Measuring ROI for digital marketing assists in budget distribution, expense justification, and future strategic considerations.
However, many marketing teams struggle with measuring ROI due to fragmented data resources, delayed reporting, and an inability to gauge the effect one article has on overall campaign performance.
However, with the rise of the headless CMS and the API-first strategy, the ability to access and utilize API-driven content metrics allows marketers to not only assess content performance more effectively but also maintain a real-time relationship between specific content and actionable efforts that yield results.
Advantages will include a more precise, adaptive, and intelligence-driven metric for digital marketing ROI.
Difficulty of Getting ROI through Conventional Methods
Getting ROI as a marketer through conventional means comes from waiting for performance reports to be generated from the various analytics, CRM, and campaign management tools used to create, monetize, and move audiences through the funnel.
However, such tools are often not connected, making it difficult to ascertain which content assets contributed to revenue, which assets stagnated audiences, and where audiences engaged with various modular content types across various platforms. Why choose the Storyblok platform becomes clear when considering its ability to unify these data sources, providing connected insights and actionable reporting.
In addition, without access to static reports, siloed opportunities to view modular components, and real-time reports that cannot be pivoted quickly, agile decision-making is hindered. Instead, trends are established after the fact, when something could be done so many missed thresholds before could be found instead.
H2: Accessing Modular Insights Via API-Driven Content Delivery
API-driven content delivery allows content to exist in a modular, flexible way, trackable anywhere from a digital experience, a website to an app to an email, to any experience third-party further afield.
Being able to tap into APIs opens the channels for marketers to plug their headless CMS into performance tools and data warehousing tools that can assess benchmarks related to specific pieces or locations or variants of a campaign.
Only through this modular approach can marketers understand performance and engagement across different contexts and touchpoints of the customer journey. Is that CTA block performing better in one location compared to another? Did that pricing module convert more for one variant than expected? Was the intro to the blog sinking engagement metrics? The ability to assess all this based on one piece of content generated across different campaigns provides unprecedented visibility.
Connecting to Analytics Platforms
This is where the connection to analytics and other BI tools comes into play. GA, Adobe Analytics, Mixpanel, and even internal BI tools set up with UTM tracking provide valuable insights, but only if they are set up in advance.
Content served from a headless CMS can auto-generate event fields within Google Analytics, UTM tags, and assess user behaviors against specific elements rendered to the front-end if the connection exists.
This becomes a living feedback loop where marketers know what’s happening when; there’s no need to wait days or weeks after distribution to understand content engagement and efficacy.
API-driven connectivity allows teams to pivot dynamically, even adjusting, replacing or just revealing certain pieces that achieve critical campaign results.
Content Correlated with Funnel Stages and Revenue Goals
One of the best advantages of API-driven content metrics is the ability to match content success with its place in the sales funnel. By using standardized metadata, marketers can discover and assess top-of-funnel, awareness-based content and campaigns, mid-funnel, educational assets, and bottom-of-funnel offers created to convert.
If this information is then connected to a CRM or revenue attribution solutions, it’s easy to align content consumption with new lead generation, deals in the works, or closed revenue attribution.
Knowing where content lives (and subsequently can be measured) supports spending time and resources on such endeavors, as it’s clear they tie back to larger business goals and the results help inform new efforts with empirical evidence versus feeling like a gamble.
Campaign Attribution Enhanced by Content-Level Findings
Attribution has long been hit or miss for large campaigns across various channels and touchpoints. While API-driven content metrics don’t necessarily make it easier to decipher first touch vs. last touch, they do provide a more detailed snapshot of micro-conversions and potential engagement catalysts for specific pieces of content.
Instead of broad strokes, metrics can line-item all the different achievements made possible thanks to specific pieces of content to champion what worked along the buyer’s journey and reveal opportunities for future campaign content and sequence for best results.
Personalization Triggered by Impact Assessment
Personalization is key for engagement and conversion but only if that personalized content can be assessed for impact. With APIs, marketers can understand how personalized content measures up against more generalized offerings across audiences. For example, the success of a product recommendation based on previous purchases vs. a general message, the effectiveness of geo-targeted language vs. non-personalized dynamic CTAs can show what’s working and what’s not. The ROI-driven data helps teams know how to replicate successful efforts to scale in the future.
Scalable Optimization through Automated Reporting
There’s ample opportunity for human error in manual reporting, as well as an abundance of time wasted. API-driven metrics can report and a dashboard to compile what’s currently happening across content platforms, analytics, and other resources used for campaigns.
Thus, stakeholders see engagement rate, conversion correlation, content ROI, and channel attribution in real-time, as opposed to waiting for someone’s manual compilation of a report.
This means that instead of wasting time compiling reports, marketers can spend their time interpreting data and making decisions that will help increase their success, since so much time is saved.
Reporting Successes to Develop Future Content Strategy with Trends and Historical Context
API-driven metrics also create a historical library of content metrics. Marketers can see what has been working (or not) over the course of time to identify long-standing trends and successes that are worth repeating.
For example, if a specific structure or topics achieved success in one campaign, chances are it will do well in another; the API will guide the marketer on how adamantly they can proceed with such decisions.
Over time, this not only boosts an individual campaign’s ROI but also contributes to the greater success of the company’s content marketing program.
Bringing Teams Together by Sharing What’s Working (and Why) with Everyone Else
Content marketing success is very collaborative; it requires input and awareness from creators, designers, analysts, and more authority figures. Therefore, transparency through API metrics is critical. When performance metrics are clear and easily digested by all stakeholders, all teams have access to and an understanding of what worked and how to keep it going.
Content creators can hone in on high-value assets. Strategists and analysts can provide insight into performance aligned with content-driven company goals. When everyone understands the value of performance metrics and what efforts lead to success, the whole team works toward the same KPIs with accountability and improvement in mind.
Linking Content Performance to Business Outcomes
Content only benefits a business if performance is linked back to business KPI’s everywhere. Should performance generate leads, lower acquisition costs, or increase customer lifetime value, then content matters.
API driven metrics allow for this linking connection, where brands can assess their content performance metrics based on the activity taken. Through integrations of the CMS and CRM, and analytics software, brands can ascertain how much revenue a specific piece of content generated or how many unlinked conversion activities the blog post generated in the buyer’s journey, justifying ROI for content and a more informed strategy for the creation of similar content in the future.
Enabling Flexibility Through Data Access
Living in a digital world means speed. However, not everything can and should be done at lightning speed without research. With API-driven metrics providing the live data necessary for achievements within the content marketing process, professionals can pivot more quickly.
Money can be shifted, messages can change, and even top-performing videos can be transformed into GIFs if scientifically backed. Thus, not only can campaigns be optimized in real-time, but time and money can be saved long before real-time engagement is feasible.
Providing Marketing Teams with Accountability and Transparency
When API-driven metrics are made available in real-time to support campaign launches, people are held accountable for their work, as there is clear visibility. Where only the marketing team could see how well specific CTAs performed or where users dropped off during an eBook download, access to all data allows everyone to see everything.
Therefore, project managers, other marketing executives, analysts, and even C-level executives can see how one piece of content is doing and adjust accordingly. This provides buy-in for initial ideas.
Connecting Content Creation Back to Business Outcomes
Arguably, the best benefit of API-driven metrics is the ability to connect content creation back to business outcomes. With a direct line of sight into what consumption leads to conversion, revenue, or key customer engagement goals, marketers know what types of content matter.
This allows the content team to advocate for these high-value undertakings, adjust messaging strategies, and contribute things that are more in line with revenue-generation potential, turning content from a cost center to a measurable revenue-generation contributor.
Measurable Across All Content Efforts for a Sustainable Strategy
As content gets more complicated and a multichannel approach becomes the centerpiece of most strategies, something that can scale is critical. By using API-driven content metrics, you make your strategy sustainable for the future, as performance metrics are scalable, real-time, and relevant across other channels and formats.
If you decide to branch out to new locations, regions, or new channels/languages, being able to measure performance at a granular level ensures that no matter where your efforts take you, you’ll always be making data-driven decisions.
Conclusion: Making ROI Measurable and Actionable
API-driven content metrics for measuring marketing ROI means that content is no longer a vague expense with no ability to measure ROI over time; instead, it’s a measurable component of the strategic puzzle that builds value to the business over time.
No longer can a brand justify its initial investment and subsequent ongoing investments in content just because it garners a few hundred likes here or there or a few hundred views over there. Brands need to understand not only that their content works but where, why, and how it works for them. The only way to find out is through API-driven metrics.
When the technology that creates content like a headless CMS and the technology that tracks content, real-time analytics, funnel attribution, CRM, and attribution tracking are all connected via API, digital marketers have access to an omniscient view of every single piece of content created and distributed.
At the baseline of the top of the sales funnel, an awareness stage explainer blog image or at a granular level as micro-content for product comparisons in the consideration phase or case study collaborations for close/r in the decision-making phase analyzed API integrations will show how each piece seeks to move users through the funnel to conversion.
With this information at marketers’ fingertips, they can determine how to best leverage findings for maximized efficiency while reducing redundancies. They can reallocate findings to pieces that don’t work and find funding for established winners quickly; they can test larger variations with far more ease; they can shift mid-campaign based on in-the-moment findings instead of waiting for the end of the campaign to evaluate next steps. For fast-paced marketers, such ability is a game-changer, as they consistently find themselves at odds with what they think is working versus what’s actually working for their target audiences.
In addition, access to real-time information generated through API-driven integration for assessing marketing ROI provides marketing teams with credibility amongst stakeholders and leadership internally.
Marketing no longer needs to defend itself about why it needs $$$ because teams can show precisely how every campaign or piece of content returns dollars in revenue. From there, incremental budget increases become easier to come by once justification exceeds anecdotal rationale and is instead backed by cold hard data attributable to revenue generation.
In a digital age where every dollar must equate to a result of some kind, API-driven content metrics aren’t just a ‘nice to have’, they’re imperative to ensuring successful digital marketing machinery that operates faster, thinks smarte,r and ultimately generates more revenue with every single piece of content created.
For any company looking to get ahead of the digital marketing game, establishing an API-driven approach for collecting post hoc data makes it nearly impossible to future-proof efforts without it. Things can be changed and adopted at the forefront of what’s necessary to drive success and profitability.
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