3 Ways To Calculate Conversions from Content Marketing

Perhaps the most valued business case for content marketing is driving conversions. When done properly, content marketing attracts prospects at the top of the funnel and guides them through the buyer journey until they convert to become customers. Therefore, content marketing conversions are the prospects who became customers because of either helpful, useful and/or entertaining content your brand provided them.

The core metrics we use to measure conversions are:

1. Cost per lead: Amount your brand spends to acquire a lead
2. Percentage of leads sourced: Percentage of leads sourced by content, compared to other marketing programs
3. Conversions: Percentage of people who take a desired action

1. Cost Per Lead

Calculating your content marketing’s cost per lead is crucial in order to benchmark your program’s effectiveness against other marketing departments. Determining this is quite simple. To begin, we need to know the costs accrued to create and distribute your content.

In this example, we’ve created two pieces of content. For the ROI Guide, we spent $3,000 to create and invested $10,000 to distribute. For the Strategy Guide, we also spent $3,000 to create, but spent $20,000 to distribute. Combining these costs, we can see that the ROI Guide cost us $13,000 and the Strategy Guide cost us $23,000.

Now that we know how much our content cost to create and distribute, let’s see how the content performed in terms of lead generation to calculate cost per qualified lead.

Our ROI Guide generated 550 new leads, 205 of which were qualified leads. To calculate cost per lead, we want to take the total cost ($13,000) divided by the total number of qualified leads (205). 

$13,000 / 205 = $63

Therefore, our ROI Guide cost $63 per qualified lead.

To determine an accurate average total cost per lead of content marketing, we’d want to take a larger sample, but for the purpose of this guide, we’ll simplify and average these two costs.

($63 + $177) / 2 = $120

Therefore, our average total cost per lead for content marketing is $120.

2. Percentage of Leads Sourced

In order to determine the percentage of leads from content marketing, we first need to gather the total number of leads sourced from other marketing programs. Looking at the gathered data below, we see that content marketing accounts for 205 of the total 710 marketing qualified leads.

To find the percentage, we take 205/710 to find that content marketing accounts for 28.9% of total qualified leads.

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Depending on goals and expectations from your marketing leadership, you can gauge how well your content is performing compared to other marketing programs.

3. Conversions

Finally, to determine the actual revenue sourced by content marketing, we need to look at conversions. For this example, let’s say our content marketing has a conversion rate of 50% and the average sale is worth $500. To find our total conversions, we need to multiply our total qualified leads by 50%.

205 * 50% = 102.5 conversions

Based on that finding, we assume these sales will average $500, so to find the total value we multiply 102.5 * $500 = $51,000.

Therefore, our total content marketing conversions are worth $51,000. 

Again, in order to gauge the performance of this conversion value, you’ll want to do some discovery within your organization to see how it stacks up against other marketing departments.

This post originally appeared on LizBedor.com (Photo Source.)

The post 3 Ways To Calculate Conversions from Content Marketing appeared first on B2B Marketing Insider.

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Handy-Dandy Guide To Content Marketing

My great grandmother Michaelena always told me when I was growing up as a young boy, “Gerry, if you want better content, then you need to figure out a better way to ask for it!”

Little did I know that this grandmotherly advice would translate into a very useful content marketing strategy.

I find many B2B organizations linking business units to the feet-on-the-street sales organization without effectively integrating content into this supply chain. The hierarchy might be efficient, however, many times the content marketing strategy misses the mark. And, the right message does not get delivered at the right time to the right audience on the right channel.

The Content Marketing Research Tells Us We Need Relevant Content

• 89% of B2B decision makers say personalized content (e.g., company, industry, category) is a key influencer (Source: ITSMA)
• 68% of B2B decision makers depend on the content more this year than last year (Source: Demand Gen Report)
• B2B decision makers want to consume at least 5 pieces of content before they make a decision (Source: IDG)

This research tells us that content is the key ingredient in this supply chain is not optimized; thus is underperforms.

For example, have you ever asked someone to write a blog post to support a marketing event or campaign? If you have, then you know the sometimes frustration of not getting what you asked for.

Here’s a handy-dandy guide to help you create better content!

10 Things To Include In Your Content Marketing Brief

Consider these ten briefing inclusions to help your writers develop the most efficient copy for your social media strategy:

1. The working title of this blog post or content is [INSERT TITLE HERE]
2. The target audience reader for this blog post is [INSERT TARGET HERE]
3. This target audience is at THIS place in the sales cycle [EARLY or MID or LATE]
4. The key question this blog post or content to answer is [INSERT KEY QUESTION HERE]
5. A simple Google search that might lead to this post might be [INSERT A SAMPLE GOOGLE POST YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE MIGHT USE TO FIND THIS CONTENT]
6. The key take away the reader should have from this blog post is [INSERT KEY TAKE-AWAY]
7. The keyword needed to be included in the title, subheads and integrated with the copy is [INSERT KEYWORD HERE]
8. The hashtags needed to be a part of the supporting tweets are [INSERT COLLECTION OF HASHTAGS HERE]
9. The key reference page on which this blog post needs to be based I [INSERT PAGE NUMBER OF THE REFERENCED MATERIAL]
10. The key research facts (try to integrate 1-3 key facts) to be incorporated into the blog post or content. [ATTACH FACT SHEET]

Do you have a content creation trick of the trade to share? If so, please share it below!

What’s The Content Marketing Lesson To Learn?

My grandmother also used to tell me that the marketing supply chain is only as strong as the weakest link – and you cannot afford to have content that does not deliver! So, the big lesson to learn is to work with your supply chain to help them assist you with better content by giving them a better brief!

There is one thing for sure, hope is not a content marketing strategy. You cannot throw requests over the wall and hope for great stuff. It’s incumbent on you to provide clear direction to your writers and content creators. After all, you are the subject matter expert, right?

This article originally appeared on MarketingThink.com

The post Handy-Dandy Guide To Content Marketing appeared first on B2B Marketing Insider.

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