How do you measure a piece of content’s success? Attach it to some outcomes that enable your visitors to convert into leads.
For example, if you’d like your latest case study to generate 100 new leads, create a series of related blog posts and include them in targeted emails to contacts who might find it interesting. Within your case study, blog posts and emails, include clear and enticing CTAs that state the next step in achieving similar results, and encourage contacts to take that desired action.
A great way to approach measuring and calculating content marketing ROI is to create a campaign around a piece of content. For each piece, you might have one or more email campaigns, paid media on search and social, calls to action on your website and shared blog posts via earned media.
For each channel, create unique landing page URLs so that you can track them independently, but also aggregate them within a campaign summary. Now, as you promote the campaign, measure impressions, click-throughs and conversions from each channel. This gives you both attribution metrics as well as an overall view of campaign effectiveness. Fold in the cost of each part of the overall campaign and the number and lifetime value of the customers it generates, and you have a realistic appraisal of ROI.