10 Creative Ideas To Improve Your Content Marketing ROI
It is extremely frustrating when content marketing efforts do not work for you. There are several creative tweaks that you can do with your content strategy to boost your return on investment (ROI). Remember, content marketing is one of the most effective inbound marketing strategies. As long as you have a positive ROI and earn more than a dollar for every dollar you invest you are in a positive position and is poised for growth. The higher your return on investment the easier and ultimately faster it will be for you to scale your marketing and sales.
The shocking truth is that often ROI is often not even calculated. To get ahead of the rest of the player you need to make sure you track everything related to your marketing spend, so you can find out your ROI and determine what works best. Then put the tips from Blue Water Marketing into action so you can boost your ROI and improve your profitability!
1. Focus on Increasing Your Income
Although decreasing costs can improve ROI, it is a smarter decision to take action to increase your income. Doing so will give yourself the greatest potential for growth. Seeking out ways to increase your income through investing your time and money into proper income-generating systems. If you are setting up profitable systems you will be able to see significantly better lead generation the road.
2. Identify Your Core Metrics
Determining what metrics matter to you the most. Obviously using a sales metric is important if you are selling, but you also need to measure and optimize traffic and qualified leads.
Knowing that all traffic is not the same and having a targeted audience to your sales page will increase your ROI. Being able to determine where your most converted traffic is coming from will lead to being able to understand your targeted audience, increase sales generation tactics and convert more customers.
Become Obsessed With Powerful Metrics
Using metrics to analyze your business is the only way you will know what is working and what is not working. You will be able to see trends, know what keywords are earning you higher conversions and so much more.
If you are a webmaster Google Analytics is a must. Google Analytics can reveal what the most profitable parts of your business are. Utilizing unique URLs, using Google’s campaign URL builder for every promotion on different channels you launch will help you identify your best performing campaigns.
One way to track clicks is to use a link shortening service like bit.ly. To get analytics on any bit.ly link simply put a + at the end of the link and that will give you in-depth info on the origin of your traffic.
For those with a self-hosted WordPress blog, there is a free plugin called Google Analyticator that makes adding analytics tracking code into every page a breeze. Ultimately the metrics that you measure are likely to improve, so set aside time to geek out with your data so you can find ways to optimize the metrics that matter most.
3. Create High Quality, Blog Content
Investing time, effort, and money in poor content that is not performing, it is like throwing all three of those resources in the trash can. Instead, you will want to ensure your budget is going toward evergreen content pieces that will stay relevant long after you publish them.
Evergreen content is not restricted to one season, news cycle, trend, or fad. However, this content type contains information that will remain true, relevant, and useful for the long term. You should continually be improving your content.
You need to create content that is high quality and evergreen it will continue to draw in traffic over time.
According to Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines, high-quality content has these features:
- Highly useful – Useful content serves a purpose for the reader. It should provide something of value for them. That can be as simple as providing information on a topic they want to know about, or as complex as solving a specific problem for them.
- Highly relevant – Relevance in content is key. If your piece of content is not relevant to the reader’s search intent for the keyword you are targeting, you will not rank.
- Strong E-A-T – Google wants vetted experts who know their stuff populating the search results – not know-nothing non-experts who just want to rank. Proving your E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) is non-negotiable in high-quality content
The good news is you might need a few creative tweaks to your content strategy to boost your ROI. Think of this strategy, evergreen plus high-quality content, as setting your content on auto-pilot. Setting up your content to be evergreen allows it to perform in the background while you focus on more pressing matters, which might be exactly what you need to boost your content marketing ROI.
A perfect example of evergreen content is Aaron Orendorff’s guide to evergreen content types on Copyblogger. It also goes without saying that this is high-quality content.
4. Experiment and Analyze
You should be experimenting with different channels and campaigns in order to analyze what is the right one for your channel.
● Email
● SMS
● Social media
● Digital Advertisements
● Direct Mail
● Content Marketing
5. Use Video
The average person receives more than 84 emails each day! So how do you separate your emails from everyone else? Embed videos in your emails can increase your conversion rates by over 21 percent?
According to Facebook, over 100 million hours of videos are consumed on Facebook each day! Therefore, you should be using video to drive traffic to your site. Having a good quality video is something that has users sharing your content, thus drawing more visitors to your site.
You can optimize your videos by having text on the screen, allowing your video to be viewed without sound on. You will also need to have a call to action to make sure that you are directing your targeted audience to do an action to make them convert.
6. Coupon Codes
Using coupon codes is a way to get potential customers to take actions, this would be your call to action. You are able to track channels that are performing better than others.
Depending on how you display your coupon codes if, in an ad, you need to make sure the landing pages are optimized and high quality. You will want to make sure whatever you are promoting in the ad is displayed on the landing page without the user having to search for it.
The best way to track which channel performs the best is to have a different coupon code for the different channels. You would then be able to analyze the data using Google Analytics.
7. Automation
If you have not started automating then you are behind the times. Using automation can enable you to achieve better efficiency and maximize your ROI by getting programs to do the work for you. Our favorite types of automation are email auto-responder, programs like Aweber can send email sequences at intervals that you specify!
Other great automation tools are for social media posts. A popular choice is Hootsuite, which you can take advantage of without having to invest hours every day.
8. Relevant Topics
Once you have decided to publish high-quality evergreen content, you need to choose what to write about.
Random topics will not do. Neither will ones tied to high-volume, highly competitive keywords.
Instead, for the best ROI, you should be focusing on topics that are:
- Useful and highly relevant to your audience’s needs and interests.
- Tied to low-competition keywords with SERPs you can edge into.
- With the understanding of your ideal customer, you will be able to deeper research into useful, relevant topics tied to keywords.
- Start with broad keywords or topic related to your industry, products or services.
- Topics should help them or improve their lives in some way.
- Use keyword research tools to find out how competitive a term is and whether you can possibly rank for it.
- Find where audience lives online to discover if this is the language they are using to ask Google about this topic.
- Using Answer the Public,You are able to find relevant questions users are asking surrounding the chosen keyword.
A useful keyword tool of choice, KWFinder.
This is just one method to find relevant keywords on useful topics. The main point to remember, though, is to think like your target reader and what they are looking for to improve their lives.
9. Consistency
After you start writing quality content and publishing them on high-ROI topics, you need to start being consistent. The more consistent you produce evergreen, useful, and relevant content, the better the returns you will see.
That’s because Google’s algorithm notices consistency. So does your readers.
10. Website UX
For a better content marketing ROI, you absolutely must focus on improving your content strategy, but do not forget about your website. Without a good website serving as your content hub and brand headquarters, you will not rank nearly as high with both Google and readers.
Readers need to be able to seamlessly access your content to consume it, engage with it, and gain something useful from it. But, if your site has a slow load time, or a confusing design, or too many ads and pop-ups, this could hinder your reader from consuming your material. These are roadblocks to your content. The reader will be too annoyed or lost to stick around to read your amazing article and will start to no longer trust you.
Good UX, or user experience, is a baseline necessity.
A few things you can update to improve UX, and thus convince users to at least stay on your page long enough to read your blog headline:
- Improve site speed and page load times.
- Reduce annoying distractions like interstitials and ads.
- Revamp your page navigation so it is clear, easy to find, and logical
11. Internal & Outbound Links
One way to improve your site’s E-A-T is to use internal and outbound links strategically. Linking to your other relevant content pieces inside the new ones you publish as well as outside resources gain authority and trust.
Most site owners are resistant to this practice because they think any link to another site is a distraction that will lead the reader away from their page. However, that’s just not true.
As long as you are not linking to a direct competitor, linking out to other high-quality information sources to prove points, back up research, or add strength to your argument or topic analysis strengthens your E-A-T score.
According to a Reboot study, linking out to other sites shows you associate with them.
If you link out to topically relevant pages that have authority, that counts positively for you. Because you are showing the user (and Google) pages related to yours that may expand and improve their experience.
Boosting Content Marketing ROI
There is not one tactic that is going to gain you more ROI from content, but rather a sleuth of actionable steps. All the above items are interconnected, just like a spider’s web. Each part is important and none will do it all. This is content marketing strategy at work.
If you pour all your focus into one part of content marketing, you will lose the big picture. Do not look at it as if you are looking through a microscope, look at the forest, not the trees. With hard work and patience, the ROI will come.
Blue Water Marketing is able to create a content marketing plan that achieves the above actionable items. Contact us today to see how we can make a difference in your content marketing ROI.
