Content marketing has established itself in recent years as a widely accepted practice in the marketing mix. Most brands today understand that they need to support some form of engaging content on their site, even if it's the bare minimum to improve their SEO. But even as more and more brands become sophisticated in their use of content, I still ask myself the dreaded question: how do you buy email list prove the ROI of content marketing? The value of content marketing is hard to gauge primarily because of how we frame our thinking about “return” in marketing.
We are drawn to the latest touches and direct buy actions. When it comes to bridging the gap between marketing and sales, we like straight lines that go from A to B, but that's not how audiences interact with brands or their content. Demonstrating the ROI of content marketing can be very simple, as long as buy email list you are prepared to reframe your “return” conversations with your stakeholders. three businessmen converse around a table Image attribution: raw pixel The content conundrum Two main attributes of content marketing make it difficult to fit into traditional funnels and attribution models: Content can fill multiple stages of the marketing funnel, depending on the substance, presentation, and position of the content in the customer journey. Customers touch various pieces of content at multiple points in their lives with a brand.
The first point disrupts our normal staged attribution, where we like to consider what percentage of our audience will typically move between each stage of our funnel. Normally, it would be easy for us to evaluate each buy email list of these steps against a possible conversion, divide it by the cost of the step and calculate the return on investment. But if your content is distributed as part of your outreach campaigns, linked to support material for informational pages, repurposed for email retention campaigns, or many other activities, how can you attribute its costs or its value at several stages of your funnel?