Thread by @timsoulo

Let's talk about the "ROI of Content Marketing."

Far too often us marketers get challenged with this question by our boss (or our client):

- How do I know that my investment in content will guarantee a positive return? ...& how can I *MEASURE* it?

[Read more..]

Well.. When it comes to "content marketing" that we do here at @ahrefs - I can see at least 10 different areas where it generates a "return" for us.

Can they all be properly measured though?

Good question!

Let's come back to it after listing those 10 "areas of return" first.

1. Our content brings us new customers (duh!)

Our articles rank well in Google and generate a consistent stream of relevant "leads."

And as long as we promote the functionality of our product within those articles - there's almost no way for us to not get "conversions."

2. Our content improves the retention of existing customers.

The product we sell is somewhat complex and has a relatively challenging learning curve.

By publishing lots of educational content we help our users figure it out, achieve their goals and stick with us longer.

3. Our content helps re-activate past customers.

The common re-activation technique is to send your churned users and email listing all new features that you've added since they left.

We always promote new features in our content. So this mechanism is kinda built-in there.

4. Our content helps with revenue expansion (selling more to existing users).

By reading our articles our users might discover some functionality that is not available on their plan (& upgrade).

Or we can teach them how to scale their operations & they would get a larger plan.

5. Our content fuels the Word Of Mouth.

When we teach our users something cool that helps them to be more successful and achieve their goals - we give them a "talking point" to share with their friends.

Most of us want to be helpful to our peers, right? :)

6. The traffic that we get to our content leads to the "Mere Exposure Effect" (check it on Wiki).

The more eyeballs we get on our articles and the more we mention our product within them - the more "familiarity" we create in the minds of prospective customers.

7. Our content helps us build a solid reputation in our field.

People want to buy from someone who knows what they're doing, right? (duh!)

By publicly sharing our knowledge we promote ourselves as credible experts that you can trust (& buy from).

8. Our content fuels our paid acquisition.

Each of our blog articles is essentially a "sales page" for our product.

So instead of creating dedicated "sales pages" and sending paid traffic there, we simply send that paid traffic to our blog articles.

9. Our content helps to remove some strain from our customer support team.

The more educational content you create, the less support requests you're going to get.

As simple as that.

10. Our content helps us to "get featured."

It's very hard to make it to someone's email newsletter with some brand new functionality that you've added to your app.

But create a compelling piece of content - and there's a good chance it will get picked up organically.

11..?

12..?

13..?

I'm quite sure that my list is incomplete and there are quite a few other ways how content brings a positive "return" to your business.

So please feel free to add your own examples :)

But what about actually MEASURING that ROI?

Well.. you can indeed measure some of the things that I mentioned.

Like how many leads your content is bringing or how reading a certain article influences your LTV.

But calculating the TOTAL ROI of content marketing?

Impossible.

That is why here at Ahrefs we don't even 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...

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.

So there's that..

I hope you enjoyed the rant :)