Here’s a simple exercise in marketing ROI.
Let’s say your all-in cost for exhibiting at a conference is $100K. You collect 20 leads at the conference, so your cost per lead is $5K. You convert two of these for total revenue of $200K, which is $10K per lead on average, for a ROI of 100% ($10K – $5K divided by $5K).
Simple – but wrong. What this calculation is missing is the value of content marketing.
How many of those 20 prospects saw some third-party blog post or article that mentioned your company before stopping by your booth? How many put you on their ‘must visit’ list because of such an article? Would they have skipped your booth altogether if they hadn’t read something about you?
After the conference, did either of the two eventual customers download third-party content from your site? Did your salespeople provide such content to any prospects as part of the sales process? Would either of them converted at all if they hadn’t seen such third-party content?
Let’s say an article cost you $5K and a white paper cost you $15K (Intellyx’s prices are lower than these, BTW). Assuming someone wouldn’t have stopped by your booth at all if they hadn’t seen the article or wouldn’t have made a purchase if they hadn’t downloaded the white paper, then what are the ROIs of the two pieces?
The answer: there’s no way to calculate such an ROI, because there’s no way of knowing how important the content was to driving the sales process.
Such is the challenge of content marketing ROI.
When we at Intellyx produce some deliverable, it typically goes on our client’s web site, and we promote it on our site and on several LinkedIn feeds and groups.
It’s difficult, but we could add up all the views via all these channels to give our client some sense of how well a piece is doing – but even with those numbers, there’s no way to calculate its ROI.
All we can really say is the following:
Without top of funnel third-party content, many potential customers won’t even see or hear about your company, let alone put you on a list of potential vendors.
And without mid-funnel third-party content, some prospects won’t bother to include you in their research process for short-listing a vendor.
What, then, is content marketing worth to you?
