Are you getting marketing automation ROI?
So you’re in marketing. In simple terms, you’re a cog in the wheel responsible for driving new revenue. In aspirational terms, you help grow the business in a meaningful and quantifiable way. Either way, your success – or failure – is highly measurable.
Everything is measurable these days, but content marketing measurement is especially hard because sales cycles are long and attribution models get muddled in the mix.
Is what you’re doing working? Is content marketing and promotion a part of your mix?
I’m still surprised by how many people answer “no.” I do understand that answer, though. Your boss doesn’t care how many views or likes your latest blog post received. She doesn’t care how many people downloaded the latest e-book or how many LinkedIn connections your recent article prompted. She cares about revenue. But there is a way to connect the dots between a great content marketing strategy and new revenue. If you’re not doing it, it’s probably costing you a lot of lost revenue.
You don’t believe it.
I know. Most of our customers didn’t either. But then they saw the light. Well, then they saw the math. First, we look at the cost of running a monthly content marketing campaign:
Content ideating, creation, editing, and promotion…..$8,900
Email marketing automation……………………………………..$1,500
TOTAL……………………………………………………………………..$10,400
The $8,900 equates to the man-hours needed to research, write and edit great content for the top, middle and bottom of your funnel. Your cost may vary. This may include white papers, blog articles, social media posts, sales collateral presentations….basically anything with words or infographics. Great content takes time to produce, so this cost can range extensively, depending on how much content you create. Promotion is included here because many companies opt to use freelancers or marketing agencies to create good content, and those entities will often promote the content.
The $1,500 includes marketing automation – the mechanism for promoting this content. Marketing automation is a key ingredient in your revenue-driving content marketing strategy. If used properly, marketing automation takes the “hard” out of “hard work” because it aggregates your marketing channels and automates the tasks needed to effectively market on all of them through software platforms and technology. If used poorly, it’s a giant waste of money and many people overspend. [Warning: quick and shameless self-promotion ahead] That’s why Macon Raine offers free marketing automation software to remove the risk and help marketers achieve marketing automation ROI faster.
Marketing automation is essential to any effective marketing strategy because it enables you to mass touch an audience quickly and easily and regularly. There are plenty of great marketing automation tools to choose from that run the gamut in terms of pricing and capability. Some of our favorites are:
Next, let’s look at content marketing in action. That is, let’s look at it through our KPI lens. For the sake of easy math, let’s assume that the majority of your content consists of blog posts on your website. If you create a blog post for each day of the month, you’ll have ~30 pages of new content. Each of those 30 pages would have it’s own form with a CTA, whether it be to sign up for the newsletter, get in touch with sales, receive a special offer, etc. Let’s look at the possibilities:
Let’s say that your content generates 14,320 visitors for the month and 21,268 pageviews. That’s a pretty good start in terms of traffic, but what does it mean for the bottom line? We’ll assume a reasonable average conversion rate of 10% to finish out the example.
If your product costs $500 per month or $6000/year, and you are driving a decent volume of traffic, there’s a potential for a lot of new revenue. If you’re creating great content and promoting it effectively, the people visiting your blog and filling out the form are qualified leads.
If we’re looking at organic traffic alone (not including paid or outbound), things are already looking up. Of the 14,321 visitors, 10% will convert, or roughly 1432. On average, SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate. At that rate, 209 of your 1432 leads will close….that’s $104,500 in new revenue for the month. That’s not even including Customer Lifetime Value.
Is the $10,400 marketing spend each month worth a 10x ROI? Is $104,500 the marketing automation ROI you need? Only you can answer that.
If it is, reach out. We’re throwing in free marketing automation software for new clients who sign on for our new Rolling Thunder content marketing and promotion offering. You get killer content to help fill your funnel and ring in the New Year with some new customers.
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