Content marketing offers a lot of promise and potential in terms of ROI. This essential subset of marketing is known for bringing in 3X as many leads compared to paid advertising. Plus, adopters of content marketing also experience 6X more conversions than companies that don't utilize this method.
But content marketing is notoriously complicated. You have different campaigns, channels, content formats, content creators, and promotion strategies that all need to work together. And you actually need to create business revenue from all of this content. When it comes to maximizing content marketing ROI, content operations can make or break your efforts.
StoryChief’s content marketing platform eliminates busywork and boosts your team's performance, leading to far greater returns. Here are seven ways you can get ROI from our platform:
7 steps to maximize content marketing ROI
1. Drive targeted SEO traffic
SEO boasts one of the highest average ROIs (2200%) of any marketing channel. That's why it usually makes up a good portion of any content marketing budget.
StoryChief’s editor has an SEO optimization tool that provides recommendations like key phrase density, using key phrases in subheadings, and adding alt attributes to images. So you can be sure that every piece of content you invest in will be SEO optimized, have a higher chance to rank, and be more likely to drive new customer acquisition.
By investing in SEO, our customer Meet Rodger was able to grow their online reach by 30%.
2. Centralize content, assets, and calendars
One study reports that knowledge workers spend 1.8 hours per day searching for information—hunting for the latest version of a certain document, looking through emails, and scrolling through old Slack messages. StoryChief can deliver content marketing ROI simply through the centralized nature of our platform. No more spreading things all over the place. You'll have all of these inside of one system:
- Content calendars
- Briefs
- Blog posts
- Podcast show notes
- Social media posts
- Employee advocacy
- Digital PR outreach management
- Content reviews
- Content approvals
- Multi-channel publishing
Centralization makes work a lot more convenient. The content calendar below, for example, provides immediate access to scheduled content (both complete and in progress).
“Our work is more streamlined and centralized thanks to StoryChief. We can manage our podcast content, social posts, and email workflows from one central platform.” - Patrick Laughlin, COO at Iprov
The less time you spend on searching for things, the more time you can spend on content that moves the needle. Compared to spreading work across a dozen tools, StoryChief can easily increase your content output by 200-400%.
3. Save time and money on marketing operations
StoryChief not only makes assets more accessible but also gives back tons of time to content marketing managers.
Time is money, so the more you save, the lower your expenses will be and the higher ROI you can achieve.
Here are some examples of ways that content marketing managers save time with StoryChief:
- Brief templates = Write briefs in half the time
- Content approvals = Review content using the same platform you use for publishing
- Multi-channel integrations = Publish content to multiple channels from one place in a single click
- Social media scheduling = Create and schedule content promotion in one seamless workflow
- Analytics = Put meaningful reports together in minutes, not hours
Better processes can translate to real content marketing ROI a few different ways. If you are paying a freelance content manager to run your content, you can pay them fewer hours per month. And if you have a full-time content manager on your team, that person can devote more time to strategy and creation (and less time on operations)—yielding better results.
Contrast that to paying high-value employees to copy and paste, and you can easily see how your ROI would be higher with a streamlined platform.
4. Launch content and get results faster
ROI and speed go hand in hand. There's no such thing as an organization getting great returns.
You need to create and launch content quickly so you can respond to audience and trends and measure engagement to adapt your strategy in an agile way.
We quickly touched on multi-channel publishing above, but it is worth mentioning all on its own.
Why? Because this publish button can deliver instant content marketing ROI.
With StoryChief, you can publish blog content to your website and other channels in just one click as soon as it is reviewed.
Compare that to teams that are writing in Google Docs, then communicating over Asana or Slack, then having to copy and paste content into their CMS, then setting up social media promotion in separate documents, Asana task cards, and social media scheduling platforms. 🥴
"We used to our copywriting in a very old school way. We used Google Docs, but we noticed that it was not really user-friendly. By using StoryChief, we probably save four hours for every campaign we launch." - Kasper Vancoppenolle, Partner & CMO at WinWinner
5. Streamline collaboration and quality
When you're investing in content and want to see returns on those investments, quality matters a lot.
You need to make sure that the content aligns with your brand guidelines, satisfies the campaign purpose, and is enjoyable for your audience to read.
A centralized platform can help improve collaboration between different teams involved in content creation and distribution, such as writers, designers, and social media managers. This can lead to more efficient workflows and higher-quality content. By centralizing your content marketing efforts, you can reduce duplication of effort and resources, which can help you save costs and maximize your content marketing ROI.
StoryChief can help you with all of this. The customizable brief template ensures that you remember to always include the information that you want writers to have. Meanwhile, our readability optimizer provides custom recommendations based on the content. And, you can use campaign tags and the content calendar to get a bird's eye view of how the content fits together.
Without StoryChief, content creators don't have as much guidance when it comes to creating quality content and might submit things that aren't up to par. Meanwhile, content managers will have to spend a lot more time optimizing and editing content.
The time savings and quality enhancements can improve ROI by lowering the time investment while improving results with customers.
6. Repurpose and continuously promote evergreen content
One of the best ways to get more ROI from your content marketing is to reuse, repurpose, and re-promote the content that you already have.
48% of marketers report not repurposing content enough, limiting their abilities to scale content production.
Content refers to anything still relevant and helpful to your audience for a year or more.
Because most content marketing teams are working on building a funnel that appeals to buyers at different stages, most content tends to be evergreen—rather than trend ornews-focusedd.
There’s a good chance that 80% or more of your content is evergreen. Pieces might just need a few small updates to be ready for re-release.
StoryChief makes it super easy to get the most out of your evergreen content. You can use the editor to make changes and update the content in your CMS in a single click.
You can also create promotional social media posts and schedule them for various networks, stretching the promotion for months in advance.
For each story, you will get a list view of all of the social media posts you have created to promote that story, so you can see how many times it's been promoted and how long it has been since the last time you shared it.
These features allow you to drive new leads with the same content, rather than only investing in new content. This way, you drive revenue and increase returns from investments you've already made.
Without StoryChief’s quick and easy evergreen content features, your team might struggle to make the time to repurpose and repromote old assets, meaning those past investments go to waste.
7. Enhanced measurement and reporting
It takes data to know whether or not you are achieving ROI through your content marketing efforts.
A centralized platform can provide you with more accurate and comprehensive data on the performance of your content marketing efforts. You'll automatically collect the insights you need to make data-driven decisions and optimize your strategy for better ROI.
With StoryChief, you can set up custom tags for campaigns, funnel stages, or buying awareness. Then you can track the success of those categories. For example, you might create a tag for top-of-funnel (TOFU) content. Then you would tag every story that is TOFU. In your reports, you can review how much traffic and engagement are being driven by your TOFU content. Set goals and track your progress.
You can also review top-performing content to know what works and adjust your strategy.
Content teams that aren't using StoryChief will spend hours cobbling together reports from half a dozen tools, or might neglect to create analytics reports, meaning they lack the insights they need to make better strategy decisions.
Learn more about how to get ROI from your content in our guide on B2B content marketing funnels.
Your path to maximizing Content Marketing ROI
As you use StoryChief, you'll want to use all of the strategies and features listed above eventually.
However most content teams should focus first on streamlining their operations.
Start by centralizing your content and collaborators so everyone can finish more work in less time. This way, you'll invest in content marketing—not busy work.
Results from your content? Manage a high-performing content marketing team with StoryChief.
