What's the difference between content teams that get a lot of budget support and those that don't? The former are great at proving their value. As it turns out, communicating the impact is the third most common concern for content marketers, according to Superpath's 2023 report.
As the recession goes on, and SaaS companies continue to cut marketing investments they consider non-essential, proving our value has never been more important.
Why it's hard to prove content marketing's value
1. Internal misalignment
A piece of content isn't a direct response ad. Many leaders see it that way — it either grows business or not. Spend $1 today and get $3 tomorrow. "Show me the ROI!", they say. This oversimplified view makes it hard to prove the value of content that doesn't immediately tie to conversions, leads, and similar metrics close to revenue. It incentivizes short-term thinking and unfair apples-to-oranges measurement. After all, not all content is supposed to drive immediate revenue.
This is often caused by misalignment. When leadership doesn't know why we're creating content, where each content piece fits in the broader strategy, and how it should be measured — companies default to chasing quick wins. More on this later.
2. Some content is left in the dark
Content can drive impact on channels and touchpoints attribution can't see. 6Sense calls these untraceable channels and touchpoints "The Dark Funnel". Unfortunately, optics matter. When companies can't pinpoint a channel in their attribution software, they become reluctant to invest. This creates an uphill battle for some content marketers, especially those in brand marketing, to prove their value. This is even harder when selling products with long sales cycles.
How buyers consume content isn't as simple as attribution suggests. A buyer can listen to your podcast. Watch your YouTube video. Read your LinkedIn posts. Read your thought leadership whitepaper because a co-worker shared it with them. This content is meant to educate, entertain, build trust, and be memorable — not drive clicks and conversions. Attribution captures none of that.
When buyers eventually Google you, and maybe convert on your SEO article, attribution will give your article all the credit. The obvious thing to do next is to double down. After all, your article "worked best" because that's what attribution could see.
In reality, content creates a snowball effect. Like fitness, there's never one healthy meal that gets you in shape. It's the healthy meals you have all year long. Some content marketers choose to frame content's impact in that same holistic way — as long as it ties to business outcomes.
Joe Michalowski is one of them:
"I would do this podcast for Mosaic even if it never got a single download. If my numbers are going up; whether it's organic traffic, lead numbers, or our opportunity-generated numbers, then the stuff we're investing in is working. As long as those ROI numbers look right, I don't care much about which specific thing created results. I know they’re all tied together." - Joe Michalowski, Director of Content at Mosaic.tech
P.S. I know a platform that can prove content's impact in The Dark Funnel. It's called BrandOps.
3. It's hard to measure the intangibles
I imagine there are two types of B2B content: brand marketing and buying journey content.
Brand marketing content is meant to make our company remembered, liked, and trusted by the 95% of buyers who aren't in the market today. This can include engaging social media posts, podcasts, thought leadership whitepapers, and similar.
On the other hand, buying journey content informs and persuades buyers who are doing their research. These are our SEO "how to" articles, sales enablement articles, product videos, and similar. For the sake of clarity, this is the content I'm talking about in this paragraph.
We often sell expensive products with long sales cycles. In situations like these, it's not enough to inform and persuade one person. Our content must satisfy the buying committee. It consists of profiles like:
The budget holder - they care about what makes you better than competitors.
The influencer - they might be interested in basic content about your category.
The end user - they want to know how your product works.
The deal blocker - it could be someone in the legal department. They might need content that proves you respect industry regulations.
The champion - they use your success stories to get buy-in from their bosses.
It's messy. It gets worse since buyers find and ditch our content as they please. They jump in and out at any stage, seemingly randomly. As much as we'd like to believe the buying journey is linear, it isn't. You've probably seen this nightmarish visual before:
Even if we tracked all these touchpoints, how could we know if our content was effective? Remember: not all content aims for conversions. Some content is all about the intangibles, like informing the buyer or making them feel confident. Attribution can't track that. That's when we use other signals. We have our bounce rate, time on the page, and similar. But are they enough?
If a buying committee member read an article about our regulatory practices, found a positive answer, and walked away smiling — we might never know. From their perspective, our content did its job. Even more so, it increased their likelihood to buy from us. But we're in the dark.
We won't know if our content worked until it's time to sign the contract, sometimes even 6 months later. On the flip side, maybe our content satisfied the buyer, but we still lost the deal for an unrelated reason. That's the hard part. We're never completely sure about our content's impact because it's just a tiny part of a system called the buying journey. That nightmarish Gartner visual again.
The solutions
Enough doom and gloom. Let's talk solutions, featuring Parthi Loganathan and Vince Moreau. These two experts have been kind enough to share their stories with me.
Parthi Loganathan, Founder and CEO of Letterdrop
Parthi Loganathan is an ex-Google Search PM turned entrepreneur. He's building Letterdrop as an orchestra that provides solutions to transform content marketing into a pipeline generation machine. These solutions include customer data, insights into what content works best, tools to maximize your distribution, and more.
Here are some ways Parthi and his team prove the value of content marketing.
1) Self-reported attribution (SRA)
Some channels and touchpoints are inherently untraceable through software. That's why Letterdrop uses self-reported attribution to better understand where leads come from. It works by adding a "How did you hear about us?" field to lead capture forms. In this screenshot, there's a huge difference between what the CRM could trace as the "original source" and the real, self-reported source.
You can see self-reported sources like Slack, newsletters, and LinkedIn. These channels normally don't get much credit, but now it's easier to make a case for investing in them. Without SRA, Letterdrop would be focusing on channels like Google that are usually just capturing demand, not creating it.
2) Combining data from Clearbit, LinkedIn, and CRMs
Attribution offers a limited view of the buying journey. Letterdrop expands on it. They combine data from Clearbit, LinkedIn, and CRMs to pinpoint the revenue impact of each page. It's a game-changer in proving your business value as a content marketer.
The Clearbit component reveals which customers are looking at the website and engaging with content. It doesn't stop at the website and blog posts. Letterdrop gets similar insights for LinkedIn as well. They can see how stakeholders engage with content, including the posts they like and comment on.
By combining this data, Letterdrop can show metrics like open and influenced pipeline for each content piece, instead of only relying on leading indicator metrics like reading time. For example, Letterdrop traced a customer worth $12,000 back to this article. Given enough data and content, patterns start to emerge. They provide a general direction of what content has the most business impact.
Getting this data isn't easy, even for Letterdrop. It requires various integrations and tools. For one, you need a CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce. You also need Clearbit. As Parthi warns, even when you have these tools, you still need to have more stuff in place. If you plan to set this up, your marketing leader should own it. You need their buy-in because they'll be responsible for assembling solutions and making sure it works.
We want to use this data to build a report. You can show that report to your CEO, and tell them: "All the content I did resulted in this. You can't fire me — actually, give me a promotion, because I've been doing all this great work, and I can show you the impact with dollar value." - Parthi Loganathan
3) Measuring the revenue impact directionally
Attribution is incomplete. Maybe it stays incomplete forever. We shouldn't use that as an excuse to avoid data. We can still try to measure a baseline and seek directional impact or correlation. According to Parthi, this is a more helpful mindset to have.
It’s not perfect, but at least it tells us the least amount of pipeline or revenue that was influenced by our work. Our influence might have been greater, but we can still show the bottom threshold. That's what attribution platforms like HockeyStack and Dreamdata do. Some offer more, some offer less data. But all of them paint an imperfect picture of the activities accounts take before entering the sales cycle.
We should make the most of the data we have, instead of waiting for attribution utopia. As Parthi argues, completely detaching ourselves from revenue in this economy is a very risky game.
Some marketers shy away from the line between the content they're putting out and revenue. If you say anything along the lines of "You can't measure it!" or "This is long-term!", you're running away from the problem. - Parthi Loganathan
Vince Moreau, Founder and CEO of ScaleCrush.io
Vince is a B2B SaaS content marketer with SEO roots. He runs a marketing agency, ScaleCrush. Unlike most agencies, ScaleCrush doesn't tick boxes. They start with deep market research and strategy — and end up fixing the fundamentals like messaging and narratives before writing any content.
Here's how Vince proves the value of B2B content marketing.
1) Defining impact and effectiveness
Content marketers struggle because they don't answer the philosophical questions. What does "impact" mean? What does "effective" mean to your company?
We usually hear platitudes like "grow revenue". Vince argues that's not what it means for an individual content piece. It's too disconnected. Instead, he sees content as an ecosystem. Each piece serves a purpose within it. When you define a clear, tangible purpose for each content piece, the meaning of impact becomes clear. You just have to align your measurement with it.
Instead of asking: "Will this content piece drive revenue?", it's more helpful to ask: "Will this content piece achieve its purpose in the ecosystem?"
For example:
The SaaS Marketing Compass builds trust.
Vince's personal LinkedIn content serves as his social validation tool.
This guide is meant to grow the brand awareness and mental availability of ScaleCrush. If ScaleCrush used a fluffy SEO article, it wouldn't work.
The content ecosystem helps you frame the discussion, instead of being pressured into talking leads. Not everything can (or should) be measured by leads.
I'm all about the purpose of my content piece. How does it fit into my ecosystem? This isn't about goals. It goes beyond that. If you start with goals, you will get stuck in the same conversations. They will always say: "Well, our goal is to grow revenue, so we need more leads!" - Vince Moreau
2) Using the "Three R" Framework
A content piece should be measured by how effectively it fulfills its purpose in the ecosystem. That's why Vince uses the "Three R" Framework. It breaks down every content piece or category (e.g., glossaries), into 3 buckets: reach, resonance, and reaction. You determine at least 1 metric for each bucket. Choose the metrics that best reflect the purpose of your content piece.
Here are some examples:
Content Purpose | Content Piece | Reach | Resonance | Reaction |
Brand awareness | A how-to guide (SEO article) | Organic traffic Organic sessions | Time on page Returning visits | Visits to your "pricing" page |
Sales enablement | A product migration guide (article) | Visits from your blog (with UTM tracking) | Time on page | Demo requests Guide downloads |
Social validation | A LinkedIn post (video) | Organic impressions | Watch time | Company page visits Likes |
The "Three R" framework encourages picking the right metrics for the job, instead of forcing the same ones all the time (e.g., traffic and conversions). You can set up various measurement schemes.
For example, if you post a video on LinkedIn, and then retarget your viewers, do you get a stronger reaction? Sure, you can track likes. But you might also track DMs or a correlation between your aggregate reach and visits to your website in GA. That would also indicate your content is working. It's getting people to leave LinkedIn because they're interested in your website. All these options go back to your content's purpose. You have to think it through.
As you can see in the example above, Vince uses LinkedIn for social validation. It makes him look smart, credible, and trustworthy. The metrics reflect that. The nature of his content also reflects that. He isn't trying to get 100,000 impressions or vapid comments from engagement farmers. If he did, he'd probably be posting the wrong kind of content.
This is the content ecosystem that we have. Here's our social content. It acts as our validation tool. We redirect people from here to there. We have different metrics we use for each of those buckets. They're all grouped into different parts. When you frame content like this, it's much easier to get buy-in. - Vince Moreau
3) Distinguishing between effectiveness and efficiency
When companies see content as disjointed parts instead of an ecosystem, a content piece has no clear purpose. How can you measure what's effective if you don't know why you created it? This ecosystem is our seat at the table. That's what makes the CEO trust us.
As Vince argues, the lack of an ecosystem gets teams stuck on hamster wheels. They end up doing campaign management, not marketing.
Churning out random SEO articles
Posting on social media
Sending random emails
Without an ecosystem and a purpose, all marketers have left is efficiency. Effectiveness is about whether a content piece fulfills its purpose. Efficiency is about achieving something with minimal resources. Content can be efficient, but not effective. This is often the case.
Efficiency without effectiveness pulls marketers into vicious cycles. "We reduced our CPC from $2.5 to $2.3!", says the marketing team. The CEO counters with: "What's the ROI?". The next step is to keep reducing costs because that can improve ROI.
Eventually, the growth stalls. Questions get asked. Marketing teams get blamed. All because they approached it wrong from the start. They were focused on efficiency, not effectiveness.
We reduced our resources to achieve this. But if "this" served no purpose, then what's the point? - Vince Moreau
4) Embracing content marketing as a support function
Content doesn't directly drive revenue. It creates the conditions that do. Your trust, brand recognition, your presence on Google Search, positive word-of-mouth, and more. These things matter. A big insurance company is acquiring some of ScaleCrush's clients from 4 years ago. Was marketing valuable to those clients? It turns out it was. The insurance company is paying millions for those intangibles.
Marketers can prove their value, without proving content grows revenue. Those are two different things. Value is perceived, not given. There are many business functions (like HR) that don't directly tie to revenue. That doesn't mean they shouldn't exist. It goes back to measuring content by its purpose in the ecosystem. When you go from "Did my content piece grow revenue?" to "Did my content piece fulfill its intended purpose?", at least you can prove it.
Bold claims like "My content actually drives revenue!" sound compelling, but are dangerous. You'll be asked to prove it, and you'll struggle. You'll need strong evidence. According to Vince, incomplete attribution data isn't enough. Leadership is too rigorous to buy into it — so why even get into these discussions? As Vince argues, content marketers would be more credible if they embraced being a support function. That isn't to say don't use attribution at all, but be careful with your promises.
Wrapping up
The way we communicate content marketing's value defines our place in companies. We know content marketing plays a major role in growing businesses and building brands. Sadly, knowing and proving isn't the same. It's what makes solving this problem so hard, but also very rewarding.
I'm Haris Spahic. I make memorable content for B2B SaaS companies.
If you enjoyed this article, then check out more of my content here.
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