The Ultimate Guide to Measuring B2B SaaS Content Marketing ROI

You’re writing blogs, guides, and eBooks, you mastered the art of podcasts, and you hosted a few webinars, but you still don’t know how to measure the B2B SaaS content marketing ROI (return of investment) for your company. Are you sure these efforts are paying off? Do you understand the basics of SaaS ROI, or do you just let things go with the flow without a pre-defined strategy? 

It’s time to change that now.

Content marketing is a very powerful tool, especially in the realm of B2B SaaS companies. But it’s worth nothing if you don’t set key performance indicators or SaaS metrics to measure the performance. Running a successful content marketing strategy is an investment, and you must be sure it pays off. Surely, the ROI, or return on investment, is an indicator of how much revenue your content marketing efforts are generating. 

In general, you can calculate ROI this way:

Content marketing ROI = (Return on investment – Investment) / Investment * 100

But let’s understand things better.

Why Measure B2B SaaS Content Marketing ROI?

Content marketing is a serious step in the overall strategy, so it’s important to know how to estimate if it was successful or not. In general, ROI is the financial benefits generated from content marketing efforts. 

Based on the formula, if you spend $1,000 on content marketing every month and generate $5,000 in revenue, following the simple formula above, your content marketing ROI would be (5,000 – 1,000) / 1,000 * 100 = 400%.

But why do all these things?

When measuring the content marketing SaaS ROI, you can:

• Understand how much your content marketing efforts are contributing to the revenue
• Identify what content works best for your company
• Easily justify the expenses and relocate resources if needed
• Improve the overall content strategy

Remember, establishing a content marketing strategy is not a one-time effort. It requires measuring, estimations, and improvements in order to make the whole thing worth the investment.

What Metrics Help You Measure Content Marketing ROI for B2B SaaS?

There are a few different factors that contribute to the overall SaaS marketing ROI, including content marketing efforts. 

The best approach depends on your specific goals and objectives. Still, in order to effectively measure the B2B content marketing ROI, you need to pay attention to:

• Website Traffic – One of the most basic ways to measure the ROI of your content marketing. You can use Google Analytics to see how many visitors your website is getting from organic search, social media, and other sources.
• Track Leads and Sales – Or how many high-quality leads and sales are coming from your content. You can leverage marketing tools and analyze the data after the campaign.
• Track Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) – The total amount of revenue that a customer is expected to generate over their lifetime. 
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – The cost of acquiring a new customer and how the content marketing affected this process.
• Social Media Traffic – The number of visitors to your website from social media platforms.

Additionally, you can define more metrics depending on what your SaaS product is for. 

For example, if you sell a project management product, you surely need additional metrics, like the number of free trials generated from your content, the total number of sign-ups, how long the generated customers are using the product, the number of renewals after the trial, as well as the number of customers who decided to buy a more advanced pricing package of your product. 

But it doesn’t stop there. 

The additional metrics and KPIs depend on the content type. So, if you completely rely on blog posts on your websites, you need to consider tracking these metrics and KPIs:

• Website traffic vs unique visitors
• New vs returning customers
• Time spent on the site
• Time spent on a page
• Bounce rate
• Page views, in general
• Page views per visit

On the other hand, for the videos, you will have to track:

• Number of views per platform
• Total number of views across all platforms
• Average view duration per video
• Average view duration for all videos in a given period
• Subscribers/followers per channel
• Number of shares

As you suppose, email metrics and KPIs will be much different:

• Open rate
• Opt-out rate
• CTR – Click-through Rate
• Delivery rate
• Subscribers
• Conversions
• Churn rate

The more content types you include in your content strategy, the more relevant metrics you’ll need to track. Additionally, you can measure social media activities, podcast attendants, and even PPC campaigns. So, if we get back to the example of project management tool, you have a few options:

• Promoting it through engaging content on your website
• Start an email campaign to educate the prospects
• Record a demo video to show how the product works
• Incorporate real testimonials from existing clients
• Launch a downloadable template on tracking the project progress

And, surely, set metrics and KPIs based on that. Keep in mind that measuring ROI in B2B SaaS content marketing can’t be generally defined since every product is unique, with different features, different target audiences, and various benefits as a result of usage.

Tools for Measuring B2B SaaS Content Marketing ROI

While the absolute choice of tools to use is up to you, we can recommend a few tool types you should consider using. 

First, Google Analytics will help you get a nice insight into what’s happening on your website, how users behave, and what actions they take while present. Overall, Google Analytics is used to track web performance. 

Still, for the content marketing happening off of your website, you may need marketing automation software, like HubSpot or Marketo, and CRM, like Salesforce or similar, to monitor the customer journey and how the content affects each stage. Again, the tool choice is up to you at this point.

How to Maximize B2B SaaS Content Marketing Return of Investment?

Even when you have a solid SaaS ROI from the content marketing efforts, you can still try and maximize it: 

Create High-Quality Content for Your Target Audience

You can maximize the ROI from your content marketing activities if you know exactly who your target audience is. That way, you won’t spend time and resources trying to spread a message to those who aren’t currently interested in your product. 

You surely know that the content must be informative, engaging, and helpful. But also, you need to match it with the different stages of the SaaS buyer journey. 

But how?

In general, the information stage is when the prospect knows they have some pain point and looks for a solution on how to solve it. During this stage, you capture them through blog posts, knowledge resources, guides, social media posts, etc. 

During the consideration stage, when the prospect knows that there is some solution, you need to let them know yours is the right one. You can do that with engaging videos, tailored emails, eBooks, lead magnets, and useful guides. 

For the decision, they need to get all the available resources to finally decide, like demo videos, free trials, product comparisons, reviews, case studies, etc. 

Once you figure these things out, you know exactly who and how to target with your content marketing strategy for B2B SaaS. 

Data-Driven Content Creation

Data analysis is not the most exciting thing to do, but it surely gives you more inspiration and in-depth information on how to run the whole strategy.

Based on tracked data, you can identify what topics, content formats, and distribution channels resonate best with the target audience. 

It may also help in A/B testing so you can decide what works best and how to optimize your content for higher ROI. 

Promote Your Content

Make sure your target audience can find your content. If you are targeting industry professionals, they’re mostly on LinkedIn and X/Twitter, while the wider audience can be found on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. 

If you want a more narrowed promotion, you can choose the contacts from your email list or even the existing customers who are interested in renewing their subscription or increasing the paid plan. 

Track the Results

As we said, the whole point of ROI in content marketing for SaaS is tracking the metrics and key performance indicators so you can make adjustments as needed. 

These results will help you refine the content marketing strategy in many ways. For example, if you receive leads from your website landing pages, Facebook posts, and webinars, you can focus more on them and even exclude the channels that only squeeze out of your pocket.

Improving the ROI for SaaS content marketing will eventually result in more customers and also improve the loyalty of the existing ones. 

How to Set B2B SaaS Content Marketing Benchmarks?

Setting benchmarks for your SaaS content marketing show can help you with measuring the ROI and tracking the KPIs efficiently. 

In summary, you need to define the objectives, like what do you expect from your content marketing efforts. That may be more leads, more sales, more conversions, better brand awareness, or improved customer retention. 

Then, you must understand the pain points and behaviors of your target audience. Additionally, you can create a content strategy based on their preferences, i.e., do they prefer reading blog posts or watching videos? 

By researching your industry, you can learn more about the established standards and compare how you perform based on that. Sometimes, you’ll need to monitor the competitors and use them as a competitive benchmark, too. 

And most important, be realistic with your expectations. If you want to increase lead generation by 20% with content marketing, you should give yourself a realistic time to do that. If you want to increase the number of paying clients by 5%, set a realistic timeframe. 

Surely, benchmarks are not set in stone, and you can review and adjust them as your content marketing for SaaS shows the initial results. 

How to Measure SaaS Content Marketing ROI for Different Types of Content?

Even though we gave you basic instructions on how to measure ROI for different content types, we can narrow it down to this list:

Blog Posts

First, you need to measure traffic and engagement, like the number of visitors, page views, time on the page, social shares, and bounce rate. Then, the conversion rates will show how many leads you generate from blog posts, including the sign-ups, downloads, filling up contact forms, or clicking on a CTA. Ultimately, you can measure the revenue generated by the leads coming from the blog post. 

Whitepapers and eBooks

This one is pretty easy because the number of downloads shows there is interest in your long-form content. The next step is to spot how many leads came from these resources and, finally, how many converted into paying customers. 

Webinars

Webinars are more complex to track because there are many elements, like the number of registrations, the attendees, how they engage during the webinar, and whether they will initiate a discussion on the topic. 

After the webinar, you can monitor the leads from registration but also post-webinar conversions. 

Case Studies

Case studies are a great way to showcase experience, relevance, and authority in your field. Based on that, you can measure lead generation, conversion rates, and customer retention with upsell opportunities.

Video Content

We highly recommend measuring the views, likes, comments, and shares, as well as conversion rates, CTRs, and lead generation. Many consumers prefer video instead of text content, so it’s a great way to capture their attention and improve your B2B SaaS content marketing ROI.

Infographics

Infographics are a great way to visualize data, but they’re also engaging enough for the audience to share them, bring traffic to your website, generate leads, and even earn backlinks from relevant sources. 

Email Marketing

This one is simple because all you need to track are open rates, CTRs, conversions, and responses. Still, you need to effectively nurture these leads and navigate them through your SaaS buyer journey. 

Final Thoughts on ROI for B2B SaaS Content Marketing

Content marketing is a complex approach because you have to track the progress or decline through various channels through which you distribute your content. That’s why you must set appropriate benchmarks, metrics, and KPIs and navigate through this exciting journey easily. 

Remember, the content types you choose and distribution channels depend on who your target audience is and what are your SaaS product features and capacities. 

That’s why there are no one-formula-for-all SaaS companies because every product requires a unique approach, not only in content marketing but also in SEO and sales. That’s why the overall SaaS SEO ROI is important for you to know the precise effect.

We hope that this guide helped you understand how each content format contributes to the overall SaaS content marketing ROI and how to customize the approach based on the SaaS product type. Also, don’t forget to use B2B SaaS content marketing blog writing tips to boost your content marketing!