The Case for Smarter, ROI-Driven Content Marketing
Traditional content marketing is stalling in competitive landscapes. Increasingly, a focus on quantity-driven content—not the high-quality content customers are looking for—is leaving content marketers struggling to accomplish their goals. However, with an effective content marketing strategy, smart leaders will find that it’s easier than anticipated to accomplish their marketing goals and achieve the return on investment they’re looking for.
Redefining ROI in Content Marketing
In order to accomplish the return on your marketing investment that you’re really looking for, you have to start by redefining how you measure content marketing success. If you’re still looking at traditional standards for measuring your ROI, you may artificially inflate those numbers without actually accomplishing your goals.
Beyond Vanity Metrics: Measuring What Matters
If you want to see the content marketing ROI you’re hoping for, you have to start by checking what metrics you’re tracking. Are you still looking at pageviews or, worse, likes and shares on your social media? Chances are, you’re no longer evaluating how your content marketing efforts are helping you meet your overall goals.
Instead, take a look at the key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with business growth. Which KPIs you focus on may depend heavily on your ultimate goal for your content marketing.
Brand Awareness
If the goal is brand awareness—or the people who know about and recognize your brand—you may want to track metrics like:
- Search rankings
- Organic traffic to your website
- Brand mentions
- Referral traffic
These simple metrics can go a long way toward showing you how often customers are interacting with your brand—and how your content marketing is helping you bring them in.
Lead Generation
Are you using your content to generate new leads? Consider:
- Conversion rates
- Subscribers to your emails or other lists
- Lead quality scores, or how likely your content is to encourage leads that are genuinely beneficial to your brand
Hint: if your lead quality score isn’t increasing, you may not be focusing on the right type of content for your brand—and that may mean that you need to adapt your strategy.
Overall Business Growth
Growing your brand isn’t just about increasing the leads coming into your business. It’s also about increasing the value of your existing customers while decreasing the cost of finding and retaining them. Evaluate:
- Customer lifetime value
- Customer retention rate
- Customer acquisition cost
- Average purchase value
These metrics can provide you with a closer look at how your content is deepening your relationship with your customers and allowing you to improve the value of each sale.
Content Marketing ROI Equation
Want to see what return your content marketing is really delivering on your investment? Try this:
ROI = (Revenue from Content – Total Content Cost) / Total Content Cost
This allows you to see exactly what your content marketing is accomplishing in terms of overall brand growth.
Understanding the 5X ROI Blueprint
Are you ready to start seeing the return on investment you really want from your content marketing strategy? Start with a solid foundation and then build on your goals.
Setting the Foundation with a Mission-Focused Strategy
Before you can develop an effective content marketing strategy, you need to know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish. Start by defining business-specific goals for your content marketing program. For example, your goal might be to grow revenue by 15% in the first quarter of your content marketing efforts or to see a customer lifetime value increase of 20% over the first year of a new content strategy.
Lay out a clear, time-based goal so that you can focus your content marketing efforts on that key area. When you clearly establish your goals, you can align the rest of your content strategy.
ROI Amplifiers: Key Drivers of Exceptional Returns
To see an increase in the ROI for your content marketing, focus on these high-performing content strategies. They can help set your brand apart from those with stagnant content plans.
High-Quality Content
If you want to see your ROI grow, focus on creating exceptional content that adds value to readers each time they connect with your brand. All too many brands are still focusing on a bland quantity over quality strategy that prevents them from fully focusing on each piece of content—and it shows. Instead, prioritize valuable content, including long-form content that showcases your brand’s expertise and the unique value you can offer your customers.
Consistency
Delivering high-quality content occasionally isn’t enough. If you want to see real ROI from your content marketing efforts, focus on your overall consistency. Deliver new content regularly, when customers expect it, and make sure you’re meeting their expectations. You already know from your customer service efforts that customers should have the same experience with your brand each time they connect with you so that they can come to count on you. Your content should deliver the same consistency.
Promotion Plans
Creating great content on its own is only one piece of the puzzle. You need a plan in place to get that content in front of the people who need to see it. Look for ways to promote your content, whether that means sharing it on social media, via email, or connecting with other brands and cross-promoting your content.
The Core Principles of ROI-Oriented Content Marketing
If you want to see the growth and return on investment that you’re hoping for from your content marketing—alongside strategies that allow you to reach your goals—these pillars will help fuel your success.
Pillar 1: Leveraging Original Research for Impact
The internet is filled with generic recreations of the same content—especially with today’s AI-driven content explosion. Original research helps establish authority in your field. It helps show customers that you genuinely know what you’re talking about and provides the research that helps back it up. Not only does original data and content establish authority with customers, it helps generate backlinks, which can raise your content in search rankings and further increase your overall authority.
Are you seeking strategies to create and effectively promote research-based content? Try:
- Surveys
- Polls
- Direct observations from your unique experience
- Customer interaction data
Chances are, your brand is already collecting data around a number of data points. When you collect and explore that information, you have the grounds to share it with customers and show them what you can accomplish.
Pillar 2: Scaling Through Strategic Partnerships
Amplify your content by collaborating with influencers and thought leaders. Those strategic partnerships don’t just allow you to show your own authority, they help you take advantage of those leaders’ authority and connections. People who follow influencers and thought leaders are more likely to have positive thoughts about your brand—and to trust what you have to offer—when you connect with them through those leaders.
Try using formats that encourage conversation and engagement, including expert roundups and interviews. These formats are ideal for highlighting industry partnerships and giving deeper insight into what your brand can accomplish.
Pillar 3: Mastering Distribution for Maximum Reach
If you want to turn your content into high-ROI assets, master the art of digital public relations and strategic sharing. Engage in distribution tactics that elevate even niche content to a wider audience, including using a wide range of platforms, making the most of social media, and utilizing forums and online communities to grow your brand presence.
Building and Sustaining a Content Marketing Ecosystem
Content marketing isn’t something that you can do quickly or that you can set up one time and then forget it. Instead, you want to create a sustainable content market ecosystem that will allow you to continue to deliver results.
The Content Ecosystem in Action
Your content isn’t just single pieces that you throw out into the void of the internet and simply hope that they will offer some type of return. Instead, it is an interconnected ecosystem that supports your overall brand goals.
Start by creating anchor pieces: key pieces of evergreen content that reflect your brand’s purpose and mission. These anchor pieces should showcase exactly what your brand has to offer, including your authority and knowledge, and help answer customer pain points.
Next, design supporting content that helps draw customers and leads back to those anchor points. This strategy helps create compounding ROI over time as you continue to add value in those key areas.
Workflow Automation and Delegation
Maintaining your content ecosystem is challenging. Not only do you need to consistently create new content, you need a strategy that allows you to measure your content’s performance, make adaptations as needed, and promote and share that content. Using the right tools and platforms can go a long way toward alleviating the time and energy burden associated with managing your content needs.
Services like Verblio Plus can help take the execution burden off of internal teams. We can handle many of the processes associated with creating, editing, and posting your content, allowing you to focus on other important elements of your content strategy.
The Role of Scalability Without Sacrificing Quality
Over time, you may need to scale up your content operations significantly in order to continue to deliver on customer expectations and help grow your ROI. However, it’s essential to keep your increased content in line with your brand standards. Outsourcing some of your content creation to a platform like Verblio, which has the tools and writers needed to help grow your content library while maintaining your high-quality standards, is an excellent way to ensure that you can continue to see that key ROI.
Verblio’s Approach to Driving 5X ROI
At Verblio, we understand the challenges that can accompany your content marketing efforts. Take a look at our approach and how it can impact your brand.
Comprehensive Strategy Design
Verblio Plus develops tailored strategies for businesses, whether you are a new business just launching your content marketing plan or an existing business that needs to refresh your current content library and provide content that better reflects customer expectations. We have successfully helped customers refresh stagnant blogs, grow their audience, and develop comprehensive content plans that align with their ongoing goals.
Execution by Industry Specialists
Expert writers are seamless extensions of your team. At Verblio, we have many writers with expertise in a wide range of industries—and many more who can take content outlines or topics and turn them into comprehensive content. This enables hands-free content delivery, allowing you to access the content you need as soon as possible.
Data-Driven Optimization for Consistent Wins
Each month, we provide reporting that tracks ROI milestones. We correct course where necessary to ensure that we are continuing to deliver on those high standards and meet your content marketing goals. As we continue to apply those key tools and techniques, we achieve measurable results for our clients.
Integration for Effortless Collaboration
Verblio Plus seamlessly syncs with your existing workflows. It removes operational clutter so that your teams can focus on innovation. As a result, your internal team is able to focus on other tasks—and you can continue to scale up your content creation according to your needs.
Advanced Content Marketing Strategies for Big Returns
Do you want to see higher-level results? Incorporate these advanced content marketing strategies into your content plan.
1. Anticipating Trends Before the Competition
Utilize predictive analytics and market research to uncover future content opportunities. Ideally, you want to uncover the latest trends before your competitors so that you can get out ahead of them and produce that content before they do.
2. Content Batching for Impact at Scale
In many cases, you can create multiple pieces of content from one core concept. Repurpose content for different platforms to maximize your ROI and ensure that you are reaching customers in the way that best fits their needs.
3. Personalization Through Data
Use audience segmentation to enhance relevance and ROI. As you get to know your target audience, you can deliver highly personalized content that reflects their unique needs, allowing you to nurture your leads and grow revenue.
4. Technical SEO as a Performance Enabler
Technical optimization is often underrated when it comes to boosting your content marketing ROI. There are a number of high-impact technical tweaks that should go into your content marketing efforts, including:
- Use metadata effectively
- Create a clear, easy-to-follow site structure
- Design a site map
- Fix errors on your website
- Boost overall website performance for fast loading times and optimization on multiple devices
- Remove duplicate content
These simple strategies make your content more visible to search engines and increase your search ranking—and that search engine optimization is key to getting your content noticed organically.
Overcoming Bottlenecks and Barriers to ROI Growth
Has your content marketing hit a wall? Are you failing to see the growth you anticipated? Take a look at these common barriers and bottlenecks—and consider how you can eliminate them.
Identifying Common Content Marketing Bottlenecks
Some of the most common challenges include:
- Unclear goals and objectives: You haven’t yet established a clear content marketing goal. Putting it in place can help align your content to that key goal.
- Poor communication: You’re struggling to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Improving communication—and aligning with your content goals—can help get you past that barrier.
- Inadequate resources: You have a clear plan in place, but you don’t have the tools or staff in place to make it happen. Verblio Plus can help knock out that bottleneck and ensure that you have the resources on hand to grow your content.
- Failure to specialize: You’re focused on general content, rather than on content specific to your niche and your target market. Making that shift can make a huge difference in your overall content marketing strategy.
In addition, taking advantage of data and making adaptations to your strategy as it comes in can make it easier for you to accomplish your content goals.
Resistance to Change Among Teams
Ingrained habits can sabotage innovation in content marketing. If you’re moving toward advanced initiatives for your content marketing plan, make sure you’ve got team buy-in. Keep the lines of communication open, showcase the benefits for your team, and make sure there is a clear plan in place so everyone is on board.
Competing in Oversaturated Niches
Some industries and even niches within those industries are so filled with content that it’s difficult for any one brand to stand out. With unique value propositions and strategic distribution, however, you can help your brand stand out.
Sustaining Long-Term ROI Success
Your content marketing strategy isn’t just about a short-term boost in revenue. You’re looking for long-term success and growth. By maintaining your content plan and continuing to produce the high-quality content your customers are looking for, you can better accomplish those goals.
The Power of Continuous Iteration in Content Strategy
If you want sustained growth, you can’t just set-and-forget a content strategy. Instead, you need regular content audits. Review:
- Is the content still relevant to your brand guidelines, target audience, and current needs?
- Does your content reflect the current needs and trends in your industry, or has it become outdated?
- Is your content still helping you achieve your ROI goals, or have you noticed that you are no longer seeing the same return on your investment?
- Is your existing content high-quality, engaging, and optimized for search engines?
- How does your content compare to your competitor’s content?
- Are you still using current keywords and relevant phrasing? How do your current keywords perform when compared to the ones customers are actually using to search for information on your industry?
Once you have answered those questions, you can get a better idea of how you may need to adapt your current content strategy to better meet your brand’s needs. Furthermore, you can evaluate the content currently on your website and remove any content that isn’t fitting those goals.
Celebrating Wins to Reinforce Momentum
Tracking small successes can encourage continuous improvement for your team. Let your team know when you start seeing those wins, whether it’s the first time a customer comments about the value of the content on your website or an increase in overall revenue because of your content marketing efforts. Celebrating the small wins helps your team stay engaged and lets them know what they’re accomplishing, pushing them forward toward higher levels of success in the future.
Final Takeaways and Your Action Plan
It’s time to create your own content marketing strategy and achieve the 5x ROI you’ve been looking for—and Verblio is here to help.
Key Lessons
If you’re ready to accomplish your marketing goals:
- Dump the vanity metrics and focus on KPIs that genuinely reflect ROI
- Set a mission-specific goal that allows you to keep your content marketing focused and effective
- Take advantage of original research and thought leadership content
- Develop a content ecosystem that continues to build on itself
- Partner with industry experts and specialists who can help you achieve your goals
- Stay ahead of the competition by anticipating trends and staying on top of the latest developments in your industry
Developing a comprehensive content strategy will never be a set-and-forget solution. Instead, you must continue to analyze and adapt over time.
Partnering with Verblio for Smarter, Seamless Solutions
Verblio Plus offers help with every aspect of the content creation process, from helping create ideas that align with your strategy to delivering publish-ready content that fits your goals. We handle it all, including targeted SEO strategy reassessments and monthly analytics reporting that can help you keep an eye on your ROI. We utilize the latest tools and solutions to help you accomplish your goals—all on a faster timeline with more scalability than your company can create on its own.
Achieve Your 5x ROI Content Marketing Strategy
A 5x ROI content marketing strategy can have a transformational impact on your business. Are you ready to take those next steps and start seeing the ROI you need? Explore Verblio Plus for smarter marketing management and the support you need.
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