With budgets crunching, being able to demonstrate that your online marketing efforts have true value is vital for them to continue.
So, based on the latest in analyical studies, we're bringing you four great ways to boost your online marketing ROI, up to 300%!
Four Hot Tips For Boosting Your Content Marketing ROI
1 – Determine Your KPIs
Simply put, Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the indicators that make the most money.
There is no One True Set of KPIs; they're going to vary depending on your goals for your content marketing. Look at your goals, then think about the steps your leads and customers will take on their path towards being part of that goal. Those steps are your KPIs.
Making things more complex is that one company's KPI may be another company's junk data.
For example, if your content marketing aims to increase online brand awareness, your Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ statistics are vital. For a company looking to drive website sales, social sharing numbers most likely aren't a priority.
To have cost-effective content marketing, you need KPIs. To have KPIs, you need well-defined goals for your content marketing.
2 – Embrace Recycling
When you're trying to keep up a steady stream of blogs, podcasts, ebooks, slideshows -and more- it can be overwhelming, and increasingly expensive, to keep up the flow.
So, to decrease the costs of your content marketing, recycle!
Reusing content -especially across mediums- is a great way to stretch the ROI of every content purchase. Here are a few tips:
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Blogs and other freely-distributed materials can be reused, but wait several months.
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Take written content and move it to another medium. Blogs could easily be turned into podcasts, or informative videos, with a minimum of rewriting.
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Slideshows and videos are practically interchangeable. Make videos of your slides and vice-versa.
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Always try to add something to make the content fit its new medium. Podcasts of blogs should include more commentary. Videos should have good music. Etc.
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Your newsletter can recycle some blog content, but include original material too.
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Don't overdo it. You won't become a thought leader if your blog only shows reruns.
3 – Increase Targeting
To get better response from the content you send out, especially personalized messages like emails, look to more precisely target each piece of content to a specific group you want to engage.
I came across a great example of this. Apparently, one of the mid-tier online video game stores has a database of obscure regional holidays, and sends out themed promotions based on them. So, in the past year everyone on their email list in New Zealand got a 25% off coupon for Waitangi Day.
If we assume they're doing this for a large number of holidays, that's a huge number of precisely targeted emails driving traffic to their site, with few costs beyond someone spending a day doing Wikipedia research.
Look for similar ways you can target small groups of leads based on shared interests.
4 – Budget For Results
Sometimes, the best way to show an excellent ROI on your content marketing is to budget with a particular goal in mind. After all, when it comes to online ad spends, the sky is the limit. Having specific goals that you're budgeting towards ensures you stay down-to-earth.
If, for example, your goal is a 10% increase in website sales, you just break down your average costs per sale and budget accordingly for enough new content to make the increase happen.
This, of course, doesn't guarantee results. However, when you've got precise results that you're budgeting towards, that greatly narrows down the number of areas where problems can arise. Therefore, “troubleshooting” the failure to achieve these goals also becomes far easier.
And, for more tips, we happily invite you to download our free eBook: