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eMarketing Consultant at eMarketingHut.com
22 October 2007 13:13pm
What would you guys recommend as the best approach for justify/quantify the need for a full time content editor possition within our team?
I know in terms of the web "content is king" and that by not having dedicated resource(s) to this simply means that we are missing out on a huge opportunity. And this is exactly why we are putting in a request for this role to be fullfilled.
However, I'd like to tackle this fully armoured with the appropriate facts and figures so that I can make my case watertight.
Any thoughts on this? How can I justify the ROI on this new role? How much traffic could this potentially bring us? How much revenue are we currently missing out on by not having someone in this role?
Your advise will be much appreciated,
Thank you all, Marco.
CTO at The Streaming Monkey
23 October 2007 07:30am
Content is most definitely king. The best way to justify it quickly is:
Informative content brings users back
Search engine rankings benefit from good content
Most important: Good content increases your conversion ratio which increases your bottom line.
Head of Online at Woolworths Liquor
23 October 2007 09:05am
Marco,
If you're looking for a ROI calculation, I'd recommend the following:
- Look at your keyword/keyphrase opportunity in Trellian (Keyword Discovery) to get volumes. Say your indistry has a target of 500K searches per month in the UK
-Based on how competitive your market is, you can take a stab at what % of that search you're going to get on your site. Remember if your Content is not written for SEO & Customer Experience and coded accordingly, it will not get you the traffic.
- Calculate that with your current site conversion & time it by the average revenue per customer/value
- Depending on when your Finance team deems to be profitable (usually 18months), you'll have an ROI for the salary of the Content person
But your business case should also have the unquantifiable benefits:
- Natural tends to convert better than PPC
- It's a strategic decision as oposed to a tactical.
There's so many ways you can take this but this is what works for us.
Hope this helps,
Faye
Chief Operating Officer at Livebookings Network
24 October 2007 20:55pm
It depends on what kind of business you're running Marco. Is it transaction based, media revenue based, lead generation, or a combination of the above?
If it's transaction based and your content relates to your products, it's relatively easy to test. Put a full set of content on a sample product set and using A/B testing point a bucket of users at the content rich version and the other bucket at the content poor version. Measure conversion and consider the difference between the two. Assuming this is positive, scale this to your full product range in a model applying the new conversion metrics. If you don't have the infrastructure to run an A/B test using web analytics tools, you can always run a dual campaign on PPC.
If it's media based, you need page impressions. This is where Faye's method (previous post) works. Content rich pages lead to new SEO visits, lead to more page impressions. This one is more difficult to test because getting a measurable result on a test set of SEO pages can take months. On this model you'll need to make some assumptions about the uplift.
Don't necessarily assume that content is king. It's only king if the cost of producing it is cheaper than the benefits gained.
Finally - consider that the cheapest content may well be user generated content. Here you maybe need to pay for moderation, but the costing would be very different to editorial content.
David