Are you getting good results from your content marketing strategies in Singapore? Most of the businesses fail to achieve their goals because they do not monitor content marketing ROI (return on investment).
A recent report by Content Marketing Institute shows that most of the digital marketers are not aware of how a content marketing program looks like or functions. Only 41% of B2B marketers said that their brands have clarity on content marketing analytics and success.
Today we look at content marketing ROI and the various content marketing metrics that you can use to gauge the performance of your content.
What is Singapore Content Marketing ROI?
Simply put, content marketing ROI is the percentage of revenue accrued from content marketing strategies you implemented in Singapore in comparison to the amount of money spent creating and distributing the content.
In the current digital marketing landscape, return on investment is one of the most essential metrics of any marketing strategy. Even though money is one of the primary indicators of how well your strategies are working, if the target audience is not viewing, sharing, or responding to your content, the chances of generating any revenue from it are slim. That is why it is important to look at other content marketing metrics that are equally relevant to your business.
Guide on How to Calculate Content Marketing ROI
Step 1: Determine the Cost of Production
Even if the content was written by your in-house team, there is still a cost attached to it. The cost of creating the content also includes assets that you paid for such as audios, videos, images, or any tasks that you hired a freelancer or agency to do.
Step 2: Cost of Distributing the Content
As mentioned earlier content marketing ROI is defined as the revenue accrued compared to the amount of money spent creating and distributing the content. The cost of distributing content includes paid promotions such as social advertising, PPC advertising and any other form of promotion done through media channels.
Nowadays, there is software that is designed to help digital marketers distribute content faster and conveniently. The cost of acquiring such software should be included in this category.
Step 3: Calculate the Amount of Revenue Generated from the Content
The first thing that you need to note is that if the blog posts, landing pages, and service descriptions are top-notch and in line with the needs of the target audience, you will generate leads from them. Sometimes, there is a clear tie of content, leads, and sales. For instance, when someone clicks on a CTA button then buys a product after reading your product review.
In other instances, the connection between sales and content is not direct. Adding up the number of sales that you got from a piece of content will help you to know your ROI.
Step 4: Calculate the Return on Investment
One of the simple and straightforward formulas used to calculate return on investment is Convince and Convert.
For example, if you spent $400 on a new piece of content and generated leads worth $1200, your ROI is 200%. Here is a breakdown on how we arrived at 200% return on investment.
- $1200 – $400 = $800
- $800/$400 = 2
- 2 x 100% = 200%
Thanks to advancement in technology, there are many content marketing analytics that you can use to determine the performance of your content accurately.
Now that you have a clear understand of how to calculate content marketing ROI, let us shift gears and look at the other content marketing metrics that you also need to factor in to determine your return on investment. As mentioned earlier, money is not the only indicator of content marketing success.
Additional Content Marketing Metrics That Matter
1: Lead Quality
Audience gravitate towards website that offers great content that is in line with their needs and expectations. This is why content is one of the things you need to consider when creating a lead generation strategy.
There are many ways to determine lead quality. For example, if you just published a blog with a content upgrade or lead magnet, you can tell if it is effective in attracting quality leads if:
- The audience reads the article and take advantage of the lead magnet. This response shows that they interested in your brand and thinking about working with you
- The audience look at other sales funnel resources
- Leads contact customer care personnel to ask about your services and other pre-sale questions
One of easy ways of determining a qualified visitor is by looking at whether they visit other target pages such as the product pricing page. Google Analytics can help you know the specific pages that your visitors frequent when they land on your site.
Set up your goals on Google analytics by going to Conversion tabs > Goals > Funnel Visualization.
Before we look at the next metric used to measure content marketing ROI, it is important to note that if your website gets a generous amount of traffic but the bounce rate is high and conversion rate low, it means the leads your content is pulling are not ready to convert. Consider revamping or restricting your Singapore content marketing strategy.
2: Sales
How many of the leads turn into sales? What is the next value of the sales? Use the Convince and Convert Formula we discussed earlier to do the ROI calculation.
Again, head over to Google Analytics click on Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages if you have already enabled e-commerce in Google analytics.
One of the content marketing metrics you will see on the Google Analytics dashboard is Page Value. This is the average value of the specific page that a potential customer visited before converting or going to the target page This metric will help you to identify pages that have the most significant impact on your overall site revenue.
Note that Page Value only monitors conversions that happened during one session. However, content marketing is not always linear. Sometimes, a visitor will come across your blog, read it but leave to do more research and comparison, and then return the following day to buy the product.
You can track such leads by using Google Analytics Assisted Conversions. It measures the number of conversions that a specific funnel such as organic search and paid ads assisted a lead to take the desired action. Click on Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels>Assisted Conversions.
Also, check out the Click Direct Conversion Value column on the dashboard to know the amount of revenue generated, indirectly or directly.
Content performance is not static, some of the blog posts may become less or more relevant over time due to changes in the market. Google Analytics can help you know the performance of the content based on dates, conversions, and sales.
3: Website Traffic
The foundation of any Singapore content marketing success is website traffic. This is based on the fact that without website traffic, you will not get any revenue. Google analytics can help you to know the amount of traffic that each piece of content on your site contributes to the overall site traffic. Click Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages – this will generate a report that will help you to know the specific pages visitors land on. The pages that record the highest amount of traffic are listed at the top.
Change the time periods to know your site traffic trends and the source of most of the traffic. Knowing the primary sources of traffic will help you to adjust your Singapore content marketing strategy accordingly. For example, you will be able to know which channels to invest more time in and which ones to ignore.
Here is a trick that I usually use to know where the traffic to the most popular landing pages on my website come from. On the landing pages report, click on any page that you want to monitor > Secondary Dimension > Acquisition > Source Medium. Clicking on Source Medium will reveal the platforms that most of your website traffic comes from.
4: Onsite Engagement
The success of your Singapore content marketing strategy cannot just be based on getting the target audience to visit your site. You need to increase the amount of time they spend on the site. A low bounce rate means that a majority of the people who come to your site spend some time reading your content. The more time a potential customer spends on your website, the higher the chances of converting. You will also get enough time to convince them to go ahead and take the desire action.
Engagement Metrics on Google Analytics will give you a clear perspective of how visitors interact with your on-site content. To get this report, head over to Audience > Overview.
The three important statistics that you should focus on are bounce rate, average session duration, and pages per session. It goes without saying that engaged website visitors who love the content will spend more time on the site and visit more than one page.
You can also know the bounce rate recorded by each page or content piece by clicking on Behaviour > Site Content >All Pages.
5: Social Media ROI
Engagement with potential customers that happens offsite is also another important metric for evaluating content marketing ROI. One of the unique attributes of social media platforms is that if people consider your content relevant and useful to them, they will share it with other users on the platform as well as link to it.
It is important to monitor referral website traffic and social media engagement as most of the purchase decisions nowadays are powered by recommendations posted online by other customers. Here in Singapore, there are more than 3 million active social media users. If your video or blog post goes viral, rest assured you would receive a ton of fresh traffic to your site and sales.
Google Analytics can help you to gauge your site’s social engagement level. Go to Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals.
You can also go a step further to look at how much revenue was accrued from social media traffic by clicking on Acquisition > Social > Overview.
In the above screenshot, you can see the percentage of conversions from every social media network. In this case, YouTube has the highest social referrals – this means that the content marketing ROI from this platform is good. The client can proceed and channel more resources and time to this platform to continue getting even better results.
How to Use Buzzsumo to Determine Content Engagement Success
Buzzsumo is an excellent tool that you can use to measure content marketing ROI in Singapore. It tracks social media shares in real time. More shares means most people on social media find your content relevant. Input the specific post URL to see the number of shares that it has received so far. Alternatively, you can input your domain URL to see the top 10 articles on your site.
This tool, Buzzsumo, gathers information from four social media platforms namely Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
6: SEO Success
How well does your content perform in search engines?
Based on the fact that most people inherent click on results that are displayed at the top of SERPs, more clicks mean more traffic and higher sales and leads potential.
Here are some questions to assist you to gauge your site’s SEO performance.
- How does your content rank for the target keywords?
- Is your website displayed on answer boxes for relevant terms?
- What is your current domain authority?
- Are you receiving inbound links?
One of the simplest ways of analysing SEO performance is by switching your browser to incognito mode and typing one of the target keyword in the search tab. If a few of your content pieces that you optimised with that target keyword appears at the top of the SERPs, you are doing a good job.
Open Site Explorer by Moz can also help you to know your domain and page authority. This tool also indicates the page and domain authority of inbound links. All you need to do is input your site URL on the search box and hit enter.
Here are two important factors to keep in mind about SEO.
- High page and domain authority is a sign that content is considered an authority and ranked well by search engines
- Authority of inbound links is an indication that respected websites are linking to your on-site content. Links from high authority sites will boost your site’s authority.
7: Authority and Exposure
Most of the content marketing metrics we have discussed so far are online website metrics. However, site authority and exposure happens offline and online. The more people recognize your site as an authority, the more they will link to your content and share it thereby increasing your reach and improving your chances of getting new leads and sales.
The Moz tool discussed above can help you determine your site’s online exposure and authority. Offline site exposure can be determined by checking if:
- You are invested to attend or speak in expert roundups and industry events such as conferences. Monitor the number of invitations that you get overtime
- Your site is featured by renowned/authority media outlets including radio and TV. Jot down offline media mentions on a spreadsheet for future reference.
Tools for Analyzing Content Marketing
If your content marketing is currently performing well and you just want to track it, consider Cyfe. You may create dashboards to track the performance of your content marketing activities.
If you’re looking for something completely free, utilise Google Analytics. Ensure that you also have Google Search Console installed and that they are synced. Google Analytics will inform you of the status of your highest-performing organic pages. Google Search Console enables you to track conversions directly within Google Analytics.
Four Advantages Of Content Marketing For Singapore’s Small Businesses
Content marketing takes on a variety of formats. Blogs, videos, podcasts, and infographics are all examples of content marketing, and they all have the potential to help small companies expand by leveraging the content they already have.
You should be aware that words are pretty powerful. Whatever you say in your content has the potential to affect what people do and choose. That is why you should consider your words and the publish button carefully before writing anything or hitting the publish button.
When it comes to content creation, you may use tools such as Grammarly and DupliChecker to ensure that your article is simple to read, has accurate grammar, and most importantly, is not a copy of another website. Combining the two assures the quality of your material and assists visitors in perceiving the piece as trustworthy.
To persuade you further of the value of content marketing in Singapore, below are some benefits that small firms may get from this technique.
- Improve Others’ Familiarity With You
While deciding on the type of content marketing campaign to talk and publish, it’s essential to keep in mind that the primary goal of creating it is to strengthen your relationship with your target audience.
To accomplish so, you must first grab their interest and convince them to continue reading the material you created for them. Ascertain that the content marketing effort is consistent with your brand’s voice. As a result, readers should immediately recognise that the item they are seeing is from your brand.
- Amplify Your Presence On Social Media
With over 4.45 billion users globally, social media platforms are one of the most successful marketing tools for small businesses, as they enable them to connect with a diverse audience and grow their online presence.
If you effectively develop shareable content, those who read it will most likely share it on social media, resulting in a domino effect for those who read the piece.
However, before that can happen, you must earn the confidence of your target audience. Here are some pointers on how to establish trust with them.
- Be accessible and available at all times
- Always be truthful
- Maintain consistency
- Exhibit Your Skills
Another advantage of producing content marketing campaigns is that they allow you to demonstrate your knowledge in a specific sector, issue, or business.
For instance, if you own a web design firm in Singapore, you should be able to explain web design in layman’s words to your target audience. Consequently, students will be able to comprehend it and balance their options to make the best choice.
Additionally, if people discover you as a legitimate source of information, they will return because they trust your material. Your target audience will develop a habit of sharing your content, which will help you increase your lead generation and website traffic.
- Outperform Your Competitors
As more firms migrate to and adapt to digital platforms, competition for a target audience gets increasingly intense.
To stay on top, you must continually outperform your competition by creating high-quality, relevant content. Remember that you must also spread your content marketing strategy across other channels in order to reach a larger audience.
The Difficulties Involved In Calculating The ROI Of Content Marketing
If you’re having difficulty assessing the efficacy of your content marketing, calculating true ROI will be difficult.
Measuring the efficacy of your content marketing initiatives is the first step toward determining your program’s return on investment. The other stage is to determine the program’s cost. When these two metrics are combined, you will obtain the standard ROI number.
The ROI Formula Is The Straightforward Part.
The ROI formula is rather basic. What’s more difficult is determining what you want to calculate ROI for. Do you keep track of conversions? Recurring sales? Purchases? Costs of assistance reduced? Cross-sells Increased?
Performance and operational indicators will vary depending on what you’re attempting to quantifies return on investment. The performance measurements are distinct, but the weight assigned to each performance parameter differs as well.
There is no industry-defined value for a “like” or a “share” and no industry-defined difference between a “lead” and a “qualified lead.” These are the values that you must establish for your business based on assessing their worth and other relevant criteria.
On the other hand, operational expenditures are more easily quantifiable. You are aware of the price you spent for the writing and design of a content asset. You are aware of the costs associated with distribution – whether it is a landing page on your website or a call out to several media sites – and promotion – whether it is a press release, a series of social media promoted messages or a blog post. You may obtain an operational cost with little effort.
If you’re going to spend time calculating ROI, do your research beforehand. Determine the business objectives you wish to accomplish and the metrics that will allow you to measure them accurately. Determine which precise KPIs will provide you with information about how things are doing, and then determine which combination of performance measurements will provide you with that information. Ascertain how you pay for development, distribution, and advertising, as well as how you allocate those expenses to a specific asset or campaign. Then add the two to determine your return on investment.
However, ROI Is Not Always Quantifiable.
Wasn’t it just beginning to make sense to you? However, here is the first caveat: ROI does not always equal monetary value.
Occasionally, your ROI is qualitative:
- Brand recognition
- Acknowledgment as a thought leader
- Customer advocacy increased
- Employee advocacy increased
Certain content marketing operations are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify financially. They are both critical components of your content marketing strategy.
In these instances, somewhat of calculating ROI in terms of expenses, calculate ROI in content quality. Is the material I’m creating the best possible for my customers? Who are my employees? Am I providing them with the most pertinent information? Am I cultivating healthy relationships?
The difficulty here is defining what “quality” means to your firm and its consumers.
Content Marketing Challenge #1: Inadequate Resources
Producing content is straightforward. Producing quality material is significantly more difficult.
Producing consistently high-quality material takes time and effort. Numerous small business take on their own content marketing initiatives and with cause. After all, no one understands your business like you do, which makes you the ideal person to blog about whatever you do.
Unfortunately, creating consistently excellent content might obstruct other tasks, such as operating your business.
Time constraints are perhaps one of the most significant impediments to content marketing that many firms confront. The other is a lack of enough funding. After all, if you lack time to create your own content, hiring someone else to do it makes it logical. The issue with this method is that while creating outstanding content requires skills.
Content Marketing Challenge #2: Growing Competition
Whether you’re writing about a bit of needlecraft company or enterprise-level IT technology, someone has previously done so for a lengthy period of time. There has never been such fierce competition for the attention of your viewers.
Regrettably, this obstacle exacerbates the first. What can you do when competition for restricted audiences (even enormous ones) intensifies? Produce higher-quality material, which costs additional time, money, or both. As a result, a symbolic arms race ensues — who can consistently provide the most acceptable content?
Additionally, when competition for audience attention intensifies, your readers’ expectations rise, increasing the pressure on you to continually offer not just good content but genuinely extraordinary material.
Content Marketing Challenge #3: Impatience and Unrealistic Expectations
If you’ve ever tried to present a business case for content marketing to a management team, you’re undoubtedly already aware of how daunting these obstacles may be. While content marketing has been popular for some years, there are several misconceptions about how it works and what management may anticipate from a content marketing investment.
Impatience is the first significant obstacle. Mention the term “years” at any pitch meeting with management, and you’re likely to receive blank glances and awkward silences. However, even with an extensive and talented content marketing staff on your side, it can sometimes take many years for content to begin performing as intended.
This is not a problem with content marketing but with expectations. Many executives and managers have grown accustomed to the relatively rapid return on investment associated with more traditional marketing tactics. It’s a difficult pill to chew to ask them to invest in content marketing campaigns and wait many years for them to pay off.
Comparing Apple To Oranges
Most conventional marketing tasks are completed within a specific timeframe – you do them, and they are complete. As an example, you are attending trade events and managing an AdWords campaign. You track performance over a specific period, and the activity occurs throughout that time period. Once it’s completed, you evaluate its success and then move on.
However, the content is distinct. Content endures, and if you generate it properly, it is still relevant to your consumers and prospects regardless of its age. Evergreen content (material that is intended to survive an extended length of time) is frequently the most significant type of content to develop – you indeed receive the most value from it since you can utilise it in a variety of ways over a long period of time.
When you approach content as an asset that you generate and utilise, you can readily value it. A campaign focusing on a $5000 white paper that generated 500 downloads and five conversions may be assigned a real ROI value.
However, the same white paper is utilised following the campaign’s conclusion. It’s on the website, on Slideshare, and has been split into blog entries, an infographic for the website, or a thought leadership piece for a media outlet. The material in the white paper has a value that is difficult to quantify in terms of return on investment since it may be used in so many different ways and over an extended period of time.
You might plot the return on investment of the paper over an extended period of time. However, it is a great deal of effort – a great deal of manual labour. And you may have ten white papers to handle each year, not to mention other material.
It would be best to view ROI as a means to an end, not a destination. Perhaps the idea is that we can analyse the ROI of material inside a campaign and determine how well it does and grasp what that means in the grand scheme of things.
Concentrate on explaining clearly how the measurements as a whole are guiding you toward your eventual business objective. One statistic does not tell the entire story; you must consider a variety of metrics in combination to determine the efficacy of your content and overall strategy.
Content Marketing ROI Is Not A One-Size-Fits-All Proposition.
To add to the frustration, ideas on the importance of measuring ROI for content marketing are shifting. Is ROI the metric that should be used to determine the effectiveness of a content marketing strategy? If that is not the case, then what is?
You must now demonstrate that your content marketing expenditure is justified. Certain firms will enable you to experiment with content marketing for a limited time (you still need a plan, though). However, they will eventually return and ask you to demonstrate how your work contributes to the bottom line and how it contributes to achieving some corporate objective.
Strive to strike a balance between measurement and exploration.
Important Metrics for Measuring Digital Marketing ROI
Content marketing is part of the overall digital marketing plan that will scale up your Singapore business. Already, we have discussed essential metrics that you should measure to determine the ROI of your Singapore content marketing campaign.
Now, let us proceed and look at how to measure digital marketing ROI and improve it. All the information we present is based on months of research and insights from industry leaders.
How to Measure Digital Marketing ROI in Singapore?
Gauging the performance of your digital marketing plan will help you spend money and time wisely. The results will also inform your decisions and help you get ahead of the competition. There is plenty of software that you can use to measure digital marketing ROI today.
Compare and contrast the options to find one that can generate accurate data that resonates with your goals and objectives. Let us dive in and look at the key metrics that you should consider to know if your marketing plans are fruitful.
-
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is one of the vital data you need to know if certain campaign areas need to be improved.
The main goal of marketing your brand is to attract customers. This metric will help you know how well you achieve this goal or the progress over time. It will inform you which areas you need to invest more time and resources in and which ones you should start offloading from the plan due to their ineffectiveness.
To get a clear picture of performance, we recommend calculating the conversion rate of each channel independently. This move will help you know the traffic sources and where most qualified leads find your content or ads.
Photo Credit: Lyfe Marketing
Next, look at the conversion rate based on the device used by the clients to browse and place orders. If one device such as the smartphone has a high traffic rate but below-average conversion rate, you need to act fast to optimise the campaign content for smartphone users.
You are not alone; most businesses struggle to increase mobile sales. Create digital marketing campaigns specifically for customers who use mobile devices to visit your website. This process will entail creating responsive images and pages to match the different screen sizes.
Photo Credit: Lyfe Marketing
-
Cost Per Lead
Different campaigns have varying goals, but one common objective in 80% of the digital marketing campaigns we evaluate is lead generation. Businesses are willing to spend thousands of dollars on lead generation campaigns.
Unfortunately, only a fraction of them succeeds due to the implementation of the wrong plans. If you want to attract new leads, you need to develop ways of sparking your brand’s prospects’ interest. One way of achieving this goal is by creating stellar content and using visuals.
Cost per lead refers to the amount of money you spend to get a new lead. It’s calculated by dividing the total amount of money spent on ads by the total number of leads accrued.
Photo Credit: Lyfe Marketing
You should re-think the strategy if the cost of acquiring a lead is more than the profit you get when they convert. It would be best if you strived to get a positive ROI always when doing lead generation in Singapore. Consider changing the pricing and how you communicate with the customers to reverse the trend.
-
Lead Close Rate
What is the lead close rate? This is one of the most common questions that we get from our readers. Lead close rate is a ratio of the number of leads that result in sales compared to the total number of qualified leads gained.
Monitoring this metric will give you a good idea of how effective and efficient your digital marketing campaigns are and inform other decisions such as spending and project timelines.
Ideally, if you are attracting thousands of leads but only a handful end up purchasing your product, it means there is a gap in the sales funnel. The content and other website elements are not effective in motivating the customers to shop.
For example, if you have a new landing page, do A/B tests to know the performance of different CTA buttons. Experiment with varying designs of pages as well as change how you market the page. If you have been using email marketing solely, start using social media platforms to share link to the page.
Content is King in closing sales online. If the copy is off, you will have difficulty convincing qualified leads that your product is better than the competitors. Cushion your brand from this hurdle by investing in the best copywriting services in Singapore.
The hired copywriters will take your brand a notch higher by creating succinct content that customers will enjoy reading and taking the desired actions.
-
Cost Per Acquisition
As the name suggests, cost per acquisition is a metric that tells your brand’s average cost of getting a new client.
It is calculated by dividing the total amount of money spent on marketing by the total sales achieved within a given period. There is no limit on the timeframe. It all depends on your goals and objectives.
Photo Credit: Lyfe Marketing
Why is it important to know the cost per acquisition?
Knowing the amount of money you spend on average to get one customer will give you a better understand the marketing campaigns. Like the cost per lead metric, if the cost of acquiring a new customer is higher than the profit, you need to restructure your campaigns.
Look for ways of lowering the cost to safeguard your profit rate. For example, you can decide to post ads on your social media pages instead of spending money on ads if the latter is not generating enough sales.
The decision you make should be based on accurate market data, not assumptions on how the customers will respond to your new way of communicating.
-
Average Order Value (AOV)
Average order value (AOV) refers to the average amount of money that customers spend on your online store. It’s calculated by dividing the total amount of revenue by the number of orders. Every business wants to increase the number of orders over time, but that alone is not enough to make the right marketing decisions.
Knowing each order’s value will help you see if you should continue using a particular channel to market your company. Increasing the AOV even by 2% can boost your bottom line if you are closing many sales.
You can improve the average order value by offering better user experiences, up-selling and cross-selling products. Look at what your competitors are doing and come up with better tactics. Be creative to avoid copy-pasting their strategies.
-
Customer Lifetime Value
What is the value of a customer to your brand? Different customers have varying impacts on your brand. Unlike the five digital marketing ROI metrics discussed above, customer lifetime value does not focus on one sale or one engagement.
Instead, it is used to determine the average amount of money a customer spends over an extended period. It highlights the average amount spent by a customer before stopping buying the product from you.
Photo Credit: Lyfe Marketing
Picture this, if you spend SGD 200 to win a new customer, and the customer makes a purchase worth SGD 200. From a distance, it may seem like you didn’t make any profit since the cost of acquisition is the same as the value of the product purchased.
However, if the customer spends SGD 200 every month, your initial investment to convince them to do business with you is worthwhile.
Focusing on the long-term profit instead of the short-term gains will give you a better understanding of the initial acquisition cost. You will calculate the ROI accurately and not be confused by the initial investment in the process or initial order.
Summary of Digital Marketing ROI metrics
The six digital marketing ROI metrics discussed above will help point your campaigns in the right direction. However, it is essential to note that the metrics you use to gauge ROI are dependent on the campaigns or digital marketing strategies.
In addition, the objectives and goals inform the ROI metrics you focus on when gauging the performance of the campaign. Here is a list of metrics based on the different digital marketing channels available to Singapore businesses.
- Social media marketing: Conversions, engagement rates, click-through-rate, new leads, new followers
- Email marketing: Unsubscribe rate, click-through rate, open email rate, conversions, and leads
- Landing pages: Unique visitors, traffic, total page views, number of returning visitors, actions taken, amount of time spent on the page, conversions, bounce rate
- Blogs: Total number of clicks, organic traffic, on-page time, new visitors, returning visitors, actions take, and conversion rate
Yearly Comparison of Digital Marketing Data
As a new business or when starting to use digital marketing, it is tempting to base decisions on weekly or monthly data collected using the various analytics tools.
However, experts are against this idea as the data is usually skewed. For example, monthly comparison of data does not consider the seasonal demand of a product or service and other market dynamics.
Yearly comparison offers a more accurate picture of the digital marketing campaign performance. The report will help you to know how each channel performed at different times of the year. That way, you will prepare well for the next year, avoid making the same mistakes and get better results.
Don’t shy away from seeking help from our Singapore digital marketing team if you are unsure about any of the data in the report. We are always happy to help brands like yours become successful by using custom digital marketing campaigns.
How to Improve Digital Marketing ROI
We have discussed almost everything there is about content marketing and digital marketing ROI. The next step is looking at simple ways of increasing your return on investment massively.
-
Set Goals Early
Before you venture into digital marketing, you need to have specific goals of what you want to achieve from each of the channels. These goals will help save time that you would have spent guessing the next move or copying competitors.
The goals will also help you know which metrics to use to gauge the performance of the campaigns. More importantly, they should not be loosely defined or vague, such as increasing brand awareness, generating organic traffic, and increasing conversion rate.
Instead, they should be specific such as increase brand awareness by 30%, generate more traffic by 48%, etc. Below is a visual representation of the characteristics of an ideal digital marketing goal.
Photo Credit: Lyfe Marketing
-
Set KPIs that Match the Goals
Key performance indicators are instrumental when doing digital marketing in Singapore. However, just like the goals, they should be smart and in alignment with the set goals.
Note that KPIs will vary from one strategy to another.
Photo Credit: Lyfe Marketing
Concisely, if the goal is to increase the conversion rate by a particular percentage, you should use KPI metrics relevant to that goal, such as sales numbers.
-
Experiment with Different Offers, Messaging, Ads
Testing is essential if you want to get maximum ROI from any digital marketing campaign. Experimenting with different offers, messaging, and ads will help you venture into unchartered waters.
A/B testing different ad designs and email copy will inform your decisions on which design and content to include in emails. The same case applies to PPC ads and social media content. Avoid testing multiple elements at the same time.
For example, if you are testing a landing page, start with the headline, then do another independent test on the CTA button. That way, you won’t end up with disorganised groups of data that are difficult to decipher.
Photo Credit: Lyfe Marketing
The same case applies to making changes on the website. You should change one element at a time to know which one impacts the performance of the page and website more.
Use the data to improve your campaigns as well as the website. Confirm that the links you share with customers via email or social media are functional to avoid missing out on qualified leads.
Tips on How to Refine your Content Marketing Strategy for Better Results
With the internet growing into a powerful marketing tool, your website must provide a lot more than the bare minimum. If you have a strong content marketing plan, your brand will passively reach potential clients, respond to their questions and convert the customers into leads.
Content is an essential component of any successful marketing strategy. According to Content Marketing Institute, 81% of brands that document their strategic content marketing plan align their employees around a shared mission statement and goals. Recording your content marketing strategy also makes it easier for the brand to develop and produce more content.
To create a strategic content marketing plan, you need a lot of time. But, if you do it well, the content creation will be easier, and you will also achieve your goals faster. Use the following tips to refine your content marketing strategy for better results.
Concentrate On Building an Audience
Research across each vertical examined shows a yearly increase in the number of marketers who report their business focuses on building an audience despite their overall success in content marketing. This is good news because when data is given, it is rather valuable as a marketing asset instead of scraping or gathering it unwillingly.
Therefore, if brands provide valuable content-driven experiences where data is given voluntarily and actively, it will help comply and flourish in the new business environment. This means that the audience that signs up to receive your brand content is an audience with whom you have been given a chance to build a relationship.
Developing an audience is a critical goal in content marketing. A brand should have solid audience personas so it can target the right individuals. Once your audience has subscribed to your content, evaluate how to nurture them. You can do this by ensuring that you are providing them with steady content.
One excellent way to nurture your audience is through email, where you deliver at a frequency rate that will not overwhelm your subscribers.
Know Your Audience
After you have built an audience, take time to know them.do not dive headfirst into creating plenty of new material without identifying your ideal client. Please note the industry they work in, their roles, and what they require to succeed.
Content marketing aims at authoring constant specifically for the ideal customer. You can also set aside unique content for customers of varying sectors, including financial, legal, and retail. Remember that it’s important not to lose sight of what your customers find most valuable.
Many people avoid sales pitches; therefore, you should be unique by finding ways to help your customer first. Even though your content will not explicitly scream “Buy Today!” you will still communicate value with them and build rapport with the ideal audience.
A common problem here is not understanding g how to communicate with your target audience well or not knowing the type of resources that will most benefit them. You can conduct a client insight analysis to help you generate client insights and profiles that direct your content marketing strategy in the proper direction. A customer insight analysis is a powerful insight that marketers should exploit as it is all information you can extract through your own client database.
Schedule Your Content Generation
To see positive results in your content marketing, marketers must plan when to generate content and the right time to distribute it. Whether you plan to write blogs daily o share insightful infographics weekly, marketers should keep up with a particular schedule to establish a structure to share content.
To ensure that you are doing it right, you could designate some team members to focus on creating content to stick to the planned schedule. If you do not have any help with content creation, set some time aside on your calendar every week to concentrate on writing blogs, creating videos, and any other form of new content generation.
You may not do it impeccably at first, but the more you are consistent, the easier it will be over time. As you work on consistency in content generation, ensure that you publish your very best material.
The digital space is full of fresh content every day; therefore, competition is more intense in today’s “attention economy.” As such, it is essential for marketers only to publish their best content, or they won’t succeed. It is much better to publish only one quality post every week instead of 10 mediocre posts weekly.
Setting the quality bar high will help you stand out from the increasingly large crowd and make your voice heard. Producing quality content is not easy; accept that it will take time, effort, and money.
Research Your Competitors
Since 48% of B2B marketers and 77 % of B2C marketers utilize content marketing, you are likely not the only brand in the industry treeing to attract customers with new content. This means that competition will be high at all times, but it also means that you have an opportunity to go through what your competitors are offering their clients.
Find out what the top competitors in the industry are doing with their content marketing strategies. Learn the formats they use and the topics they are discussing. Remember to check how their audiences are responding, and you will know what to do and what to avoid with your strategy.
Finding A Unique Angle
Finding a unique angle is one of the essential content marketing tips. Although you may find great topic ideas for your content through your competitors, you must avoid publishing content that looks similar to your competitors. Aim at providing your clients with valuable information but not information that they can readily access.
Avoid replicating every great idea you see from your competitors and making minor alterations. Rather, use the topic as a starting point and find ways to take your own unique angle from the topic. Adding a touch of uniqueness will prevent you from becoming an “echo chamber” of digital content, and you will be much more interesting to your audience.
Avoid Stuffing Keywords For SEO
For a long time, keywords have been the definitive factor in a perfect SEO strategy. However, times have changed now, and search engines like Google consider nearly 200 components to decide the position your brand should take in an online search.
Before, you would have gotten away with filling your content with random keywords related to your topic of discussion, but now the search has evolved. As clients are getting smarter, so is Google. Stuffing your content with keywords may result in low ranking from Google as a form of punishment.
Using voice search has also had an effect on Google search engine algorithm, making what consumers search more conversational. Therefore, brands must consider how a potential customer will search a topic in Google and use similar verbiage.
Leveraging The Power of Links
Marketers should avoid creating their content in a vacuum. If you are constantly creating new blogs, infographics, and social media posts, you should be able to link them to one another.
After creating content for a few months, you will have enough content to tie your blog posts to others or service pages on the brand’s website. Linking your content is an excellent way of keeping customers engaged on the website and social media accounts. A post will lead to another, and soon enough, you could get the highly coveted contact form.
Marketers can also push their content to receive external links as part of the content marketing strategy. When you allow credible third parties to share a link to your website and materials, a large audience will view your content, boosting your SEO.
Establish Your KPIs
Making your goals specific and measurable is an excellent way to achieve your goals. You must set key performance indicators (KPIs) for the content marketing strategy. KPIs help marketers know when they have achieved their goals and provides them with milestones they can check off. They will include what they plan to accomplish when it comes to revenues, sales, traffic, SEO, and other aspects of digital marketing such as email marketing and social networks metrics.
Marketers should also pay attention to their marketing expenditure, track their spending on various campaigns and keep an eye on the cost of getting leads and making sales.
Assessing Your Current Position
Most brands already have content out there. They have blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, videos, etc. That is why your next step should be to identify whether your content is helping the brand meet its goals.
To do this, you will need to do a content audit. Content auditing involves logging all your content, assessing its success and usefulness, and identifying the gaps. Tools such as SEMrush will assist you in logging your content.
Conduct Influencer Outreach
If you come up with content and mention people and brands, you should reach out to them and ask them about sharing your content. Although many of these people and brands will not follow up, the numbers matter. If you contact more people, you will get more shares.
You can also get in touch with people who may find your content exciting and who have a large crowd of following. Influencers are good at making generic content more viral. Therefore, if you have an interesting piece of content, you should try to make it visible to more people in your target audience.
Asking people and brands to share your content is not wrong, but you avoid pestering influencers with your request. Your attention should be on building strong relationships and helping other people, brands, and your audience.
Repurpose Your Content
To come up with the best content, you will need some effort and skills. Even if you plan to give away the best content for free, it does not mean that you should not get a great return on investment on the content. This is the reason why most brands repurpose content from a single format into several.
If you have a blog post that resonates with readers since it’s valuable and beneficial, you can change it to a downloadable guide for your audience. You can also turn some of the blog posts into email blasts or live webinars.
Whatever way you choose to repurpose your content, ensure that you get your money’s worth from the content production investment.
Back Up Your Arguments with Data
In today’s online media environment, trusting content can be challenging. Most people are offering untrue information to their audiences, making readers reluctant to accept facts as the truth. Therefore, marketers must ensure that they back up their assertions with data.
As you use data in your content, ensure that it is natural. If you make a point in the content, include some statistics and facts to back the data up. Moreover, if you cite your data, do it appropriately and, when necessary, link the original source of the data.
Ensuring That Your Content Is Reflecting Your Brand’s Voice
One of the best ways to develop and refine your brand’s voice is through content marketing. Many companies, including large businesses, also struggle to identify and define their company’s voice, mainly when dealing with large teams.
To ensure continuity of brand voice, you must constantly review your editorial standards to guarantee consistency in tone and quality. These components should also be consistent with a high-level overview of the blog and content in general. Although developing your brand voice is quite challenging, it is something definitely worth considering.
Closing Remarks
Regularly evaluating content marketing ROI will help you make informed decisions as you embark on rigorous digital marketing in Singapore. Sure, monitoring all these content marketing metrics is not usually possible. Just pick a few that are in line with your brand’s goals and objectives.
Brands that have a content marketing plan are most likely to feel that their efforts are paying off. A lack of strategy results in failure and will risk all your efforts going down the drain. This is why marketers need to build a content strategy to grow traffic and boost conversions.
Creating a fully functional content marketing strategy requires time, money, and effort; however, if well done, it can help you take your own content plan to a new level of success.
Get in touch with us for more details about content marketing ROI. We will help you create custom digital marketing campaigns that will elevate your business to the next level of success.