The (technical) recipe for measuring ROI of B2B content
Updated Mar 2022 - This post was originally published Aug 2019
Content marketing is on most marketers’ agenda these days. Yet proving content’s actual value presents a difficult challenge to many. This results in content being under optimised, undervalued, done for vanity, or based on gut feeling.
By connecting content with revenue and pipeline generated, a B2B revenue attribution platform can make the content ROI challenge a thing of the past.
What you will get in this post
In this post, we’ll provide you with a three-step recipe for measuring the ROI of your B2B content.
We know it’s a long read, so to keep you motivated, here’s some of the knowledge you stand to gain:
Know how to see the ROI of each piece of B2B content (URL) you produce.
Help justify spending time on content.
Instruct what types of content you should make, based on revenue generated.
Give you the ROI of your content team by comparing salaries to revenue generated.
View of Dreamdata’s Content Analytics dashboard
Does this sound like a familiar content discussion?
CMO: “We need to do more content marketing.”
CMO to CEO: “Can I hire a writer, a designer and videographer?”
CEO: “What will the ROI of this team be?”
Also the CEO: “What’s the ROI of our current content”?
CMO: “Bla bla… Vanity metric 1… Bla bla… Vanity metric 2…”
CEO: “Ehm… Let’s not do that right now.”
Our gut instinct tells us we should probably be producing those nice evergreen pieces of content. The type of stuff that will have a long and happy lifespan pulling in relevant traffic for the business.
I mean, everyone else is doing it, and come on, we all enjoy browsing blogs for useful content.
So why isn’t the content marketing buy-in greater?
It’s because proving the true value of content production remains an enigma for most marketers.
This means that content plans and efforts are often scratched completely or postponed until honeymoon periods of fresh funding or extraordinary profitable years.
Marketing leaders are afraid to commit fully to content because they don’t really know - or can’t prove - the monetary value of their content.
It’s hard. We know. We’ve been there.
We’ve hired the content people, produced heaps of content, seen rankings improve and visitors surge, the whole works. All while not having tangible data on the ROI of the overall content project.
Most businesses just cannot answer “How many company user journeys, leads, and deals did the content generate?” or, “how many $’s came out of this?” to any degree of accuracy.
Instead, (the majority of) marketers focus on the readily-available-metrics:
Search volume: They can use a search engine tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, etc. to get an estimate of the search volume of certain search requests.
Rankings: They also know that it’s the results on top of Google’s search results that most likely get the highest percentage of visits.
Traffic: When people are on the page a basic tracking tool like Google Analytics can also tell how many visitors the page gets, how long they stay and what they do after getting to the landing page, and so forth.
Conversions: The somewhat skilled operators should then have set up conversion goals like a transaction or email signup to something.
But these are, to a certain extent, vanity metrics.
At Dreamdata we would claim that if activities can’t be associated with revenue generated, through data, you’re chasing the wind.
The above readily-available-metrics should be generating further questions about the conversions:
If the conversion is a transaction you should ask:
Of those who end up buying, how many come back and buy again?
How many visits to your site did it take to convert?
Were sales, support, or marketing in contact with the buyers?
What’s the true Lifetime Value (LTV) of your customers?
Of the customers who have a high LTV, what’s the leading indicator of this?
What did those with high LTV do or what channel did they come from?
If the conversion is an email sign-up or demo request:
As above, but the challenges are even bigger as revenue is not immediately associated with the conversion.
In many businesses, there are months and even years between first conversion and $-value. This makes gaining transparency on ROI harder.
In good-practice examples, there’s a CRM associated that will have a deal value assigned, if the email at some point ends up purchasing.
In worse cases, the email looks like a completely new user when they end up purchasing 8 months later.
B2B attribution is complex
Admittedly B2B attribution, in general, is hard(er) than the relatively simpler B2C buyer journey for a multitude of reasons:
Sales cycles are looong
You’re tracking companies and not individuals
Deals require a lot of interaction with the leads and customers
Multiple people are often involved in the buying decision
Multiple media channels are used for marketing, both offline and online
Most companies today are multi-tech stacked meaning that one user might appear as 10 different users across your systems.
Feeling disillusioned about getting that B2B content ROI?
Don’t be.
We’ve found a way to show you the ROI of the B2B content you produce, and here’s the 3 step recipe.
#1 - It’s time for businesses to own their customer data
The first and most critical step you need to take is: own your own data.
Having access to all the digital touches your customer takes will let you identify whether content played a role in generating the deal and revenue.
However, having access to your data requires an important paradigm shift. One where companies move away from services owning and restricting access to their user behaviour data.
It is you and not someone else that should own access to your data.
Today, most businesses rely on a tech stack comprising of ad platforms, simple tracking platforms like Google Analytics, marketing automation systems, and CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot. With each storing information about their users and their behaviour in silos.
This however presents an important challenge to getting your content ROI.
Most of these products not only silo the (your) data but also gate access to it, requiring you to pay $$ for access or denying access outright.
So, when the time inevitably comes where your needs change or the product is no longer meeting your expectations, you’re faced with the risks of losing all historic data. Which in turn means starting to learn (gather data) from scratch again.
But how do you overcome this challenge to make sure you have all the data you need for calculating your content ROI?
To make sure you do not end in this situation, you need to:
Firstly, work with software that allows you to own your own data.
Secondly, have open access to move your data around and out of the systems as you like.
Thirdly, store your data in your own database ie. Google BigQuery or a Customer Data Platform.
With all of your data in one place and freely accessible, you have completed the first step towards data independence, and towards getting that elusive content ROI
Now you are continuously storing what takes place. You can move the data to whatever new system you want to use. You can join and clean the data for the analysis you wish to perform.
A data warehouse solution that stores all your customer data touchpoints, as described above, increasingly takes the form of a customer data platform.
A customer data platform per the Wikipedia explanation:
A customer data platform (CDP) is a type of packaged software which creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned and combined to create a single customer profile. This structured data is then made available to other marketing systems.[1] According to Gartner, customer data platforms have evolved from a variety of mature markets, "including multichannel campaign management, tag management and data integration.
Customer data platforms are indeed a technology that is being ever more widely adopted as we speak. Just take a look at this CDP institute data 👇
#2 - Connecting the user journey through historic data
How would the perfect tracking scenario look for you?
It would probably be something like following every step of the digital customer journey, everything a business does, before buying your product:
From when they are anonymous and come to your site for research
Signs up to your newsletter
Start using a free version
Become a paying customer
Repurchase and generates LTV
Perhaps at some point churns
That would be very valuable, right? It's actually possible to do, but I must warn you. It’s going to get a bit more technical here. Hang in there, you will make through to the other side.
Firstly, you need to make sure that you give anonymous ID’s to users on your website. This is something almost all tracking solutions do. As a standard though, Google Analytics does this using only the browser cookie. The problem with browser cookies is that they often get deleted.
Side note: When talking specifically about the ad platforms, most of them will start to struggle extra hard to prove their attribution as Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) is increasingly rolled out by more internet browsers and cookies start to be deleted after 24 hours.
What you should do is to make your tracking toolset an ID in the local storage of the browser as well. Local storage of browsers is normally not emptied. Segment.com and Dreamdata’s own tracking script do this out of the box.
Disclaimer: Dreamdata has a partnership with, and has official integration to, Segment.com. Our views are influenced by our appreciation of their tech.
As the ID in the local storage of the browser is still there, we can now identify them.
If you are using Google Analytics some tweaking is needed to do this. Oh, and to make matters worse, even if you get the IDing right, it’s hard to pull data out of Google Analytics, so you can’t really even apply the knowledge that the data provides you.
That was a bit technical, so let’s recap what just happened. In the old cookie tracking paradigm, the understanding of how the user arrived and what the user did on your website, would be lost.
By using Segment.com or Dreamdata’s tracking script to track through an ID in the browser’s local storage, you are now able to track what happens through the often months-long B2B sales cycles, and so get closer to getting your content’s ROI.
“Linking individual content pieces back to real dollars generated is so valuable for marketing teams. Not only will it help you justify scaling your content efforts and growing your team, more importantly it will help you focus on what really matters for your (potential) customers. You can spend your time creating content that meets their needs, and has the biggest impact on their decision-making process.
”
#3 - Putting revenue on content
Now that you own your data and you, with historical data, can identify users over longer time periods, you need one last piece to the puzzle: Associating the identifiable piece with your CRM and revenue system.
By looking up the email in your CRM and revenue system, you will get the dollar value of the user. In other words “this user was worth $X revenue”.
When you have the dollar value of the user, then you can start to look at the customer journey for this revenue to arrive in your CRM.
You can examine this in different ways, depending on your needs.
The data you have stored in your database can be juggled into metrics of two aspects: Attribution model and Revenue model.
Attribution model:
First touch: What was the first channel that led the user to arrive on your website?
Last touch: What was the last channel before the user ended up buying?
Multi-touch: What were all the touches this user had with us before the user ended up buying and what the most important part?
Custom / W-shaped: Construct your own model, depending on what you know ads value in your user journey.
Equal weight: Each touch attributes equal value, even though this probably is not the truth.
Revenue model:
First purchase: At the first transaction, what revenue did you record?
First-year revenue: What revenue have you made on the customer after 12 months (or what number of months you prefer)?
Lifetime Value (LTV): What’s the total revenue number for this account?
The choice of attribution and revenue model often depends on what your job is about. Ie. CMO: If you’re a CMO responsible for new growth, you’re probably interested in the first touch model, which explains where new leads come from.
CEO/CFO: If you’re a CEO/CFO responsible for the budget and money on the bank account growth, you’re probably more interested in the customer/w-shaped model, which gives better insight into the ROI of activities.
Either way, most people will find value and insights through switching the models and looking at the numbers from several perspectives.
Focus on the content made for traction:
The next step that would be nice for you to do, is to focus on the content you are making to drive growth and revenue.
Here’s an example of a business that puts 95% of its new content in two groups:
Blog: Targeting a bunch of relevant industry topics.
Compare: Comparison articles between the company’s product and alternatives.
Instead of looking at all content URLs, including your front, product, and pricing pages that normally will do well, you can isolate the URLs where you do content for growth and traction.
With this in place you can generate lists of all your URLs and see per URL:
How many visits the URL had
How many contacts (emails) the URL generated
How many new companies the URL generated
How many deals came from this URL
How much revenue the URL generated
Quite magical.
You no longer have to “guestimate” whether content pieces that generated emails actually resulted in what really matters: Deals and revenue.
Now the revenue it generates is pulled directly from your CRM and displayed according to the attribution and revenue model you have set.
For savvy marketers, these insights should:
Help justify spending time on content.
Instruct what types of content you should make.
Give you the ROI of your content team by comparing salaries to revenue generated.
And it should probably inspire which URLs to try and rank better in Google through link building and other tactics.
And there you have it. That’s a technical recipe for proving ROI on content.
What do you think?
Is there something we’ve missed in this recipe?
If you have questions on how to do this, please let us know.