Defining Content Marketing's Return

Once, he continues, success was measured in terms of sales lift, customer retention and other mainstream metrics, reflecting an overall return on marketing budget investment. In content marketing, however, Pulizzi says the important measurement is the return on objective, or ROO.

“While the traditional measurements are still important, you will need to consider other methods to track and measure your content’s reach, sentiment, voice and lead conversions,”  he explains.⁴ You have to create returns before you measure them, of course, and as even a powerhouse platform like Facebook shows—500 million members, and still searching for a money strategy—monetizing content is yet another challenging part of the equation.

An answer with a twist comes from New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson, whose content savvy led him to invest in microblogging phenom Twitter. While principally about online news content, his concept of “monetize the audience, not the content”⁵ fundamentally describes the power of the Internet to unlock different revenue models from content through audience interaction and engagement. Branded content marketers have figured this out too, and by using mobile, social and digital media, they are creatively harnessing content to impact tangible and intangible bottom-line results.

App-titude Test

In its outlook for 2010, leading industry researcher IDC forecasts “explosive” growth in the mobility market. Predicting more than a billion mobile devices accessing the Internet by the end of 2010, IDC estimates a tripling of iPhone apps to 300,000 and development of apps for the Google Android platform increasing by a factor of five or more.⁶

Brands are helping to transform—and profit from—the mobility market. A prime “audience- monetizer” is Kraft Foods’ app for the iPhone, iFood Assistant, a paragon of pocket utility and platform integration. Providing more than 7,000 recipes, the 99-cent app generates additional revenue from Kraft ads and includes features like cooking tips and a GPS-enabled store locator. The food marketer, whose well-integrated custom content strategy includes a print magazine with an online edition, will not reveal revenues or number of downloads—Brandweek quotes “sources” who put the latter in the seven-figure range⁷—but in the world of app metrics, the key measurement is engagement. “We think 100 engaged consumers are much more important than 1,000 downloads,” said Ed Kaczmarek, Kraft Foods’ director of Innovation, Consumer Experiences, in an interview.⁸