John Pring, director of inbound marketing and content creation at Designbysoap, advises on the actions required to measure ROI from your infographic
Content marketing in all its forms is notoriously difficult to measure in terms of ROI; often coming down to a question of semantics. Examining and assessing ROI will differ dramatically from person to person, depending on the goals of the content development and the business culture you are working in.
In fact, your definition of ROI in the context of infographics will dramatically alter how you approach the measurement of business performance.
In most instances ROI is being defined as the gain from an investment minus the total cost. But when you’re unable to clearly measure business gains through a purely fiscal lens, this calculation becomes infinitely more difficult.
Approach to measurement
In order to judge the ROI of an infographic effectively, you need to decide how you are going to measure success, i.e. which metrics you will consider in order to judge the outcome of your campaign.
Generally speaking, there are two sides to the debate when it comes to measuring infographic ROI. Those who are more exposed to the content marketing industry often advocate the priority of producing great content and engaging with their audience, and as such are less concerned with measuring performance and ROI.
On the other side are those who are far more used to dealing with marketing initiatives purely from a financial point-of-view; they will want to know exactly how content performs, putting a figure on each metric and dismissing anything seen as intangible or difficult to measure.
One can understand the thinking behind both approaches to ROI; trying to highlight a direct correlation between your content and financial returns is perhaps missing the point (given the number and prominence of intangible benefits and the relative difficulty of assigning a financial value to tangible metrics), but it’s only natural to use the relationship between spent resources and the performance of your marketing initiatives – particularly when those resources need to be justified to other team members. Perhaps the most suitable approach to infographic ROI is somewhere in the middle.
Setting goals beforehand
Before discussing the metrics you can look at to help judge your ROI, it’s worth covering the importance of setting your goals for the campaign before you publish and promote your infographic.
You need to decide what you’re looking to achieve and use these metrics to judge how successful your campaign has been. For example, are you looking to increase social media engagement, improve search engine rankings or increase inbound links to your website?
By setting achievable goals before the start of your campaign, you can not only more effectively assess how beneficial
your marketing initiative has been, but it can also inform the concept and medium of your infographic.
Another benefit of deciding on the aims of your campaign before you begin is that you’re clear on what constitutes a successful campaign. If you know your main aim is inbound links and you achieve hundreds of otherwise unachievable links as a direct result of your campaign, you can more easily claim the campaign to be a success if you achieve pre-determined goals.
Tangible metrics
Let’s look at the tangible metrics you can use to effectively judge engagement levels and ROI. These metrics are clear, measurable and their benefits easy to communicate:
• Inbound metrics (number of inbound links).
• Page views and overall website traffic.
• Search visibility (number of indexed pages, overall organic traffic, number of phrases sending visits).
• Search engine rankings.
• Engagement (bounce rate, average time on site, comments, subscribers, social followers, social shares).
Intangible metrics
In addition to the measurable, data-driven metrics above, there are a number of intangible benefits to producing an infographic that are much harder to track. However, just because they’re hard to measure doesn’t mean they’re not providing genuine value to your brand and marketing initiatives. Here are the most common intangible metrics associated with producing an infographic:
• Influencer engagement.
• Brand awareness.
• Credibility.
• Brand experience.
• Communication, learning and decision making.
It’s clear data visualisation and bespoke infographics offer a range of benefits to brands. Hopefully this article has given you the tools you need to evaluate the success (or failure) of your infographic campaigns and better assess and communicate the return on investment gained from your content-based marketing initiative.
