Ever tried to explain the ROI of your content marketing to your CEO and why it is important to your brand?

Tricky, isn’t it?

With marketers increasing their budgets in spending on content creation in 2014, ROI must still be proven. For many people, the value of content marketing is hard to measure because it seems intangible and potentially hard to pinpoint exactly where/when someone converts into a customer.

I’m with Brafton’s Zach Michonski:

“ROI on content marketing comes in many forms. It’s important to prioritize the results that matter most for your company, but it’s a big picture marketing strategy and many areas need to be measured and included within your strategy.”

That basically means setting goals.

How to Track the ROI of your Content Marketing Campaign

Setting Goals – The First Step

Before you even think about analytics, you need to designate your objectives. Maybe you want to ensure that more people hear about you. Perhaps you want to get into conversations with your customers. Or it could be that it’s all about making the sale. Deciding on your goals is a key prequel to tracking content marketing ROI.

One of the best ways of highlighting and segmenting the value of content marketing is in this infographic from Brandpoint. It highlights three key areas for measuring content marketing ROI: awareness, consideration (which you could also call engagement) and conversion.

Or you could think about it as answering three questions:

• Who knows about you?
• Who’s talking to you?
• Who’s buying from you?

Who Knows About You?

Let’s start with awareness, which is probably easy to track. All your blog posts, press releases, infographics, and social media updates are designed to keep you in the forefront of your audience’s mind.

It’s about getting attention with social media and other marketing campaigns.

Image credit: David Goehring

With this metric you show ROI by proving that more people know about you. Before you can show this, you have to have a baseline. So use something like a social media spreadsheet (you can include web traffic too) and see where you are at the start of the campaign.

Then you can use that same tool to gauge the success of a content marketing campaign by measuring:

• any increase in social media likes and shares.
• any increase in web traffic, especially from new visitors.
• any increase in inbound links from authority sites.

Who’s Talking To You?

The next step is getting your audience to trust you more via deeper engagement. In-depth content on your blog, as well as videos, podcasts, white papers, email newsletters and more will help with this process. You will be able to tell that your core audience is becoming engaged with your company when they:

• share your resources with their networks and recommend you to their friends.
• comment on your posts and social media updates.
• review your products and services.
• spend time looking at videos, listening to podcasts or reading blog posts and other resources.

Image credit: Howard Lake

Social analytics tools, analytics data and social engagement dashboards will be helpful in establishing a benchmark, tracking growth and gaining insights into your growing network.

You can also use the tools included in the main social media sites, such as Facebook Page Insights and Google+ Ripples, for a deeper assessment of your online impact.

Who’s Buying From You?

The third part of the cycle is getting customers to complete the desired action, whether that’s signing up for your newsletter or purchasing your product or service. You will easily be able to note any increase in conversions, but to link it to your content marketing campaign you will need to:

• set benchmarks before you start.
• use tracking links and tags in analytics software so you can identify which campaigns are successful.
• split test different iterations of your campaign to see which ones convert best.
• use goals and campaigns within your analytics software.

Image credit: Camila Rueda Lopez

If you know your usual conversion rates, and you can see a spike linked to a particular piece of content, then you can immediately see how it’s working. Track that over an entire campaign and you will have no difficulty demonstrating ROI.

Tracking Customer Joe

There’s more to measuring content marketing ROI than the three questions we just walked you through. Another way is to take advantage of the tools in Google’s Universal Analytics and other tools that allow you to track the behavior of a single customer.

If you can identify one customer who matches your target profile and see how that person responds to your content marketing efforts – with Universal Analytics you can even track offline behavior – then you can extrapolate that information to work out the impact of you content marketing campaigns overall.

Luke Summerfield of Clickz suggests that creating this type of “closed loop” system where everything is integrated is a key part of identifying content marketing ROI:

“With a closed loop tracking system you will be able to track an individual throughout her entire buying lifecycle, from her initial interaction with your brand to the point that she becomes a brand evangelist.”

What Happens Next?

That raises another part of the content marketing ROI cycle. It’s not just important to track initial conversions, but also to see what happens next. In other words, does that customer stick around?

Long term results of content marketing might include:

• more requests for speaking engagements at industry networking events, showing increased awareness in your industry and building your authority.
• customers returning to buy from you again and again.
• a reduction in shopping cart abandonment.
• attracting the attention of key influencers.
• the creation of a group of brand advocates who send other customers to you (whether that’s encouraging them to read your blog, sign up for your newsletter or buy).

To recap, tracking content marketing ROI means setting goals and taking benchmarks before looking at the key areas where a campaign can make a difference. In the long run, if you end up with more engaged customers and a higher profile, you will be reaping the benefits of your content marketing campaigns.

Chris is the VP of Strategy at Fit Marketing and you can reach him through Twitter (@ChrisKilbourn)!

If you liked this post, you might like our COLOSSAL CONTENT MARKETING REPORT for data on optimizing headlines, blogging frequency, and social shares by channel.