In episode 56 of the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Alan Pringle discuss how to calculate return on investment for your content strategy even if you’ve never measured anything before.

Related links:

* Content strategy ROI (podcast)
* Back to school: measuring content strategy ROI
* XML ROI calculator 

Twitter handles:

* @alanpringle
* @gretylkinsey

Transcript: 
Gretyl Kinsey:     Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 56, we talk about return on investment and how you can calculate it even if you’ve never measured anything before. Hello and welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast. I’m Gretyl Kinsey,
Alan Pringle:     And I’m Alan Pringle.
GK:     And today we’re going to be talking about return on investment or ROI. And I want to just get started with a little bit of context first. So when you’re coming up with your content strategy, why is it so important to make sure that you calculate ROI and be able to show that?
AP:     Generally, because the people that have the money want to know what they’re going to be getting for their money, that’s your return on investment.
GK:     Absolutely. And what are some of the typical kinds of pieces of information that go into coming up with that number?
AP:     Well, one way to kind of look at that is when you’re looking at your content strategy and you’re doing your analysis of your current situation, what’s messed up, what’s not working, where are the inefficiencies? A lot of the numbers and ideas in regard to ROI can come from there. Those are your pain points. If you fix them, what goodness are you going to get from that? And that’s kind of one way to look at where to start to look for those kinds of numbers.
GK:     Absolutely. I know that when I’ve interviewed different people at companies whether they’re writers or whether it’s executives or anybody else with a stake in the content, they all kind of have different pain points and so every piece of information that you can get from those different people in those different groups can kind of give you a better understanding of what that overall ROI might be.
AP:     And I think it’s important to note too, some people’s pain points trump other people’s pain points. If an executive, and especially someone who has the money that can fund your project really wants problem B to get worked out but you’re more concerned at problem A, you might want to take a look at your perspective and realize in order to get the money you may need to focus on what the exec sees as the problem as part of your analysis work on your content strategy.
GK:   Absolutely, and I think that’s especially important if you’ve got pain points maybe that are in conflict with each other from different groups. Then when you’re looking at it from that ROI perspective and thinking, “Which pain points are costing us the most?” Then that kind of clearly shows you which one might be the most important one to consider when it comes to fixing those.
AP:     Exactly.
GK:    I want to talk a little bit more about that kind of conflict and maybe some roadblocks that can come into play when you’re trying to figure out your ROI and one that I want to talk about is l...