Con­tent mar­ket­ing may be all the rage, but get­ting a real han­dle on the val­ue of these efforts con­tin­ues to dog con­sumer mar­keters. The lack of demon­stra­ble return on invest­ment (ROI) is almost cer­tain­ly one of the key bar­ri­ers pre­vent­ing fur­ther invest­ment in con­tent. Why is mea­sure­ment and eval­u­a­tion such a prob­lem? And what can con­sumer mar­keters prac­ti­cal­ly do to improve things?

Only 23 per­cent of B2C mar­keters believe they are suc­cess­ful­ly track­ing con­tent ROI, accord­ing to the Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Insti­tute’s B2C Con­tent Mar­ket­ing 2015: Bench­marks, Bud­gets, and Trends report. In addi­tion, mea­sur­ing con­tent effec­tive­ness, one of the chal­lenges that sur­vey respon­dents rat­ed the high­est, rose from 36 per­cent to 51 per­cent year on year.

The Challenge Of Measuring Content Marketing ROI

There’s no dis­put­ing that mea­sur­ing the ROI and val­ue of con­tent mar­ket­ing is a real and present con­cern. Why is that the case? There are clear­ly a num­ber of fac­tors at play.

One com­mon prob­lem is a fail­ure to prop­er­ly define what suc­cess looks like.

There is gen­er­al agree­ment that cam­paign goals should be couched in terms of con­crete out­comes such as sales, leads, and prof­itabil­i­ty. Con­sumer mar­keters, how­ev­er, are often lured into mea­sur­ing what’s easy to count, rely­ing on out­put met­rics such as poten­tial reach or shares, retweets, and likes. ROI is a finan­cial met­ric and will nev­er be mea­sured using non-finan­cial out­put met­rics alone.

Even when prop­er out­comes are used as the cri­te­ria for suc­cess, the chal­lenge of work­ing out the causal impact of con­tent mar­ket­ing rears its ugly head. The so-called “last click attri­bu­tion” prob­lem has been well doc­u­ment­ed.

Imag­ine a foot­ball team that only paid the play­ers who scored and sent the rest of the team home with emp­ty pock­ets. Yet this is how mar­ket­ing has tra­di­tion­al­ly judged suc­cess – by only giv­ing cred­it to those pro­gram ele­ments where a direct and causal impact can be seen on mean­ing­ful out­comes, such as sales or leads.

As per the foot­ball anal­o­gy, this fails to account for the way the con­tent mar­ket­ing game is played. By default, foot­ball is a team game. Many fac­tors, espe­cial­ly the con­tri­bu­tions of var­i­ous play­ers, ulti­mate­ly play a role in scor­ing or being shut out; win­ning or los­ing. The same goes for con­tent mar­ket­ing.

What Role Does Content Marketing Ultimately Play?

As is gen­er­al­ly accept­ed now, the idea of sin­gle touch impact is a rar­i­ty in the mod­ern world. Indeed, Google’s Zero Moment Of Truth (ZMOT) phi­los­o­phy is entire­ly pred­i­cat­ed on the notion that mul­ti­ple touch­points will impact most deci­sions con­sumers make today.

On aver­age, it will take more than 10 inter­ac­tions before con­sumers are per­suad­ed to pur­chase. By this log­ic, the vast major­i­ty of mar­ket­ing chan­nel inter­ac­tions are going to be of an “assis­tive” nature rather than “clos­ing the sale.”

Con­tent mar­ket­ing (as well as much adver­tis­ing, social media, and PR) will typ­i­cal­ly fall into the cat­e­go­ry of assis­tance. The chal­lenge then becomes how to under­stand what ele­ments com­prise the over­all deci­sion jour­ney, and what val­ue to place on the role of each ele­ment.

In the con­text of con­tent mar­ket­ing, how do you know what con­tent con­tributed val­ue to the ulti­mate out­come?

Is Attribution Analysis The Answer?

In recent times, the con­cept of attri­bu­tion analy­sis has often been tout­ed as the answer to this issue. There is cer­tain­ly a grow­ing appetite for using this approach to show the direct and indi­rect con­tri­bu­tion of con­tent mar­ket­ing to the deci­sion and pur­chase jour­ney.

Imple­ment­ing a mar­ket­ing attri­bu­tion sys­tem was the sin­gle biggest tech­nol­o­gy pri­or­i­ty for mar­keters over the next two years, accord­ing to an Econ­sul­tan­cy report from Octo­ber 2014.

But attri­bu­tion analy­sis is hard­ly a new con­cept and take up to date has been slow. Increas­ing­ly the cost and tech­ni­cal issues sur­round­ing using attri­bu­tion analy­sis have large­ly gone away. The bar­ri­ers to imple­men­ta­tion tend to cen­ter around mind­set, com­pa­ny cul­ture, and inter­nal pol­i­tics.

As one respon­dent in anoth­er ECon­sul­tan­cy sur­vey said:

“The ele­phant in the room is that attri­bu­tion ulti­mate­ly affects bonus­es and the pock­ets of the peo­ple involved. You have to deal with the pol­i­tics first or you won’t get buy-in, you’ll get resis­tance.”

What can be done to solve this prob­lem?

Demonstrating The Value And Contribution Of Content Marketing

We’ve learned from Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Insti­tute 2015 B2C Con­tent Mar­ket­ing sur­vey that:

• Half of B2C mar­keters had a ver­bal con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, but only 27 per­cent had tak­en the time to put their strat­e­gy in writ­ing.
• 43 per­cent of those B2C mar­keters with a doc­u­ment­ed con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy said they were suc­cess­ful at track­ing ROI (com­pared with the 23 per­cent cit­ed for the total sam­ple).

The sim­ple expe­di­en­cy of clear­ly defin­ing a strat­e­gy and actu­al­ly writ­ing it down in black and white seems to demon­strate a clear con­nec­tion between improv­ing the abil­i­ty to demon­strate ROI.

Attri­bu­tion analy­sis can be cost effec­tive when using a tool that you almost cer­tain­ly already have access to: Google Ana­lyt­ics. For sev­er­al years, Google Ana­lyt­ics has allowed us to imple­ment sim­ple attri­bu­tion mod­el­ing.

By defin­ing some mean­ing­ful and ful­ly aligned web­site goals in con­junc­tion with the dili­gent use of cam­paign track­ing, any­one can begin to under­stand the com­bi­na­tion of ele­ments that lead to con­crete out­comes. The role of con­tent mar­ket­ing can then be bet­ter under­stood and more invest­ment made in con­tent that is shown to have a valu­able role in the pur­chase jour­ney.

Imag­ine being able to show that a com­bi­na­tion of two info­graph­ics, two tweets, a Face­book post, and an online dis­play ad were the most like­ly com­bi­na­tion to deliv­er your desired end result, what­ev­er that might be – a sale, a busi­ness lead, aware­ness, or a change in behav­ior.

Takeaways

• Start small and road test the approach with a sin­gle cam­paign.
• Estab­lish goals in Google Ana­lyt­ics.
• Be dis­ci­plined about using cam­paign track­ing (Car­di­nal Path pro­vide an excel­lent free cam­paign track­ing spread­sheet to allow you to main­tain con­sis­ten­cy of approach).

The demand to show the ROI of con­tent mar­ket­ing is only going to increase, but the abil­i­ty to mea­sure the ROI of con­tent mar­ket­ing may not be as dif­fi­cult as you think.