What is a Click on your Content Worth?
Information is readily available for almost any query, and companies are racing to capture peoples’ interests and attention spans. Creating informative, relevant and engaging content is the best way to attract audiences. But how much does producing that content cost, and what impact does it have on ROI?
What is a Click?
The first thing we need to recognize is that a click on an article, link, blog post, etc. is a social thing. We are requesting information that is there because someone created that content and put it there for us to find.
We are witnessing the death of “long-term information” and data needs to be updated constantly. People want relevant information instantaneously, and our attention spans are very short. We scan a piece of content and decide if it answers our questions or piques our interests. If it doesn’t, we are quickly onto the next search result. Humans and smart devices are always connected.
Content marketing is highly competitive and each of those clicks are extremely valuable. But what is the cost of clicking on a website link or blog post? What value is placed on a click?
Cost of Content Creation
A click must represent some quantifiable cost. Is it leads generated, products sold, revenue generated, or some combination?
In order to produce content, you have to have key people and strategies in place. What audiences are you trying to attract? What types of content will you produce? Who will write and edit your content? How will it be designed? Will you use a content management platform? How and where will it be published and shared, and how often? Will it be localized into multiple languages? These are all questions that will have to be answered in your content marketing strategy, and there are internal and external costs associated with each.
If you are creating your content in-house you have the costs associated with the people needed to perform these tasks and the tools and technology you will need for writing, editing, designing, publishing and sharing. If you are using an agency or outside firm for your content you will have the monthly or annual costs of using that service to create, design, publish, share, translate and localize your content.
If you aren’t aware of the costs associated with creating your content, you can never effectively measure the content’s ROI.
Measuring Content ROI
Content is largely for lead generation, audience engagement and brand awareness. You are using content to capture attention and build your brand. The content you have needs to be created around the buyer’s journey, to guide buyers from the awareness stage to the decision stage. Producing content for each stage will help prove the ROI in terms of leads generated and eventually deals closed. The effectiveness of each piece of content will be seen by how successful it is at moving people from leads to customers.
Scott Severson wrote an interesting article for Content Marketing Institute claiming that a simple way to measure on-site content is to track the organic search results it yields. He also states that measuring the effectiveness of content marketing is not in the instant results, its value shows over time. To see his article, visit: A Simple Method to Measure Content Marketing ROI
Summary
Have analytics tools and strategies in place to help you determine the costs of producing your content and measuring the ROI of your content. Understanding the measurable results of your content will allow you to see and prove the impacts it has on your overall ROI and continue to build and improve your content marketing strategy.
