is challenging. The goal of social media is not a monetary one. It is more about market growth and branding, which affect revenue. Consider some facts about social media that show its value:

• Social media has 5.17 billion users globally.
• One person typically uses 6.7 different social media networks each month. That includes spending an average of 31 minutes per day on Facebook.
• 56.1 percent of people who use the internet also buy products online at least once per week.

Now, factor in how many people research a product or brand online and through social media before making offline purchases, and it’s clear that this form of marketing does impact the bottom line.

You’ll see immediate benefits from content marketing

No, content marketing is playing the long game. It rarely provides instant gratification. Its job is to plant seeds that will grow your market and brand over time. When you plant seeds in a garden, you don’t get watermelon within minutes. It takes time and effort to see that return.

Measuring Success: Key Metrics for Content Marketing ROI

So, if you can’t count on an immediate jump in sales, what metric should you be monitoring to evaluate the success of your content marketing? Let’s start with a basic formula that measures content marketing ROI in dollars.

Calculating ROI for your content marketing

If you can’t shake the idea that ROI is strictly about monetary expenditure and gain, there is a formula for content marketing that you can use:

• (Sales – Content marketing costs)/ content marketing costs x 100

For example, if you spent $500 on content marketing and had sales equaling $4,000, your ROI would be 700 percent.

• ($4000 – $500)/$500×100 = 700%

This is an excellent formula to use at the end of a year or quarter. It does not necessarily represent the full return on your investment, because the content will remain valuable over time. However, it will help you develop and manage your marketing budget. These metrics also provide accurate indicators of value for content marketing:

Organic traffic

Organic traffic represents how well the content performs in searches. You can use the Google Search Console to find this metric. Look at the performance section to see the number of clicks from organic searches.

Keyword rankings

Keyword rankings help you determine the power of your content’s keywords and their performance in search results. To measure this, you will need an SEO tool like SEMrush.

Page views

How many times do people visit pages on your website? This data has several practical applications. It tells you which blog posts perform the best, for instance. You can also see which product pages get the most hits and look at sales numbers for the associated products. If page views go up and sales don’t, you need to reassess the page or the product.

You can use Google Analytics to measure webpage performance.

Bounce rates

It’s not enough for someone to visit a page. If they don’t stay long enough to have meaningful interaction, you need to make changes. The bounce rate measures the number of visitors who exit a page right away and don’t explore your website.

Along those same lines, you can measure the average time spent on each webpage to see which ones make a difference and what pages are just taking up space.

Social media

Social media offers several helpful metrics. The basics include:

• Followers
• Engagements, such as shares or comments
• Brand mentions

Social media platforms also have other metrics that you can use to monitor engagement, such as the number of “likes” or upvotes.

Click-through rates (CTR)

Click-through rates are necessary metrics for email messages, ads, and search engine listings. The associated platform will show what percentage of people click a link to see your website. For email, use tools such as MailChimp to measure CTR and open rates so that you can assess the effectiveness of your content.

Strategies for Maximizing ROI: Tips from Content Marketing Pros

Consider following some advice on maximizing your investment from those who do content marketing for a living.

Have a strategy

The best approach to maximizing ROI for content marketing is to start with a strategy. Once you accept that content marketing is playing the long game, the importance of having a strategy becomes clear.

A content marketing strategy enables you to set goals and identify the best path to achieve them. If you blindly create a blog without understanding its purpose, you will never maximize its potential.

A strategy also establishes your key performance indicators (KPIs). Knowing your KPIs will tell you which metrics are most critical for your business.

Keep the content fresh

Topics such as “Your Industry Trends for 2024” will attract traffic for about six to eight months, but they become redundant at that point. This doesn’t mean you can’t use that concept, but keep it fresh. Around mid-year, you should consider replacing that topic with new trends for 2025.

A practical way to keep content worth reading is to make it evergreen. That means a large percentage of your topics should always remain relevant to your audience. For example, “How to Make Over Your Bathroom” is a topic that will stand the test of time.

If you stockpile a core base of evergreen material, you’ll have some leeway to create content on topics that last only six to eight months. Evergreen topics are also reusable. If you are behind in creating content, regenerate a previous topic with some spit and polish to make it new again.

Know your audience – always

It is the golden rule of marketing. Create content with your audience in mind. This is crucial regardless of whether you are developing blog entries or social media posts. A company that sells diapers will not see much headway if it targets CEOs. The target audience is clearly new parents, and the content should reflect their interests.

Optimize, optimize, optimize

We really can’t say it enough: Optimize your material for search engines. Use keywords throughout the content, and make sure they fit naturally into the text. Assign SEO-friendly URLs to your pages and ensure that what you produce is of high quality. Grammar errors and poor writing will quickly cause your rankings to fall.

Don’t just optimize new pages. Go back and make sure the old ones satisfy current SEO standards and trends. Search engines love to throw a wrench into your content marketing by constantly moving the goalpost. It is up to you to keep your SEO as fresh as your content.

Finally, hire professionals to produce quality content. It will be worth the investment. WriterAccess offers some of the top writing talent in the world, making it easy to perfect your content marketing. We can help you scale content production as well. Get a 14-day WriterAccess trial and see how your ROI can grow.