Putting numbers to your content marketing

How much impact can your content marketing really have? We’ve been putting our area of specialisation to the test, with some interesting results!

The test

Having recently rebranded, we ran some sponsored content on LinkedIn, with the objective of driving more traffic to our fancy new website. We took the opportunity to compare a brand ad with a blog post, both promoted with the same budget and both targeting the same audience.

Our recent test that pitted performance of a brand ad against content-focused format on LinkedIn yielded some interesting results.

The results

The cost per 1000 impressions was similar for both approaches, but the click through rate and the cost per click were substantially different… Take a guess at the star performer!

The blog (Is Social Search about to take over from Google) significantly outperformed the launch ad. The cost per click was also more favourable for the blog compared to the ad, driving 6 times the volume to the website for the same cost.

Not only did we see better value for money, we also saw an improvement in the quality of our leads. Those who interacted with the blog were a better match for the campaign’s objective based on their industry, job title and job function.

Matching strategy and objective

Does this mean that digital brand ads don’t have a place? Not at all. For the purposes of brand awareness and recognition, getting your brand out there is really important. But in this instance, where we wanted our target audience to visit our website, providing content that was relevant and appealing to them was a better bet.

If you’d like to maximise your advertising’s return on investment via social media, get in touch with us. We’ll happily have a chat about what you want to achieve and how we can help make that happen.