Theoretically, measuring the return on investment of something is relatively easy:
(Return - Investment) / Investment = ROI
However, the difficulty is not in the formula itself, but in the values used in that formula.
How to calculate the value of the investment?
We usually have a certain budget allocated for our content israel phone number data marketing and/or content-based campaigns. If that is the case, great! We have a figure that will be used for the value of the investment.
A completely different situation is when a budget proposal has to be presented and/or a portion of the budget has to be allocated to each campaign in a balanced and considered manner.
This is what I do:
1. Identify the different competitors that create content related to what we are going to target with our campaign. I trust both in the analysis of search results that a tool like Semrush can offer us and in the information that we can recover with a "keyword search" in Buzzsumo .
2. Recover all significant content-related metrics:
Links (again with Semrush, but also recoverable through other SEO tools such as Ahrefs)
Social shares for each social network (available on Buzzsumo).
Estimated traffic to the content URL (data obtained through SimilarWeb or, again, Semrush)
3. Assign a monetary value to the retrieved metrics.
4. Calculate the potential value of the competition's investment.
5. Calculate the value of the average investment of all the competition.
6. Consider the delta between what the client/company previously invested in content marketing (or link building or digital PR), as well as the value of the average investment of competitors.
7. Calculate and propose the value of content marketing/ content-based campaign in a range from "minimum viable budget" to "ideal."
Reality teaches us that the proposed investment is not the same as the actual investment, but at least we will have some data to support it and not just a hunch. However, we must be prepared to work with budgets that are closer to the "minimum viable" side than to the "ideal."
How to calculate income?
You can find a good number of ROI calculators, but I particularly like one: Fractl , for being easy to understand and use.
The general philosophy is to calculate ROI in terms of how much traffic, links, and social shares the content itself has generated organically, hence how much paid promotion contributed. Remember the methodology I described above (points 1 to 7).
However, when it comes to social shares, you should avoid the classic mistake of considering only those directly generated on the page where your content has been published. For example, let's take as an example the global campaigns that Verve Search carried out for HotelClub.com and which won the European Search Awards .
If we look only at its own social metrics, we will only have a partial picture.