6 Scientific ways to maximize ROI on your Content Marketing

Let's get straight to the point. The purpose of any marketing activity is to increase the sale and hence, it is important to view the activity within the context of the ROI it is capable of delivering. Return on Investment is the most efficient quantitative measure of the efficacy of marketing and the same goes for Content Marketing.

You might have great content on which you have spent considerable time, efforts and money. But it means nothing unless it fetches you the returns that would help you achieve not only the breakeven but also make a substantial profit to make your content and its marketing worthy of the efforts. This blog checks out some of the most core and scientific ways to maximise the returns from your content marketing.

#1. Focus Niche
Identify your niche and focus on it. It's the first and the most important thing to do while creating content. There are tons of content available online and publishing a content with general subject matter will be nothing but a futile exercise.
To avoid getting lost in the crowd, identify a particular niche and stick to it. In the online world where half of the world's population has some access to the internet, finding a huge number of audience for your niche is achievable. Hence, keep your focus on the niche you've selected and keep your content relevant to it.
It will allow you to provide specific and succinct information to your audiences who will find value in your content. It will also allow you to concentrate your marketing activities on the niche you've selected. A niche focus helps you identify the exact segment of your potential clients and implementing a sales funnel to increase your revenue and subsequently ROI.

#2. Content Promotion
Okay, so you have developed an excellent content, identified the right channels and published it! But, do you think that's enough? In an online world where millions of users generate and access content each day, if you don't promote your content, it won't be long before it is lost in the horde. The only way to keep your content more visible than your competitors is to promote it vigorously and keep promoting it continuously.
And, there's a figure that might shock you! Top content marketers spend more time promoting their content than creating it, and significantly more time! Someone like Derek Halpern spends just 20% of his time creating a content and 80% promoting it.

This is how most of the top content marketers work. Rather than spending time on creating more and more contents, they focus on the continuous promotion of their existing content. There is, however, a caveat here. Spending more time on promotion of content rather than its creation doesn't mean the quality of the content can be compromised. You'll still need to have the content that is superior to your competitors'. The need is to have few high-quality contents and continuous promotion.

You may also like to use tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule and automate content posting on social networking sites. That saves time and make it easier for you to track user responses to your content.

#3. Content Quality and Keyword Insertion
The quality of the content is the supreme characteristic. It is the driving force behind the success of any content. Unless there is a marked difference in the quality of the information your content offers and its presentation style, it is unlikely that it'll be noticed by the target segments of your audience.
It's also important to understand that quality is not static. Once you have created a quality content, you need to keep updating it and improving its quality. It will allow you to beat your competitors who are also trying to outwit you.
Quality is essential but it doesn't guarantee the success of your content. In an online world with millions of contents available on the same topic, you need to ensure that what you have to offer gets a higher ranking in search engine listings. It is where keywords play a crucial role. Users will not search for the name of your blog or website. Rather, they will search for specific information by typing the corresponding key phrases in the search engine box.
Inserting appropriate keywords and keeping their density at the right level is crucial for the success of your content. An idea keyword density would be 1-3% of the total length of your content. It will ensure that you have sufficient keywords and the optimum number of times they appear in your content while also avoiding keyword cluttering, which would not only hamper the quality of the content but could also be consider as spam by search engines.

Google Keyword Planner is a great tool by Google to analyse keywords. You can find out useful variation of keywords and their monthly search volumes across various geographical areas. It helps you identify right keywords and competition associated with them.

#4. Advertising
Just publishing a high-quality content online doesn't suffice the purpose. You need to advertise it to increase its reachability. Sharing content on the online channels identified by you doesn't suffice the purpose. Organic growth and traffic generation through social media has limited benefits. To make your content popular and ultimately to monetise it, you need to advertise it by creating a unique combination of various inbound and outbound marketing methods. As a starter, you can try Facebook Sponsored update to increase reach of your post.

#5. Optimizing Sales Funnel
Once you have successfully positioned your content through advertising and online marketing, the next and the most important step is monetisation. Unless you make money from your content, there isn't any ROI, and it will just be another cost-incurring proposition. Monetisation requires identifying the people who will pay for your content and a sales funnel is a highly useful tool. Optimising the sales funnel will enable you to increase your ROI by filtering the audience who will pay.

#6. Measuring ROI
The entire process is focused on a single factor - Return on Investment. Unless your returns are positive and substantial, there's no point in investing in developing and marketing content. ROI is the percentage of the profit of the total cost. It's important that you track and measure the ROI of your content marketing process to ensure it is able to achieve the objectives you've determined for your content.

Conclusion
Maximising ROI is no rocket science. Simple measures like the ones stated above will go a long way in letting you make more money from your content marketing than the cost you incurred, and it is what ROI is all about.