How content drives revenue (and how to prove it)

Author: Rachel Lindteigen / Source: Marketing Land

In business, revenue is often the bottom line. Let’s face it, as marketers, if we’re not driving new customers and business isn’t growing, we’re not really doing our job. It’s up to us to drive business along with the sales team.

Something that intrigues me is how few people seem to understand that you can and do drive revenue with the content you create. I’ve had clients ask how you measure the success of a content marketing program, and it’s not a secret that we should keep guarded. We should be showing our clients exactly what we’re doing to drive revenue for them. By showing what we’re doing, we’re showing our worth and helping them understand what content is doing for their bottom line.

Whether you work for an agency and help clients or are in-house, you have someone you report to — be it a client, boss or board. And while within the industry, we feel that content is second nature, the reality is, it’s not in the broad picture. Many people outside of our niche industries don’t fully understand content marketing. Does your mom, dad, best friend or spouse really understand what you do for a living? Most don’t.

Driving revenue with content marketing

So how do you drive revenue with content marketing?

The most straightforward answer is found simply by looking inside your analytics account and finding out how much revenue each page or post has generated for your website. You can easily find out what your best-performing pages or posts are.

With some of my clients, we’ve found that inspirational content drove lots of revenue. For example, a major home goods retailer found great success with their blog posts that focused on design inspiration.

If we wrote a post that showed customers how to create a current season trend at home for less, we saw a big return. Customers liked being able to shop the blog post. We’d link the product URLs right in the blog post, and that allowed the customer to easily find the items. But it also allowed us to track the referring traffic to those URLs and see how much came from the blog post itself.

Behind-the-scenes or preview posts

Another great revenue-generating piece of content is often the behind-the-scenes or preview posts for a brand. We often find that the loyal customer base (i.e., the blog reader) wants to know what’s going on before the public. If we create a blog post that highlights a new product line and share a few sneak-peek images, we can start to create a bit of excitement over the launch.

If we want to track revenue on that post, we can go several routes — one would be to follow the referral traffic from the…

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