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Content as Marketing - the return on investment argument

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Subject:  Content as Marketing - the return on investment argument Ashley Friedlein - Favourite
Author:   Ashley :   view profile | all posts by this author | add to favourites
Date:   13:27:53 7 November 2005
 
We've recently been doing our budgets for next year, including our online marketing spend. This includes the usual suspects (e-mail, search, affiliate, online PR etc.). 

However, as we've analysed our performance for this year, and are looking at where best to invest for next year, we're realising that actually we might get more 'bang for our buck' by investing in further quality content rather than 'marketing' per se.

For most forms of online marketing you'll typically be looking at CPM, CPC or CPA type financial models. Ideally, you'll track these through to actual customers so you also get more of a feel for quality (e.g. lifetime value) of customers delivered by each type of marketing activity. In fact, if you're doing your tracking properly it doesn't really make any difference whether you're looking CPM vs. CPC vs. CPA and so on - they're just slightly different mathmetical takes on the same thing.

We're finding that rather than investing £X in, say, paid search marketing, we can invest that same amount in content, and related PR (online and offline), and generate a higher ROI (lower CPC, lower CPA, better conversions etc.). Not only that but, in doing so, we have generated a futher intellectual property asset, with organic links that continue to deliver value. 

A lot of companies talk about "link building strategies" where they go out (or pay an agency to do so) and ask people to link to them to help them with their natural search rankings. But why should they link to you? And why go to the effort of doing all this research and asking? If you create some great content and do a bit of PR then the links will come to you.

My point is this - how many online marketing or e-commerce managers out there are looking at content as potentially their best form of marketing? 

Any experiences / thoughts you can add?

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com

 
 
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