So, you’ve just signed raraPR to manage your public relations by way of content and digital marketing. Or you’re still thinking about it and you want to know…
- How much will a social media and content marketing campaign cost?
- What sort of value will a social media and content marketing campaign return?
- How long will it take to see results from your Social Media And Content Marketing campaign?
Let’s clarify that ultimately the results you want are:
- Increased brand awareness and connectivity with your target audience.
- A cost-effective way to share your brand-story with the world and an alternative to expensive and one-off advertising rates.
- Increased traffic to your website followed by an increase in new business leads followed by new business.
If you’re rolling with best practices as recommended by raraPR, you’ll start to see results in six months. If however, your budget doesn’t stretch to the Royale-with-Cheese distance and output needs to be adjusted to fit within the budget, then of course initial results will take longer. Likewise, content marketing is not something you start and then stop. It should be an on-going, evolution that moves at the same beat as your business for many moons to come.
This doesn’t mean on-going third party/PR or digital agency costs. It just means that it’s something you need to continually nurture and invest time into which can be managed in-house or collaboratively with raraPR, post campaign.
Measurement
Many businesses initially set-out to measure the effectiveness of a social media or blog campaign based on new inquiries at the end of the campaign period.
I would highly recommend however, that a content marketing campaign effectiveness is measured by a combination of web traffic flow, brand engagement behaviours as well as new inquiries, not inquiries alone.
While an increase in enquiries through the site is a great form of measurement, content marketing via a blog or social media is actually more about driving new and relevant traffic to your website where it’s up to you to harness that traffic and turn it into a sale once they’re there.
Great marketers are no longer using ROI revenue per customer-metrics as a form of measurement. Yet despite this, businesses doing marketing well, expect to devote about 9% of their budgets to social media and content marketing spend. It’s been reported that this will grow to 16% by 2018.
Benefits You Can Expect from a 6-Month Campaign
- Building words around your brand in the online space improves your SEO (your site will rank higher via Google).
- Content is ‘evergreen’ which means, you’ll receive solid traffic from posts placed years ago. The longer the blog posts are there, the more time they have to collect traffic/inquiries. They don’t disappear. It doesn’t have to be an on-going cost. (raraPR has received over 2000 visitors from this blog post and probably more by the time you click on it here). In comparison to paid SEO/Google ad-word plans and directory listings it doesn’t have to be an on-going cost; where as soon as you stop paying the benefits stop. For one half-page ad in a national glossy magazine, the average advertising-rate is around $12k. The ad will appear once, in print and then BAM it’s gone. Online content within your website will continue to drive traffic and inquiries for many years to come. Pay less than this in comparison for long-term benefits.
- The higher the credibility of the content around your brand, the higher the page will rank.
- Blog content within your site will increase web traffic, brand awareness and therefore enquiries and new business will flow from there.
- The more online content you develop around your brand, the bigger your online footprint becomes and therefore the more easily you can be found.
- A social media/content marketing campaign with raraPR will provide you with lots of guidance on content marketing and blog management for future submissions which can be managed collaboratively with raraPR or in-house by you and your team.
- In the short-term, the best way to measure the effectiveness of the blog campaign is through Google Analytics/web traffic. In the medium to long term it’s via inquiries, new business and ultimately business profit.
Marketing and Public Relations should be seen as an inherent cost of doing business. A necessity no less important than the company email system and similarly to emails should be seen as a business expense and not an investment/asset.
Yes a content marketing campaign will generate more business, otherwise we wouldn’t do it or believe in it. The more efficient your PR and marketing is, the more business you create. It should however be measured against business profits and not short-term ROI comparisons which are unrealistic and have very little meaning to long-term business growth.
Words by Jade Roberts, raraPR.
