Why is it so easy for companies to spend $1M+ for paid media each and every month but spending $1M a year (or a lot less) for an organic strategy and content is tough?
Organic content has a stronger conversion rate than paid media.
Organic content creates a larger top of funnel than paid media.
Organic content improves the conversion rate of your paid media.
Organic content warms up your prospects creating a shorter path to conversion when they get to sales.
Organic content can retain and convert customers to evangelicals for your brand.
“But Walt, we can show ROI for paid media, right down to the second! You can’t do that with organic media.”
Absolutely we can show ROI for an organic content marketing strategy, although it won’t be measured by the second. It’ll be measured in days, weeks, quarters and years. And when executed correctly, the ROI grows exponentially year over year as traction and momentum grows with brand awareness and brand evangelicals.
Tracking ROi for organic media is easy, you just need to set yourself up for success.
Cookies (as long as we can use them) clearly show the customer journey along organic and paid touch points through any good analytics tool.
UTM codes, specific phone numbers for platforms, landing pages, website visits, social visits are all KPIs that can be tracked and followed from organic touch point to sales engagement.
Here’s a real-world case study.
In June of 2020 I was hired to build a brand new creative marketing agency from scratch for a manufacturing company. The stated goals from the owner were to build brand awareness and grow sales to increase market share in the industry. I predicted the company would start to see an ROI from the team in about 12 months due to the owner’s mandate to aggressively build the team from 0 to 11 in a matter of months along with the necessary infrastructure to the support the team.
I built the content marketing strategy around docu-reality, documentary style storytelling that would emphasis people and craftsmanship. The products were hand built by skilled craftspeople, which is rare in American manufacturing. The products were used primarily by blue collar, salt of the earth people. My initial strategy was to lean into “American Chopper” meets “Dirty Jobs” style storytelling to elevate the stories of these people, creating brand affinity from the audience. As a secondary strategy prong, we created education and edutainment content around product use and maintenance to provide added value after the sale.
We immediately started creating content with a skeleton team and had the full 11 member team hired and functional by the end of September. The most important hire of the entire team was the Social Media Director. Without a full time, dedicated social media director, you will not realize the full potential of an organic content marketing strategy.
Full episodes started loading onto YouTube, shorter and alternate segments along with graphics and photos started loaded onto other social platform, and articles and white papers were prepared for blogs and other digital print platforms.
In November we tracked the performance of our audience growth to date:
You can see these are not ‘earth shattering numbers.’ We didn’t add 1 million viewers overnight or even after 5 months, nor was that our intent. Our intent was to build a community of fanatics who engaged with our brand, who purchased our brand and who evangelized our brand to their network. Going after vanity metrics of followers accomplishes nothing if all they do is scroll and click hearts. Your organic content strategy HAS to be focused on the customer journey from discover to conversion as the end goal. The content is there for brand awareness and to build trust in the brand. We added quality followers in just 5 months.
The most impressive stat from our Traffic chart was the YouTube Watch Time. Remember the team was not at full strength until September, but by November we had increased the YouTube Watch Time by over 2000% from the previous year. Using a unique influencer collaboration strategy, we grew our audience exponentially on our own channels and that audience was watching our content.
Audience growth meant that our content marketing strategy was engaging a new audience with our brand, elevating brand awareness. Now it was time to take a look at the KPIs that truly matter, the leads.
As suggested earlier in this article, we set up a unique phone number for each social platform, ensuring that every piece of content on each platform displayed its own phone number. We set up UTM codes and landing pages, some with quote forms that had to be filled out by the prospect. We tracked social inquiries with a goal to answer each inquiry within 24 hours.
We had 3 ‘warm lead’ KPIs because they required the customer to initiate action. A phone call, fill out a form or make an inquiry via a social channel. The fourth KPI, ‘click throughs’ are considered ‘cool’ because clicking a link means they’re looking for more information, not necessarily ready to take action. Note that we only started tracking social inquiries at the end of September when we installed Sprout Social.
At the time, the company did not have an automated CRM yet. Sales was all paper and spreadsheets so we could not automatically track the phone numbers, UTMs, Cookies or other codes from touchpoint to sale. We could see that the customer made it to the sales team from one of our touch points, and honestly that was the completion of the first part of our job. Get the prospect warmed up and in the hands of sales so it’s a much easier conversion for the sales team.
Since we had no automated system to provide data on sales won through organic touch points, I ran estimates based on only 1% or 2% of all organic leads converting to a sale. Our products ranged from $3500 to $80,000 and I chose $10,000 as a good median sales price after consultation with our sales team.
If 1% of those 22,433 leads converted to a $10,000 sale, that would be $2.4M in new sales.
If 2% of those leads converted to a $10,000 sale, that would be $4.8M in new sales.
Salaries for the Creative Agency: $262,520 for one year
Cost Per Lead; All Leads: $11.70
Cost Per Warm Lead; Phone, Quote Form, Social Inquiries: $91
But wait! There’s More!
Remember I was hired in June and the team was not fully assembled until the end of September. We ran our ROI calculations through the end of November, just three months into the full tenure of the team. So the salary number has to be adjusted so for the purposes of calculating the ROI. This time we’ll just run the salaries for September, October and November..
Salaries for the Creative Agency Sept, Oct, Nov: $65,630
Cost Per Lead; All Leads: $2.92
Cost Per Warm Lead; Phone, Quote Form, Social Inquiries: $22.81
$22.81 Cost Per Warm Lead for an estimated median purchase price of $10,000. I’m not a math genius, but that’s seems like a really good ROI on the organic content marketing strategy. And this was just three months into the strategy.
Throwing money at paid media is easy, just keep feeding those automated systems sending lots of money to those apps and platforms. Then deliver automated reports on all that 'engagement' to prove your worth.
Spending a little money (much less than $1M/month) to elevate and strengthen your organic brand story through a content marketing strategy and organic content should be just as easy. And more cost effective.
You just need to set yourself up for success with good KPIs to show your ROI. UTM Codes, specific phone numbers, landing pages, social inquiries are the places to start. Good luck!
#marketing #marketingstrategy #contentmarketing #storytelling #creativedirection