Last updated: September 22, 2023
Over the last 10 years, we’ve had the opportunity to measure the ROI of content marketing campaigns across a wide swath of companies. This report aggregates that data and organizes it into descriptive sections for each industry vertical for which we have sufficient data. We then address the issue of quality, as achieving a positive ROI is only possible when the content created passes muster with Google’s algorithm as well as your website visitors. The variable of quality explains why some companies have had no success with content marketing and others have had so much that they’ve invested in building a complete content marketing team in-house.
When executed at the highest level—following the principles of thought leadership as described below—the average yearly ROI for a content marketing campaign is $984,000. This is due to the inexpensiveness of content marketing (particularly in a B2B context, where digital advertising, trade shows, and ABM are the most common forms of lead generation) compared with the impact of high search rankings for dozens of valuable keywords over a multi-year period.
Content Marketing ROI by Industry
The below chart shows the average 3-year ROI across each industry.
Below, we explore each industry’s content marketing revenue and ROI in more depth:
- Biotech
- Energy / Oil & Gas
- Financial Services
- Higher Education
- IoT
- Insurance
- Manufacturing
- Medical Device
- PCB
- Pharmaceutical
- Real Estate
- Solar
The primary goals for biotech & life sciences content marketing are:
- To position yourself to gain market share by identifying trends and opportunities early
- To enhance name recognition and grow brand awareness to capture leads and attract investors
- To build a database of resources to better-inform advocates on policy issues (local and federal)
Our success working on content marketing campaigns in the biotech & life sciences industry has come from publishing case studies, blogs that target central pain points of biotech manufacturing processes, well-crafted landing pages for bottom-of-the-sales-funnel search terms, and in-depth guides. We targeted these at drug and food company decision-makers, lab managers, and researchers.
- 3-Year Average of New Revenue: $1.1 million (844%)
- Year 1 ROI: $0.7 million (367%)
- Year 2 ROI: $1.1 million (633%)
- Year 3 ROI: $1.6 million (656%)
- Landing Page Conversion Rate: 1.3%
How the Quality of Your Content Influences Your ROI
The majority of content published by B2B companies can be separated into three tiers:
- Low Quality: Putting out a blog that feels amateurish is common among brands who have never invested in content marketing before and are blindly following the mantra that every business should have a blog. Typically, one of the executives will either publish a blog a few times per year or they’ll delegate to someone on staff who doesn’t have enough industry knowledge or experience to sway a potential customer. For a variety of reasons, lax investments like these do more harm than good.
- Standard Quality: This is the bulk of what’s online today. Standard content marketing is reasonably well-written and has proper spelling and grammar, but fails to feel authoritative. These kinds of blogs often contain subtle issues that majorly impact traffic and conversions. For example, the paragraphs may be too too long to hold the audience’s interest, the graphics (if any are used at all) may be generic stock images, or the copy reads like a sales pitch. Good content should demonstrate wisdom and experience, coming across like a thoughtful treatment of the topic.
- High Quality: One way to describe what your audience is seeking is thought leadership: journalistic-quality content that holds their attention for an extended period of time through interesting metaphors, examples, and insights. The content should be at the lowest reading level that can still expand on the subject in a complex way, while containing a degree of “industry-speak” that is inclusive to your target audience while turning away those you don’t want to attract. I’ve broken down the necessary qualities of content in this category in the chart below.
| Content Quality | Well- Written | Carefully edited | Specific | Skimmable | Authoritative | Objective-seeming | Contains custom graphics | Contains case studies / examples | Conversion Optimized |
| Poor |  | | | | | | | | |
| Standard |  | | | | | | | | |
| High | | | | | | | | | |
The Impact of Proper SEO on Content Marketing ROI
These returns present a compelling case for incorporating content marketing into your broader marketing strategy. But in order for you to get to the ROI content marketing is capable of, you must follow the rules of SEO on your site. Those rules are:
- Carefully plan out your content marketing strategy.
- Understand what makes content engaging and effective for readers.
- Publish your content on a regular basis—at least twice weekly.
It also doesn’t hurt to study the factors Google uses to rank search results.
If you’re interested in outsourcing your content marketing campaign, you can get in touch to learn more about how we execute on content marketing in your industry. Our Bay Area-based firm has more than 11 years of expertise in achieving a high ROI for companies like yours.
Further Reading
For more information on organic marketing ROI, we recommend reading:
