How long do I need to do content marketing before I see results?

It depends!

But if this answer does not satisfy you, I recommend waiting for at least six to nine months before giving up on content marketing.

Apart from understanding how long it takes for content marketing to show results, this article also talks about some mistakes in measuring results and the right metrics to consider when analyzing the ROI of your content marketing efforts.

The real ROI

Now, let’s try to understand ROI. Is it about impressions, clicks on your Facebook posts, bounce rate, or growth in the number of qualified leads? Still don’t get it? Check out this video by Gary Vaynerchuk:

We need to understand what real ROI is for content marketing, as content marketers usually get into a tough spot when asked about ROI. A lot of people tell me, “I am not getting sales conversions even after trying content marketing!”

Most of the time, conversions are expected too soon. If you have ever done sales, you know that an ideal customer takes at least five interactions to convert, and that’s the scenario with 80 percent of sales happening today. To achieve this target, you might want to consider mapping the content with the customer journey and your sales process. But again, even if content helps you cover more than 50 percent of your sales reps’ job, it will take time.

So, what’s the ideal case? How much should you wait to see the results? Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi said in his book, Content Inc., that “it took an average of 15 to 17 months of consistent content creation and distribution to reach monetization [or results].”

But that’s until the phase of reaching monetization. The ideal time should be somewhere between six to nine months, after which you start seeing the results and growth in your customer base.

Losing patience?

Kissmetrics got more than 1 million unique visitors within 10 months—organically. That made content marketing their primary means of getting sales and revenue.  If you have already been doing content marketing for months and you still think that the ROI is a concern, you might be measuring it wrong.

Let’s keep it straight. Content marketing is not what usual sales and marketing professionals have been doing for years. It is new age marketing so it needs different metrics.

Below are the metrics that you should stop using to measure content marketing success:

So, what should we actually measure?

Conclusion