What Type of Content Is the Best for Driving Revenue?

Social marketers understand the importance of great content for generating revenue through social media, and now, executives and leaders at many brands do, too. In this hyper-digital, visual-first age, striking visual content can make or break performance on social, so it’s crucial to know what type of content is the best for driving revenue.

Without a robust content strategy, brands risk losing opportunities to increase sales, build brand awareness and acquire new customers. While savvy marketers know this, breaking it down into numbers and translating this to your bottom line can be a challenge.  

This article explores: 

• The best type of content to increase ROI.
• How social content impacts digital marketing revenue growth.
• How to increase revenue through digital marketing.
• How Dash Hudson helps quantify creative content.

Social media absolutely increases revenue. Social commerce is a huge part of regular social interaction — but social contributes to ROI even before this stage. 

In 2024, $82.3 billion in content marketing revenue was generated. This number is expected to grow to 94 billion in 2025, all the way up to a projected 108 billion dollars in 2026. 

• Awareness: In the awareness phase, social media allows you to establish your brand identity and attract users to your brand, social profiles and website. 
• Consideration: In the middle of the social media marketing funnel, often referred to as the consideration phase, users start to consider the product or service behind the brand identity and visuals. This is the perfect time to inform your audience about your product — including answering popular queries relevant to your brand and looking at your social analytics to uncover which content your audience typically seeks. 
• Conversion: Finally, the conversion stage — now more than ever, a seamless transaction and conversion experience is baked into the customer journey and on social channels. 

There will be upwards of 308 million users on social media channels in 2024. If your brand is not on social, how will you attract new customers, retain old ones and ultimately increase ROI? 

As mentioned previously, quantifying creative content is difficult — but not impossible. The efficacy of your creative content can largely be determined by the goals you set, how your content supports the customer during each unique stage of their purchasing journey, industry benchmarks, and of course, your overall brand objectives.

If your latest social media post has led to an increase in your follower count, it may be effective in the 'awareness phase' of your marketing strategy. This phase aims to create a base of engaged followers familiar with your brand before attempting to sell to them. Over time, brands can use this data to calculate the monetary value of their social media interactions. However, this process may take time. 

From there, brands can implement UTM parameters on links to determine when these unique visitors return and take specific conversion actions — think cart creation and additions, checkouts and more. 

Then, you can even start to track the ACV (average customer value) from acquisition all the way to conversion. While their initial action or visit is difficult to quantify, this is an important stage of the customer journey. When you can dive deeper into ACV, your team can put an estimated value on this stage of the journey.

But when it comes to specific mediums, which content are marketers investing most in, and what drives the most revenue?

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Blogs are a great way to repurpose content on a variety of platforms. From directly sharing links on Twitter, to sourcing tips and quotes for social assets. You can even re-optimizing blogs to support on-site and social media SEO. Blogs are also great for driving organic search traffic and linking to other essential pages of your website. While social posts often have a short shelf-life, blogs can rank for months and even years. It’s worth noting that algorithm changes and stale content can impact rankings and should be monitored over time.

Like other types of content on this list, brands can create blogs for nearly any stage of their customer’s awareness or purchasing journey. Is there a pain point your product or brand helps solve? Do people often ask a popular query online that relates to your brand? I.e., best makeup ideas for Spring.  

Events

Events continue to be a large focus for brands to drive revenue — 66% of B2B brands report events are their leading area of investment. While the pandemic caused many traditional events to be put on hold, marketers diversified and pivoted to digital or digital-hybrid events. 

Events drive revenue through gaining leads — think trade shows — or building authority by speaking at conferences or summits. This drives ROI by capturing leads, introducing your brand to new audiences, and personalizing the outreach and engagement process.  

Case Studies 

Case studies are a great way to boost your site’s expertise, authority, and credibility. They’re also great for sharing with your audience via social. 38% of brands report whitepapers are the most valuable content to move prospects through the sales funnel, and 28% of brands report research reports are the most effective. 

Case studies help drive ROI by contributing to website traffic, introducing new leads to the funnel, and capturing your target demographic. They offer a great piece of content to repurpose. Information from case studies can be repurposed into guides, infographics, informational videos and more.  

Podcasts 

Despite being around for approximately twenty years, Podcasts have grown in popularity in the past decade. From January 2019 to December 2022, online searches for Google podcasts rose 233%, while searches on Apple podcasts rose 83% and 50% for Spotify. 

Like other mediums on this list, Podcasts are a great way to drive traffic and attract users from a completely different user base. This could include those who aren’t as active on social or prefer to absorb information through audio. 

Podcasts offer another opportunity to produce content for your other social channels. nippets thrive on TikTok and Instagram — with a TikTok link in bio or another solution, like LikeShop, brands can easily funnel this traffic to their website or Podcast feed.

YouTube Videos 

YouTube is where your long-form video content can shine — but don’t discount YouTube Shorts. While YouTube Shorts is another great place to share the types of short-form content you’d share on Reels or TikTok, YouTube is a perfect place to upload filmed podcasts (or even the audio), interviews with people related to your industry, or other series your brand produces. 

YouTube SEO can help your brand identify which keywords are most popular to increase your chance of ranking in the algorithm. Keywords are also a helpful basis for creating a video series that aligns with your brand’s identity and social goals. 

Short Form Video Content 

Short-form, organic video content and social entertainment are arguably the biggest drivers of traffic right now. In 2022, Instagram accounts with up to 500 followers who posted Reels received an average user reach of 892%. For accounts with 500 to 2K followers, the average user engagement was 152%

Organic content also presents so many pros for brands — it’s low-cost to produce, drives more engagement and impressions, and is a great way to start implementing a multi-channel strategy into your campaign if you’re not already. Cross-channel campaigns perform better in terms of engagement rate and impressions, which is an excellent opportunity for brands to explore different calls-to-action, reach their social goals, and increase brand awareness. 

Think brand awareness doesn’t drive ROI? Think again. 

We know how content marketing impacts revenue and drives ROI. So, how should marketers navigate their content marketing strategy to boost their KPIs like reach and engagement? Knowing where to pivot is extremely important for brands in hyper-competitive spaces like social media that are often filled with noise — how to increase revenue through digital marketing.

Create Custom Measurement Reports

Knowing how to measure marketing ROI can be challenging — this is where custom reports that measure KPIs that matter to your brand come in. Properly identifying your brand or campaign objectives and which KPIs support those will be crucial to measure and report on your social campaign’s success. 

For example, is your content strategy stuck in the awareness phase? Relevant KPIs to monitor would be followers gained, reach and engagement rate to determine how engaged your followers  are. 

If you’re focused on conversions for a particular landing page or product, your report will mostly concentrate  on traffic to a specific page and clicks to relevant social commerce links and calls-to-action. 

Custom reports let you pull in the most relevant data for your KPIs, so you can report on how social contributes to your larger goals without metrics that don’t tell a meaningful story.

Don’t Be Afraid To Pivot

Instagram and TikTok trends come and go — while marketers should give time to see if certain tactics work (for example, if your first TikTok video doesn't get millions of likes, don't let that discourage you from including TikTok in your content marketing mix). That being said, it’s crucial to understand when a certain piece of content doesn’t resonate with your audience and eliminate it from your strategy, or try out different social features or content styles and take it a step further with A/B testing to see what content best serves you best. 

Develop Influencer and Brand Ambassador Relationships 

Influencer marketing is essential to a robust social marketing strategy now more than ever. In 2024, global influencer marketing is worth 21 billion dollars. 

Another interesting trend — and one that’s particularly beneficial for brands — is the introduction of nano and micro-influencers to the industry. Nano-influencers (1-10K followers) garner 213% higher engagement rates than even micro-influencers. Since this group of influencers typically require lower costs than influencers with 500K followers, this is a great way for brands to decrease their spending and generate a higher ROI. 

Increase Content Marketing Budget 

Most brands are expected to increase their content marketing spend, with 42% of reporting they plan to increase. If brands don’t increase or reallocate their marketing budget strategically during quarterly and yearly planning, they risk their existing strategy becoming ‘stale’.

Implement SEO On Social and Your Website

If you’re going to share amazing content, it’s important to make sure it’s easy to find. This is where social media SEO comes in. While the Instagram algorithm and TikTok algorithm typically gauge metrics like engagement and follower demographics to determine which content to show to their audience, brands shouldn’t ignore the power of search to bring their content to a wider audience. 

More youths now than ever are using channels like TikTok to search, with 40% of Gen Z reportedly using TikTok over channels like Google. For brands focused on reaching a new demographic or diversifying their followers, ignoring TikTok SEO can be detrimental to your strategy.

Luckily, measuring the impact of visual content and your influencer and creator ROI has never been easier than with Dash Hudson. Quickly identify the ROI of influencers your community engages with, discover visual trends, and learn what UGC resonates with your audience. 

Supporting creative efforts can be difficult, so Dash Hudson features like Dash Hudson's Predictive Vision AI predicts which content your audience will best respond to. Meanwhile,  link-in-bio solutions like LikeShop drive conversions from your feed to your website. A seamless customer journey and user experience are indispensable for brands hoping to grow their ROI from social media. With Dash Hudson, you can create a straightforward, effortless customer journey, glean content opportunities for your strategy, and pull in ROI reports all at the same time. 

Which content management system is best? 

The best content management system depends on your goals. If the only tool your team needs is a Scheduler, you might not need to use software that has features like Social Listening or Influencer Marketing Measurement. However, analytics in the native app only provide so much detail and often don’t leave room for customization. To scale your marketing efforts, the best content management system will include a Social Analytics and Monitoring feature to analyze your data.  

Which industries spend the most on content marketing?

While it’s tricky to find exact figures for which industries spend the most on content marketing, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Retail Industry spent the most on digital marketing overall at 57.2 billion dollars. Meanwhile, the Beauty Industry spent about 7.7 billion dollars on total advertising in 2022. 

How does a CTA help generate more leads?

A call-to-action helps to generate more leads by encouraging users to take a specific action. Yes, users often have a purpose to visit a specific webpage, but the simple act of suggestion can persuade the user to take the desired action. Be sure to write and design CTAs that aren’t too wordy and clearly state the intent of the landing page or post  — complex CTAs that don’t connect with either page’s intent can frustrate users, causing decreased engagement, lost followers and high bounce rates.