CMI has a great post on how to calculate the ROI on your content marketing.
In essence, it works like this:
1. Use Google Analytics to track the increase in organic visits to your site that result from your content marketing.
2. Use Google Keyword Planner Tool to find the cost per click (CPC) for the primary keyword or phrase used in each piece of content.
3. Then use that data to work out what it would have cost you to drive the equivalent amount of traffic using CPC rather than content.
If you do a reasonable job on your content marketing, it should end up driving more traffic than CPC (which you should also be investing in) and it will deliver additional benefits as well, that can’t be measured by this method – brand awareness, etc. But this is a good simple way to think about the numbers.
Kraft is one company that has some great insights into the other benefits of content marketing:
Kraft very clearly does not see content as a means to simply generate some engagement, but to understand customers based on their interactions with content.
She described the content marketing program as a ‘scaled learning engine’, that helped the company understand its considerable audience as a whole, but more importantly, as individuals.
The team at Kraft tag and track more than 22,000 different attributes of their audience based on their behaviour and engagement with web content.
Kraft has proven that its content marketing yields 4x better ROI than its traditional advertising.
That last quote is the key reason why you should be thinking seriously about content marketing.