How to Measure the ROI of Your Content Efforts in 2023

0:00All right, so we're going to talk about how to measure the ROI of your content efforts in 2023. 2023. So when it comes to 2023, you got Google Analytics 4. If you haven't used it, you pretty much have no choice by now. And you may notice you're not getting all the data that you really want, especially when it comes to your content marketing. The quickest way that I found to to measure the ROI of my content marketing is a UTM parameters. So that way you can see, all right, where you're supposed to use UTM parameters for external, not internal tracking, but that's an easy way to see where you're getting traffic from.

0:44It's not the right way to do it, but for someone who doesn't have tons of resources, it's just a quick little hack that can end up giving you some quick insights. But the way I actually measure them, dude, is I just run A-B test. And this is a little bit unorthodox, but what I'll do is I run A-B test to see which content pieces, like what call to actions I can add in there are boosting conversions. And then what I do is, because you take your most popular pages, right? Those are the easiest ones to run A-B tests on with your content. So then I'll put a call to actions. If you read it in my blog post, you'll see that I have call to actions for my services.

1:20If I was selling products, I would do products within there, within my sidebar as well, within links within my content. And then once I figure out the type of call to action that works the best, I implement it throughout all my posts. And then within my Salesforce, we can see what leads come from what content pieces that someone first read. And then from there, we're looking at what content sources didn't just provide the best leads, but also cause the most closes. And then we'd end up producing more of that content over anything else. And that just helps us not just measure the ROI, but more so impact how many more leads we're going to get.

2:03And I think that's more important than just measuring the ROI. Cause what you'll find with your content marketing in the long run, a lot of your traffic comes from SEO, but your posts can go up and down in traffic. You got to figure out a, how do you convert those visitors into leads or sales. And that's why you do experimentations on your call to actions. And B, you got to figure out, all right, what topics are driving the most revenue? And then you just start creating more content around those topics. So Neil, let's clarify here. So the first one that you mentioned around UTM is really for everything, right?

2:32Now, the second one is more so for the content on your site. The second one is the content on your site. The UTM stuff, like, it's not the correct way to do it. But for some people, I find it really tedious, actually. yeah i used to do that the second way is of running experiments just because you get traffic to your content most people get the traffic but they don't know how to convert it you got to run a ton of experiments on what call to actions actually drive the most conversions and you do it with your most popular posts it's too hard to do it on all of them like over 6 000 blog posts there's no way i'm doing it on all 6 000 and then the third way is you end up tracking which content types like topics are generating you the most revenue.

3:14And then you just create tons more content around those topics. And to clarify on that point, if I have an article on beginner's tips to SEO, and that's driving a lot of revenue, I wouldn't go create the newbies guide to SEO or the dummies guide to SEO or how to get started with SEO because that's all around the same thing. Then you're just regurgitating and then it causes confusion with Google on what wants to rank. But if I know SEO worked well, like the beginner's guide to SEO, then I may create content around like how to get more traffic through SEO through global expansion or how to build links through infographics because that's a subset of SEO.

3:52You know, I think when I first started in digital marketing, maybe it was 2010, 2011 or so a lot. I mean, that was when you use Google analytics and you had organic keyword data. You can literally see which keywords were converting. Right. And then you started to hide that and it said, you know, not provided or whatever. Right. Those of that are old enough to remember this. And then what happened was now you have GA4, like more and more data is being taken away from you. But at the same time, I'm kind of optimistic about the future because you see chat spot, there's more of these AI tools coming out.

4:21I believe there's going to be a lot of companies or organizations that want to have a chat GPT like interface for their private data where they can just ask it questions. Like no longer do you need to wait weeks for your CFO to pump something out. They'll just get it out to you. You just ask questions and you can strategize a lot faster, your time to value on doing a lot of things a lot faster. That's going to happen for marketing as well. What I would say is, I think for both Neil and I, because we come from that a little old school era where you can see a lot of data, we're trying to retrain ourselves, at least I am, to not stress over trying to measure every single thing.

4:53Because a lot of it now, at least what I'm posting on social, I'm more focused on reach. And if I know I'm getting good reach, that's performing well, what ends up happening is sometimes I'll look at the leads that come through for single grain and which is the ad agency, right? There are a lot of people that say, Oh, heard of you through LinkedIn, heard of you through Twitter or whatever. And it's very hard for me to attribute that. But I know at least judging by the people that are commenting and the reach that it's getting that is performing. Right. So I would say, look at it as like a sliding scale, right?

5:23Sometimes it can be like measure versus don't measure. And it just depends on what it is that you're doing. So if it's like more blog content, more email stuff, maybe I'll try to measure more paid media stuff. I'm going to try to measure more, but if it's organic stuff, maybe I'm not going to try to measure as much. Neil. I think that's pretty much it. You guys now know how to get a better ROI of your content marketing. Just follow the strategy we said it works. It's a little pain in the butt to do the experimentation part, but that's really what you need to do. And it's funny because companies, I see a lot of corporations try to measure the ROI of content marketing and like we get all this traffic doesn't work, but they don't actually focus on improving the ROI of their content marketing, which is the hardest part.

6:02Yep. All right. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe five stars, please. Five stars. And we'll see you tomorrow.