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June 4, 2014

Keys to content strategy: ROI

Content strategy requires you to connect information with business results. The key to getting a content strategy approved? Return on investment (ROI). Once you show that your content strategy is beneficial to the business, you are on your way.

Here are some common approaches to content strategy ROI.

Web analytics

Your web site offers a wealth of data about site visitors. But what does the data mean? You could base your content strategy on increasing visitors to your site, but a better measurement would be quality visits or lead conversions (perhaps people who fill out a contact form). If you run an ecommerce site, you can look at revenue, shopping cart abandonment percentage (less is better), and more to get an idea of whether and how your content is improving matters.

For most technical content, however, you need to look deeper.

Support metrics

cowbells. MORE cowbells

You can never have too much ROI // flickr: mecklenburg

Providing one-on-one support, via telephone, email, or chat, is expensive. Technical information provides one-to-many support–a single document can be read by many people, which spreads out the cost of developing and delivering that information.

Therefore, content strategy ROI may involve measuring technical support costs along with content development costs, and trying to shift customers over to using more of the self-service content instead of the technical support.

Sales impact

The basic premise of content marketing is that providing useful content leads to customers—better, more relevant content results in more sales. But how do you calculate the ROI? How do you identify the share of sales produced by better content (as opposed to a marketing effort or a sales initiative)?

You need a way of measuring why people buy your product. Talk to the sales organization and find out what sort of metrics they track. For example, do they ask people why they bought a particular product? Or do they want to emphasize a feature? Can you provide content that talks about that feature?

Another possibility would be to look at product return rates. Can better installation instructions reduce return rates? Can more upfront information ensure that customers select the right product the first time? (For some interesting statistics on product returns, check out this article by Sharon Burton.)

Time to market

Can you create content better and faster? If so, you may be able to accelerate time to market for your product, which in turn means you get revenue sooner. Time to market calculations are most common for localized content. Cutting a shipping delay from six months to three months means that the organization gets revenue three months earlier. For many of our bigger customers, this type of improvement is enough to justify a substantial investment to create a better content process.

 

Do you have other ROI justifications for content strategy?

Other posts in the keys to content strategy series