Content Marketing Attribution: 3 Powerful Ways to Measure ROI

Hi, My name is Greg Bardwell. I’m the founder and CEO of SaturnOne.io. I love SaaS both as a way to deliver software and as a business model. As a founder and developer of numerous SaaS projects for more than 20 years, I struggled and learned a lot and found that content marketing is essential in achieving one’s goals as a SaaS company. 

It is no longer a question whether or not to invest in SaaS content marketing, but rather how you use content to grow your SaaS business. That’s why I created SaturnOne, a web funnels and content analytics software to help SaaS business owners focus more on product development by providing efficient tools in marketing such as content attribution. 

It used to be that as a software developer, I wanted to focus on the product, and less on the marketing side of the business. However, it eventually became clear that we cannot generate customers and revenues without a thorough understanding and application of marketing. 

We invested heavily on marketing and even had four paid apps and some free tools which had as much work on them as the software that we were creating back then. Imagine having to hire an expert to set up Google Tag Manager analytics to weave data and interpret them. Worse, only the “expert’ could use and interpret the analytics or run experiments. 

Since then, things are a lot more different. I’ve learned my lessons and became more efficient. I know what works and what doesn’t. Today I’m going to talk about a very specific aspect of content marketing - content attribution. One that could potentially double your SaaS monthly recurring revenue (MRR). 

SaturnOne is a tool to help your SaaS business in growing and improving your content marketing strategy and help you optimize for your most profitable customers. 

Introduction

Content marketing is a powerful way to reach your target audience, build brand awareness, and drive leads. But measuring content marketing performance can be tricky. In this article, we’ll tackle content marketing attribution and how to measure it so that you can make informed decisions about your content strategy moving forward. Read on for more details!

What Is Content Attribution?

Quoting a blog post from woopra.com “Content Marketing Attribution: How to Measure the Effectiveness of Blogging”, it says, “is the act of assigning credit to a given touchpoint. It helps you weigh the relative impact of campaigns in relation to your overall marketing and sales program.

In attribution modeling in general, you’re always going to sacrifice some accuracy for utility. There’s simply no objective way to assign “credit” to a given touchpoint that doesn’t implicitly contain one or more arguable assumptions.”

According to databox.com,  attribution refers to the steps visitors take to reach a desired action step. This means content attribution is tracking which of your content encourages visitors to take the desired action.

Goals from each content piece or campaign may vary, meaning content attribution can range anywhere from measuring conversion from traffic to leads and leads to customers.

Content attribution may also refer to the channel you’re using and into what level you want to go into measuring your content’s effectiveness. 

Specifically, what is Content Marketing Attribution and how does it relate to Content Marketing KPIs?

Let’s start with the basics. Content marketing attribution is the process of measuring the impact of content marketing on your business metrics. It’s an essential part of digital marketing, and you can use it to improve your content marketing strategy moving forward. 

With content marketing, you’re creating and distributing content (i.e. blog posts, guides, videos, and other types of media) targeted to your specific audience. The goal is to drive traffic to your website and increase conversions by educating your target audience and building trust with your brand.

Why Measure Content Marketing Attribution?

First, let’s look at some of the ways that content marketing can positively impact your business. 

• Brand awareness - Content marketing can help you grow your brand awareness and increase your audience size. 
• Traffic - Content marketing can drive targeted traffic to your website and increase your conversion rates. 
• Conversions - Content marketing can lead to conversions, such as sales and signups, that help boost your revenue. 
• Customer retention - Content marketing can also help you retain customers by providing valuable and helpful content. 
• Lead generation - Content marketing can help generate leads by encouraging visitors to sign up for your email list. 
• Customer sentiment - Finally, content marketing can also affect customer sentiment and help improve your customer satisfaction. - And that’s not all!

See how SaturnOne optimizes your marketing strategy by getting a DEMO now. 

A good resource to get you started in measuring is, “7 Steps to Double Your SaaS Monthly Recurring Revenue Growth Rate”.

How to Measure Content Marketing Attribution?

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s take a look at how you can measure content marketing attribution. To do so, you’ll need to track your metrics (KPIs).

There are several tools that can help you track these metrics and one of these is SaturnOne. 

Measure Your Content Marketing Attribution KPIs Using SaturnOne

SaturnOne can help you in three ways to optimize for revenue by providing you insights on your content marketing KPIs:

1. We can schedule a consultation to set your content marketing goals. Then we can help you define what you need to measure to achieve your goals, including data to get into our platform.
2. We can also work with you to develop the right insight, reports, and how to interpret reports and data through measurements and analysis. 
3. We can meet regularly (or monthly)  to review progress, make adjustments, and provide data-driven advice on how to interpret and analyze insights generated. Schedule a free consultation with our content marketing analytics experts on how they can help you optimize your content for conversions.

Subscribe to SaturnOne and you can also view how your campaign page flows from referrers and from what countries visitors are coming from. 

Everything just flows smoothly inside SaturnOne for your ease of viewing on how your website is performing in terms of customer visits and customer behavior and demographics. 

You can also view forms that are being visited and filled-out by your leads including the conversion rate of all these forms. 

As a content marketer, you can easily see how many unique visitors have visited a specific page and blog and know exactly if your blog article is successful in driving traffic to your site by looking at the figures provided. Read the related blog article, “How to Optimize Your SaturnOne Web Funnel Analytics”

Which metrics should you use for content marketing attribution KPIs?

Now that we’ve covered the types of metrics you should track for content marketing attribution, let’s take a look at some of the most important: 

• Website traffic - You can attribute the number of visitors your website received to your content marketing efforts. 
• Conversions - You can also attribute your conversion rates to content marketing. 
• Social engagement - You can attribute social engagement, such as shares and likes, to content marketing. 
• Customer sentiment - And you can attribute customer sentiment, such as positive reviews, to content marketing. 
• Time on site - You can attribute time on site, i.e. the amount of time a visitor spends on your website, to content marketing. 
• Content Attribution: the tool that’ll give you a clear picture of how successful  your content converts. It’s also the measure of your content marketing’s ROI.

Learn more on what specific content marketing metrics (KPIs) you must use for your business by reading the article, “4 Content Marketing KPIs to Measure for Success”. 

Content Attribution

Content attribution is a hard subject for many companies. Most are not familiar with attribution terms such as first touch of content attribution or last touch of content attribution. 

Given that most B2B sales and even lead generation efforts today can take up to 6 to 8 website visits over many months, some strategies may not be helpful to you. What you need is to know what content is working and where to spend your marketing dollars and time. 

When visitors convert to leads or customers, you may ask, what category of content or specific pieces of content were they engaged with? How many pieces over how long?  How many visits? What about segmentations, can you identify customer types that buy from your campaigns? Can you drill down to individual conversions? Can you put a value on customers and therefore your content efforts? 

By using Content Attribution, it helps you focus on your best customers and find out which content is contributing to your success

One way to do this is by looking at the customer lifetime value (LTV) inside the Content Attribution section of SaturnOne’s first page. For more detailed information on the subject, DOWNLOAD the FREE eBook now. 

At SaturnOne, we help answer these questions with our powerful, yet easy to use tools.

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3 Important Takeaways

Now that we’ve covered the basics of content marketing attribution, let’s conclude the article with three takeaways that will help you put these insights into action. 

• First, content marketing attribution is essential to your business. You need to understand the ROI of your content marketing strategy so that you can make smart business decisions in the future. 
• Second, there are several metrics that you can use to track content marketing attribution, including website traffic, social engagement, and conversion rates. 
• And lastly, the most important metrics for content marketing attribution are conversions, content attribution, website traffic, conversions, social engagement, and customer sentiment. That brings us to the end of this article. 

We hope you now understand the basic concepts of content marketing attribution and how to measure it so that you can make informed decisions about your content strategy moving forward.

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