Everyone knows that you need to somehow declare yourself, but how do you know if you have declared yourself enough, and how much of your revenue do you owe to the content?

When engaging in digital marketing, and even more so when ordering marketing services from a digital agency, it is very important to be aware how each activity contributes to the commercial outcome. This is especially difficult when it comes to content marketing. 

Content is mostly responsible for “micro-conversions,”, i.e. the early stages of converting a reader totally unfamiliar with your brand into a customer. It is extremely difficult to figure out how reading a specific article ultimately influenced the purchase, and what would have changed if the article had never been written. 

content marketing automation

Sometimes a customer may purchase the product right away after reading the article, sometimes a year later, and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. And as original written and video content creation is costly, there is a sensible question, how much content (and what kind of) is necessary and sufficient to generate conversions. Writing a quality article or a video script, making good illustrations, editing videos, adding infographics and animations are time consuming tasks, moreover, they require knowledge and experience that could be used for production instead of content creation.

 

Success criteria

Up to this moment we have been discussing the connection between content and revenue. But sales are not the only goal of content marketing. It also serves to build trust for your brand, increase customer satisfaction (for example, through beautifully and simply designed online mounting manuals for home appliance shoppers), increase website visibility and behavioural metrics of the website traffic, and strategic competitiveness. All this ultimately comes down to future sales, but in ways too indirect to define the link between the future sales and current content marketing.

That is why success criteria for content marketing can and should include non-monetary parameters. For example, you can measure the frequency of support requests related to an issue discussed in a recent post. Or you can measure the conversion rate at the “consultation” stage: a good article that explains how to use the product will answer most of the users’ questions, and those who previously quit after the consultation now stop wasting your managers’ time on the phone. 

 

measure to manage content

 

Measure to manage

As with any line of marketing, if you can’t measure your ROMI, it’s impossible to know exactly what works and what doesn’t. If you knew, you would probably fire all the authors altogether and forget about the content…

As you can see from the previous paragraph, the ROMI in this case should embrace various forms of reward, including labour economy and LTV growth. Part of these figures are estimated heuristically. With this much uncertainty, it’s easy to get lost.

To help you figure this out, HubSpot offers three important features:

  1. Track your content ROI. The system monitors traffic indicators, feedback form submissions, content downloads, transactions. With this information, you can find out what content is actually making money.
  2. Track the user journeys. Observing a typical user’s path across the website you can derive their behaviour patterns and know: in this kind of situation the user starts calling us on the phone; in this kind of situation the user fails to find a necessary manual and never returns, etc. HubSpot will show how your target audience normally uses the website, which pages they read, which resources they downloaded, when and where they navigate to after studying the content. Now you know what elements of your website cause the waste of your operators’ time.
    Based on the aggregated information, you can better understand the needs and concerns of your target audience. This will help you create more in-demand content, as well as improve your website to make the most required buttons more accessible.
  3. Points of interaction with the user. This is important if your sales funnel relies on several employees who send the customer to each other at different stages, and communicate with each other about the current deals. They all need to view the complete history of interaction with this customer. To help them, HubSpot offers a single deal card that accounts for all the previous transactions related to this customer and this deal, including the emails, calls, meeting resumes, and other notes are available. The traffic source can also be indicated in the deal description. Just so you know what has attracted the user to your website, and what information they have probably got before entering it. You can then compare the final conversion rate between different traffic sources. 

These HubSpot capabilities equip you with critical information. The lack of this information makes you build sales and marketing based on assumptions rather than scientific evidence, and suffer the loss of 30, 50, 70 percent of the possible revenue. This is why we actually can create a quick 2-fold increase in revenue for our clients. In fact, there is no miracle here. All we need to do is fix the problem that led to the loss of half of the orders.

Teamwork

HubSpot brings the team together – from your content manager who is busy planning your content strategy, your salespeople who analyse call records, and marketers who are busy segmenting customers and analysing traffic metrics, HubSpot is a handy tool for all of them. Each specialist has all the needed inputs and what’s more important keeps in touch with the rest of the team and realising their role in the whole thing. Professionals generate outstanding results when they see the big picture. 

 

Resume

Take advantage of the above capabilities. Evaluate the economic outcome of each content marketing activity, help the team focus on the most meaningful tasks, and pay attention to understanding the big picture.

content marketing

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