Many companies have invested in original content production in recent years in an effort to attract and engage customers, and ultimately boost their bottom lines. But as these content initiatives grow and mature, attention is shifting to a key question: What specific outcomes are they driving and how are they best measured?
Toolkits spoke with 12 marketing executives and brand publishing leaders to establish their top priorities for the year ahead, and figuring out how to demonstrate return on investment emerged as a key theme.
This thirst for measurement and a shift toward more data-driven decision-making is driving marketers to think more carefully about the metrics they use to gauge the success of their efforts – and to pay more attention to analytics tools and technologies that can offer insights into the performance of their content.
“Return on investment was, is, and will be paramount to brand publishing in 2024. That means brand publishing will be increasingly data-driven, given that we all have tools to track key performance indicators (KPIs) and see to what extent we are connecting with our target audience,” said Jennifer Parker, veteran journalist and former editor-in-chief at design consultancy Huge.
“There is an impetus on content and creative people to step up strategically and understand their impact, educate themselves on channels, and customer acquisition strategy. Why am I producing this? How is it going to be seen?” asked Franklin Morris, head of marketing at Alloy.ai. “They think the work they’re doing is disconnected from the bottom line. But it’s not. It’s what drives the business.”
It’s a natural evolution of the creative focus that’s defined the last few years, where many companies focused their efforts on building quality editorial operations but – in many cases – paid less attention to results. That happened due to a variety of factors, say marketing executives. In some cases, brands invested in content because everyone else was. “Our CEO wanted to have a newsletter because he kept hearing people talk about brands as media companies and so we started one,” said a marketing head at an agency. In other cases, high-profile cases were seeing public success, so many companies rushed to try and emulate them without clearly putting in place specific goals and metrics.
Now, many companies are placing pressure on content teams to demonstrate how their output contributes to key company goals.
What is ROI?
One problem for many marketers is definitional: While everyone agrees they need to show a return on investment for content, nobody is exactly quite sure what ROI means in this context. Some marketers believe ROI should be calculated based on sales or revenue, while others argue it should include softer metrics like brand awareness and customer engagement.
A marketing director who preferred not to be named as he had not received approval from his company to speak about its publishing strategy said that his content team “struggles to get credit” partially because “they don’t know how what actually they should be getting credit for.” Almost everyone in his company agrees content works – but when it comes down to it, they struggle to agree on what should be measured and how. This leads to uncertainty about resource allocation for the brand’s publishing program. “It waxes and wanes,” he said. The goal now is to figure out exactly what the goals are for the content program at his organization – traffic, leads, or even revenue – and then work towards that.
Emily Anne Epstein, president of Decopop Agency, says it’s a “myth” that content doesn’t contribute to dollars and cents and instead, content execs need to familiarize themselves with connecting systems and get the right analytics in place. “So many marketing metrics are focused on the last touch—but so-called “golden pages” are only doing a fraction of the work. People need to be familiar with a brand, a category, a problem, etc. before they’re ready to buy. All it takes is connecting systems to show the value of a thought leadership post. Connect your Google Analytics to Marketo and Salesforce. Get ContentSquare, Knotch, or AudiencePlus to track user journeys. Look at the companies reading your content with Demandbase. There are indicators everywhere that customers need to engage with several pieces of content before they are ready to buy. Content leaders are just so often fighting an uphill battle when it comes to analytics resourcing. Good content can, and absolutely does, make good money.”
Still, attribution and credit remain an issue. This ongoing debate adds to the pressure on content professionals to demonstrate their worth measurably — and means more work needs to be done in familiarizing themselves with the right tools and technologies that can let them do so.
For an editorial director at a health brand, the struggle is now figuring out how to get “credit” two ways: One, to show how content is helping drive traffic to her company’s website. Secondly, to show how the content her team produces helps other teams, such as the overall marketing team, the sales team, or the communications team.
Why ROI is a growing priority
One of the chief reasons ROI is becoming a priority is simply because content itself is moving from an ancillary function to the “main event.” Content is now seen as a critical way for companies to communicate with employees using internal newsletters and blogs, or to educate customers using product guides and resources. It’s also a key way to stand out as ad fatigue becomes real.
“Content has now become one of the most important strategic functions over the past year,” said Morris. “You take any set of competitors, they’re all running the same ads on the same platforms. They’re tracking the same keywords. If you’re in B2B, everyone’s pulling info on Zoominfo and going after the same leads. We know by now that the thing that attracts new customers to you is not you talking about yourself… it’s stuff that solves a customer’s problem and adds value to their day or life.” But with increased importance comes more scrutiny, say executives.
Already, a growing number of C-suite executives have become involved with content operations as they become more interested in marketing and communications more broadly, and the CMO role splinters. An increasing number of CEOs are interested in figuring out their own content approaches: How they can present their perspectives to the public as a key way to market the company. All of this means that brand publishers suddenly have to prove that the work they do actually has an impact.
The specter of generative AI and its effects on how content is published and distributed online are also driving ROI pressure for companies. A number of brands are now experimenting with generative AI to make content operations more efficient. At the same time, as low-quality content threatens to flood the Internet, companies will need to invest resources to ensure the content they’re creating is of premium quality – good enough to stand out. But that means also being able to draw a line between making those investments and ensuring there is return on them.
This also means pressure on the content-makers themselves: “Content marketers have not done themselves any favors. They play in the editorial side of things,” said Morris. “It’s time for them to also educate themselves. The impetus is on content people to go sideways.”
Even more simply, as one tech brand editor said: “It’s time to hustle.”