内容投资回报率是一个神话

As a profession, marketing has evolved a lot over the past 5 years. Previously, when asked to justify our marketing budgets, we used to squirm in our chairs and mutter something about “brand awareness.” Today, marketers want to measure the ROI on every tactic and channel they use.

Figuring out the ROI of content, in particular, is hard and often misunderstood.

In a recent study weconducted with SmartInsights, the top challenge for marketers was measuring the ROI of content. According toDriving Content Marketing Success,45％的欧洲营销人员列举了衡量ROI并产生足够的质量内容作为他们的首要挑战。

了解PPC，SEO和在线广告等战术的回报可能会容易得多。您可以大致赚取每美元，欧元或花费的返回。例如，使用PPC可能是：

• 如果我在PPC上花费100欧元，我将销售250欧元。
• If I increase that spend to €1000, I’ll make €3000 in sales.

这为公司工作ntent, however, isn't so straightforward.

Could it be that measuring the ROI of content is difficult because marketers aren’t sure what they should be measuring?

内容成功的指标

试图以与PPC，SEO，显示或任何其他营销策略相同的方式测量内容是错误的。创建内容本身不是营销策略。实际上，通过将单个货币价值衡量的内容来衡量内容将意味着许多公司甚至在开始之前就失败了。The value of content is solely dependent on how you intend to use it and the goals you're trying to achieve.

A typical marketing funnel can be broken out into three sections -- top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). How content is used across each of these sections and the goals for that content will differ widely.

Using Content to Power TOFU

Content being used for a company's TOFU strategy should:

• 帮助您在社交渠道上发展受众，并让他们参与您发布的内容。
• Encourage people to spend time on your site, getting them to read your content and visit additional pages.
• 增加您从有机渠道的流量，并让他们在您的网站上采取行动，以表明您正在吸引正确的人。

但是，没有一个指标可以回答所有这些问题 - 您将不得不在许多不同的地方寻找豆腐内容的实际价值。以下是有关如何回答重要问题的一些提示。

Q. Are people on social engaging with your content?

您在Facebook上的受众是否在增长，他们正在与您的内容互动吗？您可以直接从Facebook Insights获得此内容。自从您的订婚可能少得多他们改变了新闻源bob官网官方网站.

You can also look at the same kind of data from Twitter analytics; you can see clicks on links, retweets, favorites, and replies.

LinkedIn also released updated Company Page analytics last summer. The updated analytics can give you a sense of how your posts are doing, where your followers are coming from, and show you performance trends across defined periods of time.

They have also recently added more tools to help analyze the performance of your content with acontent marketing score and trending topics site.

Q. What is the performance of the content you’re adding to your site?

Looking at your marketing analytics can give you an idea of how the content on you're site is performing. Is it attracting people into your site (visits), what's the initial impression of that content (bounce rate), do people stick around to read that content (time on page), and are people clicking around to read more of your pages (page views).

HubSpot can show you the performance of that content across your entire funnel (what we callclosed-looped analytics), and Google Analytics can be a nice complement, as well, to look at some of those valuable TOFU metrics.

问：内容是否可以帮助您增加入站渠道的访问？

Producing quality content should help to increase the visits you generate from inbound channels. This is another strong indicator that your content is starting to produce positive results.

Q. Are people taking an action on your site that indicates they're the right type of people?

There is no point in attracting visits from inbound channels if they're not taking any action on your site.This action could be signing up to your newsletter, viewing a particular page on your site, or converting into a lead (contact).

要衡量这一点，请查看您随着时间的流逝（并按频道破裂）来查看您的访问率；您的一定％的访问者会变成潜在客户/联系人吗？这会随着时间的流逝而改变？

上述指标可以开始回答有关豆腐阶段内容表现的一些重要问题。对此不可能单一的指标。相反，您必须浏览各种指标。

使用内容为mofu＆Bofu供电

Content being created and used for a company's MOFU and BOFU strategy should:

• Educate people in your funnel about your product and how it can solve their challenges
  
• Create opportunities, pipeline, and sales for the business

Q. How many people are opening your emails, clicking on links, and moving through your workflows?

大多数营销人员会告诉您，开放率和点击率不是衡量电子邮件性能的正确指标。尽管我确实同意他们仍然可以提供代理人来确定您是否将正确的内容发送给合适的人。

如果您设置了铅培训工作流程，您将要知道该工作流程中的人们是否正在参与该内容，以及它是否成功地使人们通过您的渠道。

For example, at HubSpot we have lead nurture workflows set up to convert people into marketing qualified leads (learn more about营销合格的潜在客户). We want to know how the content in each email is performing in terms of the clicks it’s generating (click rate), but also how many people became an MQL after reading that content.

Q. Is your content helping to generate opportunities, pipeline, and customers?

You can start to measure content at this stage of the funnel by the number of customers it creates.

对我来说，查看一件内容产生的客户可能会损害该内容。有很多原因可能不会成为客户。内容可能完美地完成了工作；那个人可以采取行动并与您的销售团队进行讨论，但从未变成销售。这可能是因为该人的预算被削减了，或者他们的项目被推迟了。

Instead you can look at the number of opportunities and pipeline that was created by a piece of content. This would give you a better sense of how it performed, and it's how we measure the performance of our MOFU/BOFU content on my team at HubSpot.

The Content ROI Myth

That’s a lot of metrics, right? And we could have gone through a bunch more! The long and short of it is however, that there is no single metric you can show your boss that will categorically give the ROI of the content you produce -- myth busted!

There are, instead, a multitude of goals and metrics associated with content, which vary dependent on what marketing channels are distributing the content, and where that content is being used in your marketing funnel.

试图找出时间的ROI投资于content is the right thing to do, but you need to clearly define the goals of your content, align these across your funnel, and choose the metrics that are going to serve as indicators of your success. Doing this will give you a better picture of how content is performing across your funnel and what areas may need to be improved upon.

您也不应该忘记，仅通过硬指标来测量您的内容也会错过道格·凯斯勒（Doug Kessler）称之为“涟漪”的魔术指标 - “当您产生与观众产生共鸣的东西时，发生的所有美好事物。其中包括讲话的邀请，来宾博客，访谈，结识伟大的人，并帮助其他人进行项目。很少有人衡量，但确实产生了价值。”

Learn more about the Ripples in our free download of “The Life of a Remarkable Piece of content.”