A client in the oral care industry wanted to see hard value from its content marketing, so we built a formula to prove ROI was increasing.

Industry: Oral care
Content: Daily news articles
Highlights: Landing page visits drive ROI up 50% over time

One of our clients in the oral care industry invested in content marketing because it understood that consumers look for dental information online.

Brafton’s content marketing strategists and editorial team worked with the company to create a multi-faceted approach that included:

  • Daily news articles
  • Landing pages with conversion-focused copy
  • Social media posts to promote the content and special campaigns

Challenge: Taking the confusion out of content ROI

The strategy was effectively driving traffic: Analytics reports showed 98 percent of content readers were LANDING on the news, navigating directly to the articles from Google search and referrals. However, the client wanted to go beyond traffic metrics and find out how the content was driving hard value. The company needed to see that visitors were not just coming to the ecommerce site, but were ultimately converting and purchasing products.

Strategy: Putting together a system for measuring content conversions

We understand that as a relatively new marketing tactic, content creation has some decision makers scratching their heads about the hard value. Challenge accepted. Brafton’s strategists put together this formula to show the oral care client how much monetary return it was getting from the content it invested in:

The number of monthly landing page visits to Brafton content divided by the client’s monthly content marketing service spend gives us the cost per session.

cost per session =

# of monthly visits to blog

monthly content spend

We compared this to the value generated by the content using a similar equation:

The number of landing page visits to Brafton content divided by the revenue generated by Brafton content conversions to get the per session value.

per session value =

 ______# of visits to blog______ 

revenue generated by blog conversions

Because this client runs an ecommerce site, it’s fairly straightforward to determine the revenue generated from news content readers’ conversions. Less clear? 

Check out our video to learn how to tie other web actions to dollar values.

Results: Content ROI increases 50% year-over-year

When all of this data was combined, we saw that the cost of each content reader steadily drops, while the overall value consistently increases. The company was clearly making money on its content production – and the rate at which the cost per acquisition dropped was satisfying. The company’s quarterly return on content investment grew 50 percent within a year.

The company’s quarterly return on content investment grew 50 percent within a year.

For some additional context, we compared the cost of content to the cost of the company’s CPC campaign. The cost of each content session is lower (and is decreasing) over time, while the CPC leads are more expensive and have slightly increased. One isn’t necessarily better the other – we find the two work well in tandem and support goals across the sales funnel. But what’s clear is that content marketing is a cost-effective solution for brands.

Marketers and decision makers depend on hard numbers to justify investments and refine their campaigns. We helped this client understand how the benefits of web content go beyond organic traffic to generate consumer interest in products and drive sales. More importantly for marketers with a tight budget – we demonstrated how content ROI improves over time to bring greater value to the business.

See these related success stories for additional examples of how to measure content ROI:

Lauren Kaye is a Marketing Editor at Brafton Inc. She studied creative and technical writing at Virginia Tech before pursuing the digital frontier and finding content marketing was the best place to put her passions to work. Lauren also writes creative short fiction, hikes in New England and appreciates a good book recommendation.