But I will, because they do.

Why? Because too many see ROI solely as a reporting metric. But it’s a reporting metric that they often misunderstand without realizing it. That’s because the results are skewed and their respective values are distorted. This, in turn, means that the business decisions based on that evidence is also flawed.

ROI measurement tactics should be an integral component of a marketing campaign from the very start. Not an afterthought that is bolted on the end of a campaign to justify either the outlay or provide (flawed) evidence for future campaigns.

So, that being the case, let’s start at the beginning by defining what ROI is.

Put very simply, ROI is a ratio that is used as a performance measure to evaluate the efficiency or profitability of an investment or to compare the relative efficiency of a number of different investments. ROI tries to directly measure the amount of return on a particular investment, relative to that investment’s cost.

The problem is that many companies measure ROI in such narrow terms that they fail to consider a great many others that give a more detailed, comprehensive, and, ultimately, more accurate picture of a campaign’s profitability.

B2B

For example, B2B sales cycles are typically more complex and protracted than B2C cycles. They usually require the involvement of multiple layers of decision-makers, extended negotiations, and substantial lead nurturing to get there in the first place. That requires time and of course money. So, if you base the ROI of a specific marketing campaign on a single or limited number of sales without factoring in the ancillary time and effort that went into converting that sale, your actual ROI calculations will be misleading at best.

B2C

If you’re a B2C (business to consumer) marketer, you may ask, “Why?”. The answer is that landing a B2B customer requires many more touch points than traditional B2C conversions. So B2C rules don’t necessarily apply in the B2B world. B2B marketing is not “one and done” like B2C. Measuring results solely from the bottom of the sales funnel is actually a pretty poor indicator of the effectiveness of the overall tactics you’ve used to drive awareness. In other words, you’ve probably spent a lot more than you realize to achieve your campaign results. That’s why it is so important to invest time in thinking through and establishing what constitutes “success” for a campaign before you start.

Budget

It goes right back to factoring ROI into a marketing budget as part of the overall campaign from the beginning. Not as an afterthought, but as an essential and ongoing component. It may surprise you that a lot of B2B companies don’t set their marketing budgets based on achieving positive ROI. But, they typically plan a campaign to work within a fixed budget that includes no provision to measure ROI.

Frankly, my view is pretty simple: “Identify activities that generate more profit than expenditure and keep doing more of that.” The difference is that you need to identify those activities and what they will cost while also factoring the cost of ROI measurement into the equation. The nimbler SaaS companies do this pretty well, but large engineering companies, for example, are usually much more old-school with rule-of-thumb fixed budgets, which is why they so often end up scratching heads and gnashing teeth when the post-campaign bottom line doesn’t add up.

What I’m ultimately getting at is that calculating ROI is not as straightforward as many think, and a lot of poor decisions for future campaigns are the direct result of miscalculating and, therefore, misinterpreting results from previous campaigns.

That’s why ROI measurement must be moved firmly into the internal silo of strategic planning. For those who want a more in-depth look at what I’m referring to here, I encourage you to have a look at the ROI calculator that we developed and use. Feel free to apply it to how you map conversion rates in each step of your campaign from start (and I emphasize start) to finish.

There are a lot of other “secrets” to ROI that they didn’t teach you in business school, but lucky for you, I’m in a tell-all mood.

Factor ROI into your planning.

Most companies don’t. They just use it as a determinant of whether the campaign was good or bad after the fact (often with bad information), which tells you almost nothing about why a campaign worked or didn’t.

ROI isn’t linear!

The ratio of success changes in direct proportion to the amount invested. Too little and the campaign will have no impact. Too much and you could over saturate the market. Investing $100 and getting a $200 profit does NOT mean a $200 investment will result in $400 profit.

Think very carefully.

About how your investment is spent. Use ROI measurement as a way to determine whether or not you should do more of what’s working and divert funds from what isn’t.

ROI can be hard to define.

Although ROI is often defined as “net income”, it can be very difficult to rationalize the impact of a single campaign based on net income alone. There are a great many factors that impact profitability, so isolating the effect of a single campaign is almost impossible without well thought out measurement metrics.

ROI.

It is very often over-estimated. Tying sales to a particular campaign is misleading because that campaign will typically target and reach customers that would have bought anyway. If a prospect click on an email to buy, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it ultimately increased sales. there is a huge difference between attributed sales (what you say you believe is the result of a campaign) and incremental sales (the actual sales increase achieved).

ROI is like catfish, a bottom-feeder.

It can only be truly measured if lured from the depths with the right bait.

Reducing spending does not necessarily increase ROI.

Because ROI is a ratio there is a tendency to minimize spend to maximise profitability, e.g., running a direct marketing campaign using email rather than postal mail. But this is often the wrong approach, particularly in B2B where sale values are high. You should therefore always focus on maximizing the effectiveness of your investment rather than minimizing its cost.

What has the greatest impact on ROI?

Optimizing conversion rates. There, I said it.

So, how should you use ROI metrics to run better direct marketing campaigns?

1. Build a model of how you want your campaign to work and then look at how you can optimize each individual step of the customer journey. Using formal marketing framework can also be very helpful at this stage.
2. Focus from the start on making your investment as effective as possible, not as cheap as possible.
3. Don’t just increase the volume of activities. Look at expanding into other activities, particularly if you have a very focused audience. Remember, ROI is not linear!
4. Finally, don’t assume that ROI is the final arbiter of the performance of all campaigns, especially if you’re measuring from the bottom of the sales funnel.  Although top-of-the-funnel activities are very difficult to measure without carefully constructed ROI criteria, they ultimately contribute to more sales.

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Data can particularly benefit content generation. Marketers have created content based on product groups’ requests, their own opinions of what will work, and occasionally just doing what was done before because it was the easy option. This results in tired or ineffectual campaigns that perform less well than they should. However, this can easily be addressed by taking a data-driven approach to content generation. Here’s what we mean:

Deciding the Topic

The topic for content, particularly in B2B, is often driven by requests from product marketing teams who want to promote their product or service. Although product marketers should understand the market and therefore what is relevant, it’s not a great approach to content generation. That’s because they tend to focus solely on their product or service, rather than what the organization as a whole can provide as a complete solution. Product marketers often get their worldviews from customers and use the view of existing customers as the basis to attract new ones. The problem is, potential new customers often have a very different set of challenges and requirements than those already in the tent, so an appeal that is compelling to existing customers will not necessarily resonate with those who are considering your offering.

And this is where understanding and making good use of data applies. There are now many sources of data to help you understand what topics should be addressed with marketing content. Hopefully, you’re already using analytics data to determine what topics are drawing attention on your website. If so, that’s great, but this alone isn’t enough. You need to find out what problems your prospects want to solve before you offer a solution.

Sourcing the data

Google provides great information about search topics that are hot. By using a combination of keyword planner and Google trends, you can readily identify topics that people really care about.

Figure 1 shows the volumes for searches for the terms “Instagram advertising” and “TikTok advertising”. Not surprisingly, the Google data shows that although there has been a steady increase in the number of searches around TikTok advertising in the last five years interest in Instagram advertising is consistently higher, with more searches for the term.

Figure 1: USA Searches for Instagram Advertising (blue) and TikTok Advertising (Red)

Google will identify the number of pages containing a keyphrase. This gives an indication of the total amount of content on a topic. There are just over twice as many pages for “Instagram advertising” as there are for “TikTok advertising”. (There are many other tools that can provide even more detailed analysis.)

Using this data, it’s possible to decide on the topic on which to focus. For example, a marketing agency might look at the data in the graph above and determine that in the near future TikTok advertising is likely to drive more searches than Instagram, so to market their paid social activities they would probably choose to write about TikTok advertising.

The same approach works in any market with sufficient searches to warrant data collection from Google. For example, Figure 2 shows the data for searches about motor reliability and efficiency. If your company has just produced a reliable, efficient motor, based on the data gathered by Google, it would make sense to focus on content based on your new motor’s efficiency.

Figure 2: Google Search Trends in USA for “Motor Reliability” (blue) vs “Motor Efficiency” (red)

Of course, the search data from your site and Google Search console are other great sources of data about what interests your audience. However, be conscious about recognizing that there will be keywords for which your site is not optimized. They will therefore register fewer searches and clicks in the Search Console.

Deciding the Format

You probably produce content in a variety of formats, but we’re not going to recommend that you automatically start testing your most popular format. The aim is to test your audience’s level of interest in the topic as quickly as possible. Normally, a white paper or eBook is the easiest format to produce, so you should start with them. Blog posts are also easy to create, but it can be difficult to differentiate between the level of engagement from organic traffic vs traffic you drive to the content, making it more difficult to accurately measure performance.

PDF is the default format for many content offers. Although the format used will have little or no impact on registrations, it’s important to remember that PDFs provide no analysis of what the recipient read or how engaged they were.

On the other hand, modern marketing documents produced using platforms like Turtl provide detailed analysis of what pages the reader looked at and how long they spent reading them. Trust me, the cost of these platforms is paid for by the data they provide by ensuring you spend time on the topics that actually matter to your audience.

Promoting the Content

To understand the level of interest in your proposed content, you need to promote it. This will kick-start traffic to the gated landing page (or to soft-gated content). LinkedIn and paid-for search provide some of the easiest channels to promote and test B2B content. Other channels, such as organic social and display advertising, introduce too many uncertainties, which means that it can be difficult to get a clear assessment of the content’s performance.

I’d always recommend having a go-to way to promote content to test whether a topic resonates with an audience. If you are as consistent as possible in the format and approach that you use, you’ll accumulate data that will soon meaningfully compare with other data acquired from documents you’ve promoted using the same format.

Comparing Results with AB Testing

More important than comparing against disparate campaigns – where target audiences, keyword choices, and other factors might skew the performance of a document – is to AB test different titles. Without a compelling title, the content of a white paper or eBook will have virtually no impact on the conversion rate of a gated landing page. So the best practice is to create several titles. Then, AB test them to find out what resonates with your audience. You might also want to test different front cover designs, too.

Note that email is often a poor option for testing content. Rented email lists are expensive, but using your own data risks introducing bias to the data as you’ll primarily be talking to your existing fan base – i.e., your customers. It’s highly unlikely an existing customer will have the same preferences for content as a prospect. So make sure you test your prospects.

By the way, if you use soft gating, the audience will see the content before the form, so this will have an impact on conversion rates (although what follows the form will still have some impact, albeit negligible). While poor-quality content will not impact the conversion rate of that document, it can substantially reduce the likelihood of people wanting content from you in the future. Quality is still king. Compromising on it will cripple if not kill your future campaigns.

Analysing Reader Behaviour

A platform that allows you to determine what your audience viewed or read and, equally, what they ignored, is incredibly valuable. The first thing you should do is use the data you have gathered to optimize content. If no one is reading a section, take it out. You lose nothing and eliminate the frustration caused by readers having to skip forward to find the part of the document that interests them. If readers are leaving at a particular point, that’s probably an area that needs a little work!

When it Works, Double-Down

The 80-20 rule applies to many things, including content marketing. In fact, for many companies, it’s more like 5% of their content producing 95% of the results. So invest as much time as possible in generating content that works. Take that same content and repurpose it for a blog post, video, interview or podcast, etc.

And don’t be shy about creating similar content on the same topic or issue. If the data shows you’re your engagement is high, it means there is an interest in learning more. So don’t be afraid that you are doing too much about one topic. Instead, double down on making the best content on that topic available in any format. Additionally, use it to create smaller extracts and longer pieces. Different people have different needs and interests as well as different attention spans. Variety will ensure that you reach as broad an audience as possible.

An important consideration when repurposing content is to use data to inform your understanding of the most effective tactics and channels for that content. If your audience engages with videos, create more videos If they appear to like white papers, make sure there are several to choose from. Often the activities of organic site visitors can give you a great indication of the type of content favored by your audience.

And finally, when you create repurposed content, make sure you also use a range of promotions. Although some channels can be particularly effective, you will limit yourself if you don’t choose a range of channels. However, make sure that your primary investment is in the channel that has traditionally worked best for you.

Data: The Key to Great Content Marketing

Data ensures that you generate content on the right topics. Additionally, its content is exactly what the audience wants. Whether you’re using Google search information to identify topics or Turtl to understand what parts of your document are being read, designing your content strategy to generate data, and then acting on what that data tells you, can elevate your content marketing and deliver outstanding results.

Mike is the CEO of Napier, a B2B technology PR and marketing agency with offices in Europe and the USA. 

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