by Fronetics | Mar 15, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Here are four simple steps to help you measure your company’s content marketing ROI and the success of your strategy.
Lean-startup pioneer Eric Ries said, “The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions.” In other words, measure the things that will tell you if an effort was profitable so you know where to put your time and money.
But most companies aren’t using the right metrics to track their content marketing ROI. For example, 83% of B2B enterprise companies (over 1,000 employees) use web traffic as their main metric for measuring content marketing ROI. A spike in homepage hits could be the result of your hard work, but it could also be ghost spam, or even both! So clearly, web traffic isn’t the most reliable metric.
Content marketing ROI is harder to quantify than checking a few quick numbers. But don’t give up hope. In the article How to Measure Content Marketing ROI: A Simple 4 Step Process, marketing consultant Bill Widmer breaks down a simple, four-step process that will quickly and effectively measure your content marketing ROI.
What is content marketing ROI?
Content marketing ROI is how much revenue you gain from content marketing in comparison with what you spend on creating and distributing content. It’s an actual percentage that shows how much revenue you gained vs. how much money you spent. And for a lot of businesses (and bosses), this percentage is very important. They want you to be able to prove that the marketing dollars that are going into your content marketing strategy are actually pulling in new business.
Every company has specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that help shape their marketing strategies. Here at Fronetics, we believe that your content marketing strategy should take these KPIs into consideration when thinking about your ROI:
- Website traffic
- Leads generated
- Conversion rate
- Direct sales
Obviously content marketing has more benefits than these four KPIs demonstrate — including better customer retention, brand awareness, and improved SEO — but to begin to measure your ROI, let’s focus on these four main points.
Measure content marketing ROI in 4 simple steps
1. Download your reverse goal path data.
Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media, suggests:
- Go to your analytics dashboard. Set the date range for at least a year.
- Go to Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path.
- Add a filter like “/blog” so only blog posts show up.
- Sort by Goal Completions.
After this step, you’ll be able see which of your posts have driven the most conversions. But you can’t stop there. These are simply conversion numbers. We want those numbers to become conversion rates, so let’s keep going.
2. Download your pageview data.
In order to calculate a conversion rate, you need to know pageviews. Here’s how to get that information:
- Go to Content > Site Content > All Pages.
- Filter with “/blog” to get only blog posts.
Download this data into the spreadsheet from step one.
3. Get your conversion rate.
Now here’s a little math for you. Divide the data in the “conversions” column by the number in the “unique pageviews” column. This will give you your conversion rate per blog post.
This will show you what your best-performing pieces of content are, and what posts need to be updated to gain more views and shares.
This information will give you valuable insight into the topics that your target audience are reading about and how you can better plan for high-ranking content in the future.
If you have posts or pages that are older — like over a year — and they haven’t gotten any views or conversions, it’s time to think about reworking them to have more appeal to your target audience.
For your actual percentage, you’ll need to calculate how many of these leads have converted to sales.
4. Calculate content marketing ROI based on lead conversions.
Here’s where things get a little more complicated, but still very manageable. You need to start putting tags on your leads according to the content they came from.
You can use programs like WordPress or Blogger to help you automatically tag any leads that came from a specific form. Assuming the form correlates to a single blog post, you will know that any leads with that tag came from that post.
You can also connect your leads with a CRM, such as HubSpot or SalesForce, and track which leads came from specific emails. These programs easily integrate with your analytics and email marketing platforms for up-to-date numbers and data.
Related posts:
by Fronetics | Mar 12, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Here’s how to quantify the impact of content marketing on brand awareness, a notoriously difficult benefit to measure.
A successful content marketing strategy strengthens the relationship between brands and their target audiences. And brand awareness is a key component to any successful content marketing strategy. Ultimately, the more aware audiences are of your brand, the more likely they are to buy your products or services.
To properly measure the impact of your content marketing, you must start at the beginning, with the overall goals for your content marketing strategy. What kind of content are you creating? Why are you creating this content? How will this increase sales or grow your business?
A lot of our customers include increasing brand awareness among their content strategy goals. But this is a very difficult objective to quantify. How can you measure how familiar people are with your brand?
Here are four metrics we recommend for tracking the impact of content marketing on brand awareness.
4 metrics to measure the impact of content marketing on brand awareness.
1. Social media reach
Tracking the reach of your social media content is a good gauge of the impact it’s having on your brand awareness. Companies can waste a lot of time trying to track down information on various social media accounts; don’t fall into this trap.
Use tools, like Shared Count, that show how many times a piece of content has been shared on social media. Shared Count accurately tracks the social reach of your content on the most popular social media sites — including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — to easily keep track of your social reach. In turn, you can discover the impact your social reach is having on your brand awareness.
2. Brand mentions
Not to state the obvious, but if people are talking about your brand online, it’s safe to assume they are aware of you. There’s a great deal of value in knowing what customers are saying about your company and your products/services. Monitoring brand mentions online can provide honest feedback and objective insight from current and potential customers.
There are several tools to help you track brand mentions online. Here at Fronetics, we prefer the ease of Google Alerts, which allows you to set up custom alerts when your brand is mentioned online. We also use Hootsuite, where you can track brand mentions, as well as keywords and phrases, across all of your social media platforms.
3. Media mentions
Media mentions differ from brand mentions in their origin. Media mentions come directly from publishers, instead of customers. These mentions include any media coverage — TV, print, social media, interviews — that include your brand. Remember, if publishers are talking about your brand online as a result of the content you’re creating, it’s impacting your brand awareness.
And let’s not forget about linkless mentions. As Google and other search engines continue to update their algorithms, it’s crucial to update your monitoring practices. Linkless backlinks are becoming increasingly popular and can have a huge impact on your brand awareness (and SEO!).
4. Branded searches
Knowing how many people are searching for your specific brand tells you a lot about how well known your brand is. Using online tools, such as Google Adwords or Moz, you can track the searches for your products, blogs, social media platforms, and any other variation that you find useful. These tools are free, easy to use, and perfect for determining if your company is popping up when customers are searching.
Using these tools to measure brand awareness offers clues that customers are finding your company in their search efforts. If the needle is not moving in a positive direction, always adjust your strategy to until you find what works for your business.
Drawing the public’s attention to — and heightening their knowledge of — your business ultimately generates leads. And some of those leads will turn into sales. But, let’s be honest: this doesn’t happen overnight. And it’s often difficult to quantify.
That’s not a reason to throw in the towel. There are ways to measure the work that you’re putting into your content marketing program. Using these metrics, you can start tracking the impact of content marketing on brand awareness.
Related posts:
by Fronetics | Mar 8, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Use these 4 steps to determine the topic clusters that will be best for driving organic traffic to your business’ website.
You’ve determined your pillar content and written your pillar pages. Now what? It’s time to develop topics clusters.
Topic clusters show search engines that your website contains breadth and depth on a particular subject, which will help them decide to show your page over others in a user’s search for that subject.
Determining what topic clusters to use can be overwhelming — as can figuring out how to optimize blog posts that contain cluster content. Let’s take a step back and think a little about what a topic cluster is.
HubSpot Academy has a great succinct summary: “Topic clusters are comprised of a pillar page and subtopic content that you’ve compiled for each of your core topics.”
So how do you go about developing topic clusters? We’ve put together a four-step guide to get you started.
4 steps to developing topic clusters
1) Choose your topic.
This is all about determining where you can or strive to be a thought leader. Pick topics that are fundamental to your business, places where you can be a resource for potential buyers and industry peers. Define these topics with a name that summarizes the content it will address.
Chances are, you’ll have some supporting content already. Conducting a content audit will help you determine how much you have in place already.
2) Compile subtopics.
HubSpot recommends having “6-8 subtopics that address specific questions your customers may be exploring related to the core topic of your pillar page.” Other sources recommend between 10-20 subtopics. It depends on how broad your main topic is. (But if you can come up with more than 20 subtopics, your topic is definitely too broad!)
Conduct a brainstorming session with your team to think about relevant content that your target buyers would seek out when researching products and solutions.
Simple Marketing Now blogger Christine B. Whittemore suggests starting with identifying the problems your buyer persona faces. “Map out 5-10 core problems that your core persona has. Use research… to truly understand your buyer persona problems, including the world used to describe them.”
3) Develop pillar pages.
Now that you have a list of topics and subtopics, you need to develop your pillar pages. These pages will extensively — and broadly — cover each main topic, and they will include links to each subtopic.
Inbound Marketing Specialist Sarah Seward suggests using “relevant pictures, high-quality and interesting content, compelling headers, and any additional, related resources, such as a custom graphic visually demonstrating your expertise on a topic.”
4) Create!
Now it’s time to create your content (or brush up existing content you discovered in your audit). Be sure to link pages covering your subtopics to your pillar pages, using the correct anchor text. That means hyperlinking words that are relevant to the topic and subtopics.
Additionally, you can link subtopics together where appropriate. The more often you can create relevant links, the better.
Now repeat this process until you’ve created several topic clusters that best define your business. This SEO strategy will help ensure that prospective customers that are searching for products or services like yours will be more likely to visit your website and patronize your business.
Related posts:
by Fronetics | Feb 20, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
One of 2018’s fastest growing marketing trends is influencer marketing. Companies will increase their influencer marketing budget to keep up with the competition.
You’ve probably heard the buzzword by now: Influencer marketing seems to be on the tip of every marketer’s tongue these days. Linqia’s latest report, The State of Influencer Marketing 2018, shows that B2C companies are already taking full advantage of this marketing trend. Their report shows that 86% of B2C marketers used influencer marketing in 2017, and 92% of marketers that tried it found it to be effective.
B2B marketers, on the other hand, have been slower to adopt this new marketing trend. Influence 2.0 – The Future of Influencer Marketing Research Report 2017 showed that only 11% of B2B marketers have an ongoing influencer program.
To understand why influencer marketing is becoming so popular and why B2B companies need to jump on the trend, let’s start with the basics.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on influential people, rather than the target market as a whole. Marketers identify individuals that have influence over potential buyers and create marketing campaigns and activities around these influencers.
For example, Microsoft teamed up with National Geographic last year to launch an influencer marketing campaign, called “Make What’s Next.” The technology giant leveraged some of the most famous adventure photographer influencers on Nat Geo’s Instagram for the campaign. The objective was to bring awareness to young women with interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). By utilizing Nat Geo’s most heavily followed female photographers, Microsoft was able to access a built-in following.
Why influencer marketing works.
Influencer marketing is extremely effective because of three key components:
- Social reach: Influencers can reach millions of followers (and consumers) through their social media channels, websites, and blogs.
- Original content: Influencers work with marketers to produce original content for your brand.
- Consumer trust: Through their existing, strong relationships with their audiences, influencers have a built-in level of trust and can influence consumer opinions.
Content marketers are working overtime to update their content marketing strategies to include influencer marketing campaigns. Consumers no longer want to hear from brands about their products; they want someone they trust to recommend products and services. This is where influencer marketing comes in to play.
Marketers across industries found influencer marketing to be so effective in 2017, that 52% of are planning programs that leverage multiple types of influencers (celebrities, top-tier bloggers, micro-influencers) in 2018.
Where do you begin?
Instagram should be your starting point. According to new research, influencer marketing on Instagram will have generated over $1 billion by the end of 2017, with significant annual growth going forward. With more than 700 million users, Instagram’s platform allows influencers to easily share photos and videos with their followers. Product promotion has never been easier.
Boxed Water turned to Instagram influencer marketing to market its philanthropic campaign, The ReTree Project. The company paired with social influencers, like actors Aidan Alexander and Jaime King, and YouTube star Megan De Angelis, to spread the word about their new campaign. These popular Instagram users asked consumers to post a photo with the hashtag #ReTree and, in turn, Boxed Water would plant two trees for every photo posted. Just one month after launching the campaign, Boxed Water generated more than 2,600 posts with the hashtag.
With 39% of marketers planning to increase influencer marketing budget this year, B2B companies are quickly seeing the leverage that influencers can have over their target audiences. By pairing your products or services with the right influencer, marketers can easily tap into thousands of potential consumers, increasing website traffic and leads.
Have you tried influencer marketing? How was your experience?
Related posts:
by Fronetics | Feb 8, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
These social media statistics are important to keep in mind when planning out your content marketing strategy.
A strong social media presence is key to successful marketing in 2018. Social media is simply unavoidable these days.
So, you jumped on board and you’re posting and tweeting. You’re creating content. You’re learning about search engine optimization and how to improve your rankings. But you’re still not reaching the audiences you were hoping to attract. What’s going wrong?
When you are posting on social media could be as important as what you’re posting.
Timing is everything, and that statement especially holds true when it comes to posting content to social media. If you are sending out your message and nobody is there to see it, you are that proverbial tree falling in the forest; you did not make a sound. Your post had little to no impact.
So, even if you are putting in the time and effort to craft informative blog posts, tweets with just the right message, or Facebook posts that inspire more than just page likes, you still are not getting the most exposure you can out of social media.
We have done our homework when it comes to the best times to post on social media. And the truth is there is no “one size fits all” answer to when you should post. There are general guidelines that differ for each site. But in general, it’s important to keep your target audience in mind when deciding where and when to post.
Here are some social media statistics that you need to consider when deciding when to post your content.
Social media statistics your business needs to consider when publishing content
(Made with Canva)
Related posts:
SaveSave
SaveSave
