What's the best way to compare ROI across content formats, channels, and platforms?

Content marketing is a powerful way to attract, engage, and convert your audience, but how do you measure its effectiveness and compare it across different formats, channels, and platforms? In this article, you'll learn the best practices and tools to calculate and compare your content marketing ROI, and optimize your strategy for maximum results.

1 Define your goals and metrics

Before you can compare your ROI across different content types, such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, or infographics, you need to define your goals and metrics for each one. What are you trying to achieve with your content? Is it brand awareness, lead generation, customer retention, or something else? How will you measure your success? Is it by traffic, views, shares, subscribers, leads, sales, or retention rate? Once you have a clear idea of your objectives and indicators, you can assign a value to each metric and track your performance over time.

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Joyce Tsang 👩💼 Content Marketing Expert

I give entrepreneurs a content strategy to drive growth 🧲⚡ 7x Reach | 2x Interactions | 60 MQLS
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One of the most important things is to allocate your content touch points into different stages in the content funnel. While your social media posts maybe there to drive awareness in TOFU, your EDM might be in the interest stage of MOFU to drive engagement. Understanding what role your content play and where they work in makes your ROI calculation much more reliable and insightful.

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2 Choose a formula and timeframe

To calculate your ROI, you need a formula that reflects your investment and return for each content format. A common formula is: ROI = (return - investment) / investment x 100. However, you can also use other variations, such as: ROI = (revenue - cost) / cost x 100, or ROI = (profit - cost) / cost x 100. The formula you choose depends on how you define your return, revenue, or profit, and how you account for your costs, such as production, distribution, promotion, or maintenance. You also need to decide on a timeframe for your calculation, such as monthly, quarterly, or yearly, and make sure you use the same timeframe for all your content formats.

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3 Use tools and analytics

To compare your ROI across different content formats, channels, and platforms, you need tools and analytics that can help you collect, organize, and visualize your data. Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool that can track website traffic, conversions, and goals for content performance on different channels and platforms. Content marketing platforms such as HubSpot, CoSchedule, or Contently can automate workflows, optimize content for SEO, and generate reports and dashboards for ROI. Additionally, ROI calculators such as ClearVoice, Lumen5, or Wistia can estimate ROI for different content scenarios and options based on inputs and assumptions. This allows you to compare potential or actual ROI for different content options.

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J. Ilyse Craft(SuperCoach)

A professional certified Coach who creates sustainable lasting change| Inspiring personal freedom , inner peace, power & love
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Most platforms will provide data. Using these metrics to determine if the content you’re producing is relevant to your audience is important to your short and long term goals. The data doesn’t lie. It’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics but when you look at actual return on investment of time , energy and resources, it becomes very clear what’s working and what’s not.

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4 Analyze and optimize

Once you have calculated and compared your ROI across different content formats, channels, and platforms, you need to analyze and optimize your results. What are the best performing and worst performing content types, channels, and platforms for your goals and metrics? Why are they performing well or poorly? How can you improve them or leverage them for your strategy? What are the gaps and opportunities in your content mix and distribution? How can you align your content with your audience's needs, preferences, and behaviors? By asking and answering these questions, you can refine and adjust your content marketing strategy for maximum ROI.

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5 Learn and experiment

Finally, you need to keep learning and experimenting with your content marketing ROI. Content marketing is not a one-time or static activity, but a dynamic and ongoing process that requires constant testing, learning, and adapting. You need to monitor your ROI regularly and update your goals, metrics, formula, timeframe, tools, and analytics as needed. You also need to try new content formats, channels, and platforms, and compare their ROI with your existing ones. By doing so, you can discover new ways to reach, engage, and convert your audience, and grow your business with content marketing.

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6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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What's the best way to compare ROI across content formats, channels, and platforms?

1

2

3

4

5

6

1 Define your goals and metrics

2 Choose a formula and timeframe

3 Use tools and analytics

4 Analyze and optimize

5 Learn and experiment

6 Here’s what else to consider

Content Marketing

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What's the best way to compare ROI across content formats, channels, and platforms?

1

2

3

4

5

6

1 Define your goals and metrics

2 Choose a formula and timeframe

3 Use tools and analytics

4 Analyze and optimize

5 Learn and experiment

6 Here’s what else to consider

Content Marketing

Rate this article

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