How to Accurately Measure B2B Content Marketing ROI

There are three categories of KPIs you need to monitor based on their utility:

1. Content performance: Dwell time, drop-off rate, and conversions.

2. Operational efficiency: Review duration per content piece, number of review cycles before publication, and time taken to convert an idea into a tangible content piece.

3. Qualitative improvement: Brand alignment, monthly content volume, and month-on-month growth.

In the rest of the chapter, let’s dive into the utility aspect of the aforementioned metrics to learn how you can draw insights from them to improve the B2B content marketing process.

Content performance metrics

1. Dwell time

It is the duration a reader stays on a particular page. For articles, the average reading time should be 70% of the actual reading time.

To explain with an example, if a 1000-word article takes 5 minutes to read completely, then a desirable average reading time is 3.5 minutes.

The logic behind this is that most of your visitors will scroll through and click away. At the same time, it means that there were some readers who spent more than 5 minutes on that blog post.

The latter half of the insight signifies that your content is worth reading. It relays that you are delivering value to your audience, and your message helps them achieve a tangible goal.

With that, you now know how to boost it up — write useful stuff.

If your article talks about a legitimate problem that your audience faces, is easy to understand, and is actionable, then people will spend longer. This is one of the primary reasons why dwell time is one of my favorite metrics in this chapter.

A good article that discusses a trending problem and provides a practical solution will get read.

2. Drop-off rate

If a reader leaves your page without converting, it doesn’t mean that your content was useless or harder to understand. It means that your audience didn’t perceive your offerings as the best possible solution for the problem addressed.

You can fix that by improving the connection between the problem addresses or the value promised with your products and services. 

A lot of B2B brands introduce their offerings suddenly, which may turn a reader off. A better approach is to explain what an ideal solution would be (based on the peculiarities of your products or services) and then make the pitch.

Simultaneously, you must understand that drop-off is a part of the game. B2B purchase journeys are complex and go through multiple content pieces.

If a reader exits your website after reading a blog post, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything is wrong with it. They may revisit it again to become a lead or complete a purchase.

Another way to reduce drop-off rates is through purposeful internal linking to other educational content pieces. In some cases, CTA-style anchors, such as “Here’s how we helped a company save 25 hours a week through our software,” can be more effective in keeping a visitor engaged with your brand.

3. Conversion rate

Someone will open their wallet and give you money if they are convinced that your offerings are best for their needs. So, when a content piece has a higher conversion rate, it means the message can connect the problem and solution in the context of your brand properly.

When you reverse-engineer that logic, the way forward becomes intuitively clear. Make sure that the article’s flow is rational and logical while acknowledging the problems faced by the reader and recommending your products or services in a friendly way.

To be honest, there is no static formula or framework that naturally produces content that has high conversion rates on autopilot. The primary reason is that the parameters that ensure a content piece can persuade and sell are mostly qualitative.

For instance, I mentioned that the article’s flow should be rational and logical. These two terms, although easily understandable to most, are difficult to define tangibly.

Similarly, suggesting an offering in a friendly way can mean a zillion things. There are “different definitions of friendly” that depend on culture and context.

Rather than overcomplicating things, my advice forward would be this: spend years to learn the art and science of persuasive writing or hire an experienced writer.

Operational efficiency metrics

1. Review duration

A typical review cycle should take no longer than one hour. Blog posts, product-led articles, landing pages, case studies, etc., don’t matter. It takes 10-15 minutes to read and add comments. The rest of the time can be spent making edits.

If a content piece demands more than an hour to get reviewed, it signals that the process is flawed. Something’s wrong fundamentally. It could be that the outline lacked important details or that the stakeholders didn’t pay enough attention during the ideation phase.

When you approve a title that is related to your B2B company’s content marketing goals and validate an outline that comprehensively captures the points of discussion for every section, then your review cycle can be comfortably completed within an hour.

To fix this, spend more time discussing the nuts and bolts of the B2B content marketing campaign for your product or service. Talk about the purpose of each content piece and visualize it by creating rough drafts with ChatGPT.

2. Number of review cycles

It should take one review cycle, unless it’s the very first content piece. Initially, it might take time to figure things out in terms of the elements of the deliverable, but after that, it should be a straightforward process.

For the sake of sanity, give no more than two review cycles per content piece, then hit ‘Publish’ and move on.

Again, to optimize this metric, you need to revisit the foundational philosophies of your B2B marketing strategy.

3. Time from ideation to publication

An approved content idea or title should be published as a polished piece within N days. N is their position in the prioritization sequence.

When it takes longer than that, you have added more requirements or tasks in an ad hoc manner. This is normal as long as it happens occasionally.

Otherwise, you need to set clear goals and define B2B content prioritization parameters to minimize the time. If approved ideas sit for too long, they often end up getting archived.

Qualitative improvement

1. Brand alignment

Is the content piece closely related to your brand’s offerings?

Before AI search was a thing, plenty of big B2B SaaS companies, such as HubSpot, would publish completely random articles that weren’t remotely related to their core offering. The purpose was just to get some traffic.

Fortunately, after LLMs took over, queries around these topics were answered readily in AI-generated answers.

As a result, now more than ever, it’s critical to produce content around your brand. Simply churning out content for organic traffic will only lower the ROI of your B2B content marketing efforts.

The best way to ensure brand alignment is to examine the title and outline. The title will tell you whether it is an actual problem with your ICP. The outline will explain the context in which your brand is mentioned.

2. Content volume

There are plenty of B2B content marketing experts who emphasize optimizing existing content and focusing on quality. While there is some truth to this, relying on them will lead to disappointment. 

Let me explain why.

First, if the content didn’t drive enough value within a year, it was probably fundamentally flawed, or there were some technical issues with the web page. Either way, a content refresh isn’t going to help.

Additionally, if an article did perform well, you wouldn’t think of tweaking it, because why fix it if it ain’t broke?

Second, quality works when you publish at the right time. It depends on luck. Regardless of how amazing a content piece is, it won’t rank or be cited by LLMs forever. And you will only see returns if your target audience searches the relevant phrases or terms within the period it ranks.

Moreover, there is a lot of nuance in what content gets served to which audience based on the tool used, location, and previous context. AI-powered search tools, in particular, remember users’ past preferences to personalize their output, which may work against you, regardless of your article’s quality and content optimization acumen.

Therefore, you must ramp up the volume.

There are two key benefits here.

First, volume, in itself, is quality. It negates luck. If you post on LinkedIn every day, chances are you will catch the attention of your intended audience (provided you are connected to related people), regardless of how frequently they check the app.

With so much volume, it becomes a matter of when, not if.

Second, you gather more data to enhance your process and run more experiments. Every B2B content team has a bunch of ideas they want to execute, but fail short because they lack bandwidth. 

The solution here isn’t to be ruthless during task prioritization; it is to increase the bandwidth.

This will enable you to understand what ICP resonates with what messaging or which problem is more important for a particular buyer segment. On top of that, you can improve your B2B content quality automatically, because that’s what repetition does.

3. Iteration impact

After every B2B marketing campaign, you should find areas of improvement in content quality and the creative workflow. Then, at the end of the following campaign, you need to assess whether you actually made any progress.

Basically, with every passing month, your message should be more polished and aligned with your brand. Simultaneously, you should also produce more content pieces.

The iteration impact shows whether you are going in the right direction in terms of ICP targeted, positioning, and content volume. If things are off, you need to retrace your steps and undo some of the damage.

Here, it is pivotal to understand that you may have slow months in a row due to various reasons, such as economic conditions, market demand, and current trends. Hence, before you declare a set of iterations as wrong, look at external factors that are beyond your control but affect your niche.

Wrapping up: Google Analytics is overrated

You don’t need to track every conceivable metric because most of them don’t matter. Today, there’s a surplus of every kind of data simply because we can collect it.

It is better to focus more on metrics that drive action and enable you to look internally. On top of that, it’s also essential to include qualitative metrics, which guide principles and processes around B2B marketing content creation.

Speaking of principles, that’s what the next section of this book is about. 

See you there.

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Next Chapter: Coming Soon

Previous Chapter: Video Content Strategy for B2B SaaS Brands (AI and Featured)

Index (with Prologue): Content Marketing 101: For Lean and Agile Teams