One of the biggest advantages of content marketing is its potential return on investment (ROI). Assuming you’ve implemented the strategy effectively, and stick with it for long enough (which could mean several years or more), you should see a higher profit returned from your efforts than you’d see in other marketing and advertising strategies.

Your content marketing return on investment (ROI) is the critical number that clues you in to how efficiently your campaigns are performing. Are you getting high returns on a minimal investment or are you pouring funds into a campaign that’s yielded barely appreciable results?

How to Push It Higher

The best content marketing strategies are the ones that exploit the key benefits of content marketing, and enable you to cut costs further, achieve higher longevity, and accelerate your compounding returns: 

1. 1.  Make your content serve multiple goals. Content marketing can be used for a variety of purposes; you can use it to improve your brand’s relationships with consumers, you can use it purely to attract new traffic to your site, or you could use it as a conduit to earn more conversions from your existing site visitors. The best strategies use content for a bit of everything, which maximizes the value of every piece. Optimize it for search engines, for readers, and for conversions—all at once.
   2. Centralize your efforts on key pieces. Many new content marketers make the mistake of trying to produce as much content as possible as quickly as possible. It’s true that having more content gives your readers more opportunities to interact with your brand, and search engines more pages to index, but if your content doesn’t provide significant value to your readers, all that content could actually be doing more harm than good. Instead, it’s better to funnel your resources and focus on a handful of important, landmark pieces, rather than dozens of “meh” entries.
   3.  Make content production leaner. Reduce what you’re paying for your content marketing campaign by making your production process leaner. You can do this by working with specialists capable of producing the best content for the lowest possible expenditure, by cleaning up the collaborative processes you have in place throughout your organization, or by implementing more content marketing automation tools that spare you manual efforts.
   4. Focus on evergreen content. “Evergreen” content refers to any piece of content that has the potential to remain relevant indefinitely (as opposed to news-based content, or content that’s only relevant for a brief amount of time). Evergreen content will pay off consistently for a longer period of time, ultimately returning a higher profit on your investment.
   5. Exploit free distribution opportunities. Your content can only impact the people who have the chance to see it, but spending money on advertisements and promotions will increase your total costs, jeopardizing your ROI. Instead, spend time distributing your content on free platforms, like social media channels. These will give an instant boost to every piece of content you create—and won’t cost you an extra dime.

With these strategies, one of the highest-ROI marketing strategies available gets to climb even higher. Pay close attention to the kinds of returns you’re getting on your current efforts, and don’t be afraid to experiment if you think you can push the boundaries even further.

The more time you spend optimizing your campaign, the more value you’ll get out of every new piece of content you create.