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Why You Struggle To Prove Content ROI

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Why You Struggle To Prove Content ROI

Measuring content ROI is a near impossible task.

Too often, that statement ends the conversation about proving the value of content marketing. But the difficulty in tying content directly to the bottom line doesn’t mean content marketing isn’t a contributor to a business’ success.

The failure to understand that too often leads to the demise or weakening of content marketing support.

Why is the ROI of content marketing so problematic? Because the premise too often is that content marketing should feed directly to the bottom line. Many see the “return” in ROI as synonymous with “sales revenue.”

Sound familiar? If that’s the challenge you face at your brand, let’s explore a few options to overcome it.

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Traditional #ROI may be difficult to prove– but it’s still worth it to explain #ContentMarketing value in business terms, says @AnnGynn via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Think about why you’re measuring content’s value

A couple of years ago, Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo shared a tweet thread listing the benefits the company knows it gets from its content marketing. Yet Ahrefs never intertwines return on investment and content marketing. Here’s how he explained why they don’t:

“We won’t track how many leads we get from our articles organically, let alone what is the CPA of running paid traffic to our articles. Measuring those things would be just the tip of the iceberg,” he wrote.

“And let’s say we measured those numbers and they turned out terrible …? We wouldn’t halt our content marketing operations anyway! We KNOW that it works for us, no matter what those ‘isolated’ numbers say.”

It’s a great lesson in measurement. Think about what will change based on the numbers. If the answer is nothing, consider measuring something else.

But most executives expect numbers. And content marketing leaders need to provide them.

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Explain content marketing (and marketing content)

Even people who work in marketing get confused about the difference between content marketing and other content used in marketing. No wonder executives operating outside marketing wouldn’t know the distinction.

Before you try one of the options below, consider hosting a conversation to explain the difference between content used in marketing and content marketing to key stakeholders.

What’s content used in marketing?

Content used in marketing usually focuses on the sale. Think product pages, sales promotions, customer service instructions, ads, and other content designed to lead to a transaction – a sale.

What’s content marketing?

As CMI defines it, content marketing is:

A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Think blogs, newsletters, guides, video and audio shows, and other content designed to inform, educate, or entertain. Sales aren’t the immediate goal (though, of course, they can and should be part of the “profitable customer action” that’s the ultimate goal.)

Content marketing aims to build an audience. Some of the people this content attracts will convert to customers. But those conversions represent only part of the value content marketing offers.

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The audience represents an asset with quantifiable value, says Robert Rose, CMI’s chief strategy advisor. (Robert explains how to model the value of the audience asset in this article.)

Start with (what else?) specific goals

Though you can prepare your execs to think beyond traditional ROI assessment, you need to show how you’ll measure your content marketing’s impact.

Start by setting appropriate goals for your content marketing program. It’s not enough to say, “increase brand awareness” or “educate audiences.” Be specific: identify the goal, the target audience, the metric used to measure progress, the number you strive to achieve, and the timeframe in which you plan to complete it.

Here’s an example of a goal that covers each of those elements:

Our content marketing goal is to increase brand awareness online among women between the ages of 25 and 45. We intend to achieve a 10% increase in unique visits to our blog from this group in each quarter of 2023.

TIP: Make sure your content marketing goals align with your brand’s business goals. The example above only makes sense if the brand’s business goal is to increase sales within that target audience.

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The more you speak the language of business, measurement, and success, the more likely business leaders will understand these essential points: Content marketing isn’t easily evaluated by traditional ROI. But it’s not far from a fuzzy nice-to-have – it’s vital to the business.

Make sure you use business terms to describe the value of #ContentMarketing, says @AnnGynn via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Redefine your content marketing strategy

CMI’s annual research shows the same top three goals for content marketing year after year: brand awareness, building credibility/trust, and educating audiences.

In our most recent study, at least 72% of marketers cited those goals.

In the same survey, sales-related goals ranked further down the list. Here’s how they factored for B2B marketers:

  • 5 – generating demands/leads (67%)
  • 6 – nurture subscribers/audiences/leads (54%)
  • 8 – generate sales/revenue (42%)

If you must operate under the premise that a return on investment means how your content marketing affects your bottom line, adjust the goals of your content marketing strategy. Focus on leads and sales.

If you make this switch, remember that your editorial approach will need to change, too. Don’t forget to adjust your metrics to align with your new goals. Website traffic and social media analytics shouldn’t be at the top of your list (they might not even be on your list.)

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Invest in an attribution model

Of course, content marketing should have an impact on revenue. After all, why do it if it isn’t helping the business? But it’s not a direct line.

If your executives expect you to connect the dots to the bottom line, you must invest resources – experts, tools, and time – to develop a multi-touch attribution model.

By taking this route, you can keep using your current content marketing strategy until the data tells you it isn’t working for your brand’s business goals.

The first component to invest in is someone who loves data. Interest in content marketing is a secondary requirement. (Traditionally, too many content marketing teams make metrics an afterthought or last step in strategy and hiring.)

Look for someone who appreciates solving analytics puzzles and knows how to translate numbers into useful data for the content marketing team and the company’s executives.

A few years ago, Content Marketing World speaker Katrina Neal shared the three analytics categories where data scientists can be helpful:

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  • Descriptive (what’s happened)
  • Prescriptive (what’s happening in real-time/near future)
  • Predictive (what’s going to happen and how you should react).

Once you have analytics talent in place, your team is ready to develop an attribution model for your content marketing. An attribution model follows a person’s content touchpoints and what actions they take.

This illustration shows a multi-point attribution model that reveals a person downloaded an e-book, read an email newsletter, had a badge scanned at a trade show, and attended a webinar before becoming a customer. (You can read more about this model in Pawan Deshpande’s article Marketing Attribution Models: A Primer for Content Marketers.)

1673570458 289 Why You Struggle To Prove Content ROI

Some companies use a single-touch attribution model that gives all credit for the sale to a single interaction (even if the customer has interacted with the content in multiple ways.) For example, say the person in the example above becomes a customer, buying $280 in products. In attributing the sale, a single-touch model would designate the webinar attendance as the only touch that matters. Thus, the webinar attendance value for that person would be $280.

TIP: In a single-touch model, the first or last touchpoint usually gets credit for the value.

A single-touch attribution model is better than nothing, but it doesn’t work for a comprehensive content marketing program. A multi-touch attribution model better reflects the value of interactions over time, which are the hallmark of a content marketing approach.

A multi-touch attribution model better reflects the value of interactions over time, which are the hallmark of a #ContentMarketing approach, says @AnnGynn via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

With multi-touch attribution, a $280 sale gets attributed to four content marketing tactics. Using a linear multi-touch model, each tactic has the same value – $70.

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In a weighted multi-touch model, the values vary based on the perceived importance of each touchpoint. For example, you might set up your model to assign 30% of the value to the first touch (in this case, the e-book) and 15% to reading the newsletter. The tradeshow interaction gets 20%, and the last step before the sale – webinar attendance – gets 35%.

In this model, each content marketing tactic has a dollar value – an indicator of its contribution to the sale.

This multi-touch attribution model I’ve used here focuses on a single sale. But you can create more complex variations of the models that look at lifetime value, repeat customer value, and so on.

Pivot from content marketing

If a strategy overhaul or a better approach to analytics and attribution modeling won’t work for your brand, stop doing content marketing. You’ll never have the long-term support necessary for success. Content marketing – building and growing an audience – takes time. (CMI founder Joe Pulizzi has estimated it takes at least 12 to 18 months to show results.)

It takes 12 to 18 months to build an audience with #ContentMarketing, according to @JoePulizzi via @AnnGynn @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Shift your content marketing resources to focus on content created for general marketing purposes. By focusing your resources on that type of content, you can better connect your work to the bottom line – and get the necessary, ongoing support from leadership.

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And if you want to bring content marketing back into the fold (or keep your existing audience), figure out how to create a minimum viable content initiative that can happen alongside the team’s marketing content work.

If you can show that marketing significantly impacts the bottom line, the executive team is more likely to support your content marketing MVP – and possibly more down the road.

Need more guidance to hone your content marketing skills? Enroll in CMI University and get 12-month on-demand access to an extensive curriculum designed to help you do your job more effectively.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute



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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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