10 Examples To Prove Content Marketing ROI To Your CEO

It’s not always easy to convince your CMO and marketing leaders to give you the budget and support for content marketing. To get their buy-in, you need to show them the ROI of content marketing. But what makes this so hard is because content marketing is a long-term investment with long-term results.

Content marketing is not traditional marketing or advertising, and it requires a completely different mindset and strategy that is more customer-centric and value-led. It’s an approach different from what traditional marketers are used to. So how do you go about challenging the status quo and convincing your marketing leaders and teams to get on board?

To help you build a strong business case for content marketing, you need to talk about what your marketing execs care about: revenue growth, cost savings, brand loyalty and operational efficiencies. Here are 10 proof points you can use to help get the budget and support you need for your content marketing efforts.

1. Content Marketing Drives Positive Brand Perceptions

GE partnered with BuzzFeed to create branded content and found that it significantly lifted brand perception when compared to the performance of display ads. The majority of users who saw GE’s branded content viewed GE as a “creative,” “inspiring” and “innovative” powerhouse, which resulted in a 138% Brand Lift on social media.

As well, nearly 80% of users who discovered GE’s branded content through trusted recommendations via social media, such as Facebook post or Tweet, assigned a positive brand attribute after viewing the content.

2. Content Marketing Is A More Cost-Effective Strategy To Boost Organic Reach & Engagement

Intel conducted an analysis comparing the impact and reach of TV advertising and content spend. Spending $5 million on a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl earned Intel 57 million engaged minutes. Engagement for a $5 million spend on Facebook, on the other hand, would drive 83 million clicks to the company’s content hub Intel iQ. This is the equivalent to 1.5 million subscribers and 257.5 million engaged minutes, given an average user typically spends about two and a half minutes on Intel iQ.

3. Content Marketing Leads To Greater Customer Acquisition

Hubspot’s State of Inbound Marketing study found that increasing your publication cadence directly leads to greater customer acquisition. 82% of marketers who blog daily acquired a customer using their blog, as opposed to 57% who blog on a monthly basis.

4. Content Marketing Yields Better ROI Than Advertising

Content marketing enables Kraft to gain a better understanding of its consumers through consumer interactions with its content. The first party data Kraft owns allows the company to quickly identify new consumer trends and target advertising based on these insights. In two years, Kraft has shown its content marketing efforts is driving 4x better ROI than traditional advertising.

5. Content Marketing Boosts Pipeline Revenue

Xerox launched a targeted campaign to connect and engage their top 30 accounts, and partnered with Forbes to create a magazine offering relevant, valuable business tips to Xerox’s target audience.

Over 70% of the targeted companies interacted with Xerox’s microsite, and the company saw a 300-400% increase in readership compared to past email campaigns.

But more importantly, through the campaign Xerox generated 20,000 new contacts and over 1,000 scheduled appointments, which earned the company $1.3 billion in pipeline revenue.

6. Content Drives Brand Awareness And Sales

Being the world’s 5th largest PC vendor, ASUS was largely unknown to many consumers globally. To fix this brand awareness problem, ASUS partnered with Microsoft to create a content marketing campaign. The campaign included a microsite featuring editorial and customer content such as videos and articles, and was launched across 8 countries.

According to Microsoft, the microsite earned 4 million visits and an online audience of 16 million users. ASUS exceeded its sales objectives by 60%, and saw a 16% increase in its global sales and 2.6 million increase in computer sales.

7. Content Marketing Influences Purchase Decisions

When considering a purchase, 85% of today’s consumers conduct research and read content from trusted experts. On average, consumers engage with 11 pieces of content before making a purchase decision.

For B2B buyers, they are 3 times more likely to visit a product or service provider’s website to learn about their offerings before making the final purchase. That’s why content marketing matters. By consistently delivering valuable, relevant content to your target consumers, it shows that your brand is genuine in your care and interest about customers and their needs beyond just selling your products. This helps your brand build thought leadership, authority and credibility in your space. So when a customer is ready to make a purchase, they have full confidence in your brand and are ready to work with you.

8. Content Marketing Gets More Customer Renewals And Upsells

By increasing its publishing cadence from 2 to 6 blogs a week, the content marketing agency, Marketing Insider Group, saw 41% higher renewal rate, 33% more sales and 24% higher MRR (monthly recurring revenue) for customers who engage with their content.

9. Content Marketing Improves Customer Loyalty

Retaining your current customers is 6-7 times cheaper than obtaining new ones, and leading marketers are using valuable content relevant to their key customer segments to foster stronger loyalty to their brands. Patagonia’s Worn Wear campaign is a great example of this – it highlights stories of customers using their products until they are finally worn out, encouraging consumers to not purchase new clothing unless absolutely necessary, to be more sustainable and, of course, more loyal to the brand.

10. Content Marketing Reduces Content Development Costs

In its Marketing And Media Efficiency Outcomes Drive Content Marketing report, Forrester found that many brands use content marketing to reduce the amount of content produced within their organizations, which dramatically lowers overall content development and management costs. Through more effective planning and collaboration, organizations within a company can produce and manage fewer, high quality assets that can be reused to maximize content spend and efficiency.

I hope these 10 proof points will help you build a solid business case for content marketing, and help get you the budget and support you need to achieve your content marketing goals!

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