Guest contributions are imperative for creating thought leadership content, but tracking your return on investment is often difficult. Although the content can potentially increase customer trust, it is difficult to precisely quantify the benefits of this guest post. You can incorporate easy-to-track metrics that should help decipher your ROI.
You need to assess your company, establish your objectives, determine key performance indicators (KPIs) for achieving those business goals, and then measure and monitor these KPIs.
Let’s address some valuable metrics for determining success.
1. Lead Quality
Regarding lead quality, not all guest posts are created equal. First, you’ll want to consider how qualified the lead is. It means looking at factors like how well they fit your target customer profile, whether they require your product or service, and whether they’re likely to be budget conscious.
Key Factors to Consider
To determine the leads generated from a guest post, you’ll need to consider three key factors: reach, conversion rate, and engagement.
Reach
Reach refers to the number of people who see your guest post. The more people see your post, the more qualified leads you’re likely to generate. To maximize reach, guest-post on high-traffic sites with a large audience.
Engagement
Engagement measures how long readers spend reading your post and how many take action after reading it. A high engagement rate indicates that readers find your content valuable and are likely to convert it into qualified leads. To maximize engagement, ensure your post is informative, engaging, and relevant to your target audience. Considering these three factors, you can ensure that your published guest posts generate high-quality leads. You’ll also want to consider indicators like whether they’ve visited your website, opened your emails, and interacted with your brand on social media.
Conversion Rate
Finally, you’ll want to consider how likely the lead is to convert. It can be tricky to predict, but you can look at factors like whether they’ve made it through your sales funnel or requested more information from you. If people aren’t taking action after reading your post, that’s a sign that you need to work on your CTAs or the quality of your content.
By considering all of these factors, you can get a good sense of your leads’ quality, and what kinds of leads are most likely to convert into customers.
2. Sales
Once you’ve generated a list of leads, it’s vital to track how many of those leads turn into sales. It will give you a clear idea of the effectiveness of your guest-contributed content. There are several ways to measure this, but a straightforward method is to track the number of sales made within a specific time period after a lead is generated.
For example, you could track the number of sales made within 24 hours, 48 hours, or one week after a lead is generated. It will give you an overt indication of your content marketing strategy’s effectiveness at converting leads into sales.
Since leads and sales correspond directly to income, they make it easy to measure guest-contributed content ROI.
3. Web Traffic
Web traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. Without a steady stream of visitors, it becomes challenging to generate leads and sales. One way to measure ROI is to track web traffic. However, measuring web traffic can be tricky.
There are three main types of web traffic: referral traffic, organic search traffic, and direct traffic.
Referral traffic comes from other websites linking to yours, organic search traffic comes from people finding your site through a search engine, and direct traffic is when someone types your URL into their browser.
Several tactics drive traffic to your website, but not all are equally effective. Referral traffic, for example, generally has a much higher conversion rate than organic search traffic. It is because referral traffic is often more targeted and, therefore, more likely to result in a sale.
By understanding which traffic sources are most effective, you can ensure that your guest-contributed content efforts drive the results you need.
4. Onsite Engagement
One of the main goals of guest posting is to engage with potential customers and encourage them to take action. One way to calibrate the success of your efforts is by looking at onsite engagement metrics such as bounce rate.
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that your content is irrelevant to your visitors or that they could not find what they were looking for. A low bounce rate and high pages per session indicate that people are interested in what they see on your site and are sticking around to learn more.
You should keep an eye on these critical measures of engagement. In addition, measuring the number of leads generated and conversion rate can also give you insights into how conclusive your content marketing campaign is at driving results.
5. Social Media Shares and Comments
In the past, measuring the return on investment (ROI) of content marketing was a bit of a guessing game. You could look at website traffic and sales figures, but it took a lot of work to know how much of that can be attributed directly to your content marketing efforts. With the advent of social media, however, it’s now possible to get a better idea of how effective your content marketing is. Every time someone shares or comments on one of your guest-contributed content, it’s like an endorsement that can reach a broad audience.
This “word of mouth” marketing method is highly effective, as it allows potential customers to see that real people are talking about your brand. In addition, social media shares and comments can help to boost your search engine ranking, as they signal to Google that your content is relevant and popular. As a result, measuring the number of social media shares and comments is an essential part of measuring the ROI of your content marketing strategy.
6. SEO Success
SEO success doesn’t happen overnight. It can demand months or even years to remark results from your efforts. But that doesn’t mean measuring the ROI of your content marketing is impossible.
You can use a few key metrics to track your progress and gauge your success.
Inbound Links
This metric measures the number of links pointing to your website from other websites. A high number of inbound links indicates that other websites consider your site valuable, which can help improve your search engine ranking.
Domain Authority
Another metric is DA or domain authority which measures the strength and popularity of your website. A high DA score indicates that your site is well-established and respected, which can also help to improve your ranking.
Target Keywords Ranking
This metric measures how well your website ranks for your target keywords. If your target keywords consistently rank in the top 10 results on Google, you can be confident that this ranking increase indicates that your guest-contributed content is paying off.
7. Exposure and Authority
One important metric to consider is exposure. Exposure refers to the number of people who see your content. The more exposure your content gets, the more likely people will see you as an authority figure in your industry. And seeing you as an authority will lead to an incremental proliferation in business referrals, leads, and sales, boosting your overall content marketing ROI.
So, to improve your content marketing ROI, start by building your authority.
Conclusion
Now that you have learned how to scale your ROI, it’s time to start crafting more customer-centric and evergreen content.
A great pursuit to begin is with our free high-converting writing templates, which are a good starting point for creating not just blog posts but ebooks, case studies, and other lead magnets.
DOWNLOAD OUR FREE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO EVERGREEN CONTENT MARKETING!
