Forget the beef - where's the ROI? Image from Wendy's

We’re familiar with this scenario: It took a while, but your boss finally doesn’t look at the content marketing plan you proposed like it’s a handful of magic beans. You’ve stated the case, earned the trust, got your marketing machine running and the numbers are coming in. The good news: There’s more website traffic and “buzz” about your brand. The bad news: Buzz doesn’t pay the bills. Sales numbers haven’t really lifted. What gives? Where’s the ROI? And how do you find and fix the issues before your boss tells you to take a hike up that beanstock?

Link Like Your Business Depends On It (Because It Does)
You’ve written or posted interesting material, promoted it using social media and other methods, used the very best SEO techniques and people are finding their way to your website. Once they’re there are there links to take them to other sections of your site (related info, your successful case studies, information about what your business does)? If not, you’re missing the opportunity to draw the connection between content potential clients are paying attention to and services you can provide.

If you do have links within your content – how often are they being clicked? Where are people most often being directed to? And once they’re there, do they keep searching within the site or do they move on? Your metrics should involve ways to track the activity of each user.

Love The Loiterers
Hurrah – you received 500 website hits from your one Tweet. Boo – 80% of the visitors stayed for under five seconds. Your metrics can (or should) see how long people are staying on your website. The longer the stay, the more likely that they’re engaged in the content you’ve produced. If they’re engaged, you have a better chance of selling yourself to them (both in a soft sell and a more direct approach later on). If your metrics indicate that your website is a victim of a click and run, you likely have a fair amount of work ahead of you. The content might not be right (too long, too technical, not delivering what the social media marketing promoted it to be, etc.), the design might be unattractive or perhaps you have too many ads or scripts running.

Pander To Repeat Visitors
Within your tracking mechanism, you should be able to spot (and even label) people that visit your site more than once. It’s normal for people to do their research and check back a few times before making a decision to contact you. Find out what these readers are searching for, returning to or responding to and find ways to add a little more of what they like to the site (or better yet – market your services more toward those interests).

The Last Exit
Where are you losing people? When you track the activity of visitors to your site have you noticed that they lose interest after x amount of time? Or perhaps you keep pointing people to a section of your site that people look at for two seconds and then close the window? If that’s the case, you may need to change up your methods or scrutinize what might be turning people off. Did you get them all the way to the e-store, see they’ve started selecting items only to discover they left before completing the transaction? Check out our tips on shopping cart abandonment.

Make Contact
How many hits (directly or through linking) is your contact page getting? There’s a good chance that if people are making the decision to find out how to get in touch with you, they’re very interested in your services. Take a look at your contact page – is it clean, easy to understand and contains the relevant info people need? Do you offer a contact form, direct e-mail addresses or generic e-mail addresses? According to Seth Godin, this could have an impact on peoples’ willingness to contact you:

…I visited eight sites. Six of them hide their email address. They use forms of one sort of another. One firm refused to accept more than 500 characters in the “how can we help you” box, while three of them wanted to know what state I was in, etc.

Email contact is like a first date. If you show up with a clipboard and a questionnaire, it’s not going to go well, I’m afraid. The object is to earn permission to respond.

Um, oops?

If people are going to your contact page but not contacting you, a revamp of the page might be necessary. And if people are contacting you but you’re not getting sales out of it – the problem may be your sales team, the product, the pricing or an issue of having identified a wrong customer base to market to.

To butcher a perfectly good metaphor: Social media and content marketing can lead a horse to the water. But if the water is unappetizing, you can’t blame the content marketing for the horse’s unwillingness to slurp it down.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Content Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.