You scramble to explain how that blog series probably helped a few deals move forward. You gesture vaguely at that product explainer video that likely nudged some prospects along. You say “engagement” a few times. And the CFO nods — but not in the good way.

Marketing budgets have plateaued at 7.7% of company revenue for two consecutive years, according to Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey. At the same time, the Content Marketing Institute finds that fewer than half of B2B marketers say their organization measures content performance accurately.

Flat budgets and fuzzy metrics aren’t a sustainable combo. To keep your seat at the table (and your budget intact), here are five plays that tie content to revenue in ways your finance team will actually care about.

1. Track Every Pass on the Field

If you’re only tracking last-click conversions, you’re missing half the game. Most content does its best work long before someone fills out a form by tackling intangibles — planting ideas, building trust, and answering questions a simple product page just doesn’t cover.

To show that impact, start mapping each asset to a stage in the buyer journey: Awareness, Consideration, or Decision. Then connect those stages to your CRM or marketing automation platform, so when a deal closes, you can see the full content trail behind it.

How to start:

• Look back at the past few quarters of content
• Assign a stage to each piece (gut instinct is fine to start)
• Add those tags to your lead or opportunity records going forward

This doesn’t need to be perfect or overly technical. Even a simple tagging system can surface patterns — like that one product-focused blog that keeps showing up in early-stage deals. Once you spot an asset like that, you can double down on its strengths or repurpose it for sales enablement.

2. Graduate to Multi-Touch Scoring

Content doesn’t win deals alone and rarely wins on the last touch. Think about the webinar a customer watched before even talking to sales —  those moments matter. And they don’t typically show up in a last-click report.

That’s where multi-touch attribution comes in. It spreads credit across the full buyer journey so you can see which pieces actually pull their weight, even if they don’t get the glory of the final click.

There are plenty of examples of this process in action. Take, for instance, NineTwoThree Studio. The product design and engineering firm — a Contently client — used time-decay attribution to link AI-optimised articles to ChatGPT-driven sessions and generated more than $1 million in qualified leads within 90 days. The firm now ranks in the top results for 92% of its target AI queries.

You don’t need a team of data scientists to get started. Tools like GA4, Adobe, or even a well-structured spreadsheet can help you test different models, like:

• Linear, where every touch gets equal credit
• Time-decay, where newer touches get more weight
• Position-based, where you emphasize the first and last touch

Simple first steps:

• Grab six months of data from your CRM or analytics tool.
• Try out a basic model — even just assigning 40% to the last touch, 30% to the one before it, and so on.
• Compare it to your current reporting. Which pieces show up that you’ve been ignoring?

Chances are, a few early- or mid-funnel assets will suddenly look like quiet power players. And once you know what’s working, you can invest more strategically (and stop chasing disappearing clicks).

Contently’s analytics make this process even easier. Our Content Value dashboard automatically maps every asset you create on the platform to the buyer journey, and showcases how each piece contributes to pipeline, revenue, and retention. You can dig into performance by asset type, persona, funnel stage, or even custom goals, all without wrangling a mess of spreadsheets. Customers using this dashboard report seeing multi-million-dollar organic ROI and average audience growth of 40% in six months.

3. Trade Vanity for Value Metrics

Executives aren’t looking for vibes. They’re looking for value. So it’s time to swap out vanity metrics like views, likes, and bounce rates for numbers that actually tie to revenue.

Two great ones to start with:

• Cost per Assisted Opportunity: how much you spent on a content cluster, divided by the number of deals it helped close.
• Net SEO Value: a rough estimate of what your organic traffic would’ve cost if you’d paid for it via search ads.

Here’s a quick back-of-the-napkin formula:

Net SEO Value = (Organic Sessions × Avg CPC) – Content Costs

If that number beats your paid search ROI, you’ve got yourself a strong case for more investment in content — and fewer eyebrow raises at budget time.

The point of this exercise is to speak in a language your finance team already understands: efficiency, cost-per, and net return. When content starts showing up in those terms, it stops sounding like a gamble.

4. Turn Data Into Boardroom Stories

If you want your content program to resonate in the boardroom, ditch the 10-tab deck and boil it down to one powerful slide per initiative — your “Money Slide.” It should include:

• One standout chart
• One clear headline
• One quote that brings it to life

Here’s an example:

 Headline: “Financial-literacy hub influenced $4.2M in Q2 pipeline — up 27% from last quarter.”
Quote: “This content made it easier to explain our product to clients.” — a relationship manager

This approach works especially well when showcasing cross-functional wins. Say your team localized hundreds of articles in a single day and saw a major bump in regional engagement. That’s a story. It’s also a great way to make future budget requests a lot less painful.

Here’s how one team turned a simple metric into a story that stuck: A leading financial-services enterprise recently localized 252 articles across 3 languages in one day, using Contently’s AI-powered workflow. 

5. Tighten the Feedback Loop

Attribution is an ongoing rhythm. Set a recurring time (monthly, quarterly — whatever works) to check in on what’s performing, what’s lagging, and what needs a second life. That could mean trimming underperformers, refreshing outdated blog posts, or chopping long videos into clips people actually finish.

Small tweaks. Big lift. And just in time for the next budget review.

These days, it’s not enough to say content works. You’ve got to show how much it works — in language your finance team actually understands.

So map every piece to the buyer journey. Use multi-touch models to surface your real MVPs. Trade vanity metrics for ones that tie to revenue. Turn your reports into stories that stick. And keep refining as you go.

Do that, and the next time someone asks what content has done for the business, you won’t even need to say a word — your slides will do the talking.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

1. What if we don’t have fancy attribution software?

You don’t need a new tool to get started. A basic spreadsheet with deal IDs, content touches, and journey stages is enough to start spotting patterns. Over time, you can layer in GA4 or your CRM’s native reporting — no data science degree required. 

Platforms like Contently can also help you scale when you’re ready by offering built-in attribution tracking, journey mapping, and cluster-level insights designed for marketers who want proof without pulling an all-nighter in Excel.

2. Our leadership team still wants last-click numbers. Now what?

Run both. Put last-click and multi-touch side by side to highlight what’s missing from the old model. Early- and mid-funnel content that gets ignored in last-click reports often looks a lot more valuable with context — which tends to win over skeptics.

3. How often should we review content performance?

At least once a quarter. Block time to audit what’s working, what’s slowing down, and where new opportunities are emerging. The more you build this into your rhythm, the easier it gets, and the faster you’ll have proof ready when budget season rolls around.

The post The Most Effective Ways to Tie Content to Revenue in 2025 appeared first on Contently.

Engagement content metrics are a powerful way to gain deeper insights into our content’s performance and determine whether or not it’s having the desired effect. These metrics measure how well users interact with content, such as how long they spend on an article, how many shares it receives, or which sections of a page are clicked.

By leveraging these types of metrics, you can gain invaluable insights into what resonates with your target audience and what doesn’t. Engagement content metrics can also help you determine the best times and formats for distributing your content, as well as which topics generate the most interest.

Metrics help us make data-driven decisions to improve our strategies. Without metrics, content marketing efforts can become directionless and ineffective, wasting time and resources. So how do you know which ones are most important for your goals?

Why Engagement Content Metrics Matter

The shift towards engagement as the best metric for measuring consumer sentiment and brand effectiveness can be attributed to several factors. Engagement content metrics such as likes, comments, and shares provide a more comprehensive view of how audiences are interacting with your brand and what you produce.

Engagement content metrics measure brand sentiment and affinity, identify what resonates, and begin an authentic relationship-building process.

Audiences are actively engaging with content rather than simply consuming it. So engagement is a clear indicator that audiences are interested and invested in the content and the brand behind it. By tracking engagement content metrics, content marketers can gain insights into how audiences are responding to their content and their brand, developing an understanding of brand sentiment.

Positive engagement metrics are an indicator of brand affinity, while negative engagement metrics can signal issues that need to be addressed. Engagement content metrics provide a more accurate reflection of the customer journey.

Content marketers can track engagement metrics at different stages of the customer journey to understand how audiences are interacting with content and how it is influencing their decision-making process. This helps them optimize their content strategies to improve engagement and ultimately drive conversions. By focusing on engagement rather than revenue, content marketers are prioritizing a positive customer experience, building brand loyalty, and improving overall business performance.

This authentic relationship is better than multi-touch attribution back to revenue because it showcases that customers are interacting with a brand at different stages of the buyer’s journey.

Overall, the shift towards engagement as the best metric for measuring consumer sentiment and brand interaction reflects the importance of building authentic relationships with audiences, understanding the customer journey, and prioritizing the customer experience.

Improve Engagement Through Customer Experience

So how do you improve engagement? Start with personalized customer experiences. When customers feel valued, appreciated, and understood, they are more likely to return to the business and recommend it to others. Here are some reasons why providing a positive customer experience is essential for improving engagement:

• Builds trust and loyalty: When a customer feels valued and appreciated, they are more likely to trust the business and become loyal to its brand.
• Increases customer retention: When customers are happy with their experience, they are more likely to return to the business and make additional purchases. This not only increases revenue but also helps to build a loyal customer base.
• Improves brand reputation: When customers have a positive experience, they are more likely to share their experience with others, leading to positive word-of-mouth marketing for the business.
• Encourages customer feedback: When customers feel valued and appreciated, they are more likely to provide feedback on their experience, which can be used to improve the business’s products, services, and overall customer experience.

Why Engagement Tells a Better Story Than Revenue

Personalized and relevant content can be a powerful tool for brands to improve engagement with their target audience. Here are some examples of how brands can use personalization to improve customer experience and enhance engagement metrics.

• Personalized email campaigns: Brands can use email marketing to send personalized messages to their subscribers based on their previous purchases, interests, or behaviors. For example, a clothing retailer can send an email with personalized product recommendations based on the customer’s previous purchases, or a beauty brand can send personalized tips and tutorials based on the customer’s skin type or beauty concerns.

• Personalized product recommendations: Brands can use data analytics to offer personalized product recommendations to their customers based on their browsing and purchase history. For example, an online bookstore can recommend books to customers based on their reading history or wishlist, or a streaming service can recommend movies or TV shows based on the customer’s viewing history.

• Personalized social media content: Brands can use social media to create personalized content for their followers. For example, a food brand can create recipes for their followers based on their dietary preferences or cooking skills, or a fitness brand can create personalized workout plans based on the customer’s fitness goals or activity level.

• Personalized landing pages: Brands can create personalized landing pages for their website visitors based on their search terms, referral source, or demographics. For example, an e-commerce brand can create landing pages with personalized product recommendations or promotions based on the customer’s search terms or referral source. In addition, account-based marketing strategies target specific companies or clients to create more personalized experiences for high-dollar target accounts.

• Personalized chatbots: Brands can use chatbots to offer personalized assistance to their customers based on their queries or preferences. For example, a travel brand can use a chatbot to offer personalized travel recommendations based on the customer’s budget, destination, or travel style, or a customer service chatbot can offer personalized solutions based on the customer’s issue or feedback.

Brands can use personalized and relevant content to improve engagement by offering customized experiences that cater to their customers’ preferences, interests, and behavior. By using data analytics and technology, brands can create personalized content that resonates with their target audience and builds long-term relationships with their customers.

Engagement Content Metrics vs. Revenue Attribution

Engagement metrics and revenue metrics are both important measures of a brand’s performance, but they serve different purposes and have different limitations. Let’s explore how engagement metrics compare to multi-touch attribution calculations. Which provides a more comprehensive view of the customer journey?

• Engagement metrics: Engagement metrics measure how users interact with a brand’s content or social media accounts. They include metrics such as likes, comments, shares, followers, and click-through rates (CTRs). These metrics help brands understand how users engage with their content and how effective their marketing strategies are in building brand awareness and engagement.
• Revenue metrics: Revenue metrics, on the other hand, measure how much revenue a brand generates from its marketing efforts. They include metrics such as return on ad spend (ROAS), customer lifetime value (CLV), and conversion rates. These metrics help brands understand the financial impact of their marketing strategies and how effective they are in driving sales and revenue.
• Limitations of revenue metrics: Revenue metrics have some limitations compared to engagement metrics. For example, they don’t capture the full picture of a customer’s journey or the impact of non-financial factors such as brand loyalty or customer satisfaction. They also don’t account for the indirect or long-term effects of marketing strategies, such as the impact of brand awareness or word-of-mouth marketing.
• Comprehensive view of the customer journey: Engagement metrics can provide a more comprehensive view of the customer journey by capturing the interactions that users have with a brand before and after they make a purchase. For example, engagement metrics such as likes or shares can indicate brand loyalty or advocacy, which can lead to repeat purchases or referrals. Engagement metrics can also help identify areas for improvement in the customer experience, such as identifying common pain points or areas where users drop off in the customer journey.

Engagement metrics and revenue metrics both have their strengths and limitations. While revenue metrics are important for measuring the financial impact of marketing efforts, engagement metrics can provide a more comprehensive view of the customer journey and help brands understand how users interact with their brand beyond just making a purchase.

By using a combination of engagement metrics and revenue metrics, brands can gain a more holistic understanding of their marketing performance and develop more effective content strategies.

Stay informed on the latest content trends and marketing strategies. Follow The Content Strategist newsletter for more content just like this!

The post Why You Should Prioritize Engagement Content Metrics appeared first on Contently.

It goes to show: You can plan out all the research and intelligent content strategy choices, but sometimes you just make a gut decision that works out. (These mailbags are consistently among our top-performing posts every month.)

I usually advise against making content strategy decisions with your gut. But if you do, surround yourself with people willing to tell you your idea is awful. Or, at the very least, people who make fun of you when you start humble-bragging about your content marketing column with Mac Miller GIFs.

ON TO THE MAILBAG.

Monetization! You barely discuss how to monetize content. Creating and distributing is all fine, but once you do that, what’s next? How do you start producing revenue off your content? What are the options available and what’s right for me?

—Eyal, Tel Aviv

What’s up, Eyal? Fun fact: I lived in Tel Aviv for the first month I spent running The Content Strategist. I felt like such a badass editor because even when I woke up at 11 a.m., it was still only 4 a.m. back in New York.

The main reason I don’t talk very much about monetizing content is that most brands simply aren’t ready for that yet. In fact, it’s the last step in Rebecca Lieb’s content marketing maturity model.

However, I do think it’s possible for brands to monetize before they hit the “run” stage. Part of the beauty of content marketing is that there are more flexible approaches to monetization than there are in traditional media.

Usually, content monetization falls into three stages:

Attribution: The point at which you can effectively calculate hard ROI for your content marketing. When your CEO knows that if he puts $1 into content, he’ll get $2 out, that’s monetization.

There are a few models for attributing content to revenue. (Here’s the multi-touch one we use.) Remember, though, that direct revenue is just the bull’s-eye in the five rings of content marketing ROI. There are other ways for content to boost your brand, but tying them to concrete dollar amounts isn’t as simple.

Bartering: If your content is killing it, you’ll eventually reach a point when your audience is big and valuable enough for you to barter with other outlets. It’s a great way to get marketing and advertising opportunities for free. Plus, bartering is hip! All the cool kids in Brooklyn are doing it.

Essentially, you’re trading access to your audience for access to another audience. I’ll give you a few examples. We regularly swap ads between CMI’s Chief Content Officer magazine and Contently Quarterly. We forged an editorial partnership with the Digiday Awards. And on Thursday, I’m doing a webinar with HubSpot about executive buy-in for content marketing, which HubSpot has been promoting in its newsletter for weeks. (We’ve also been promoting it to our list of 100,000 email subscribers.)

All of these programs would normally come with a five-figure price tag, but since we also have an influential magazine and blog, we’re able to get them for free.

The key, of course, is finding the right partnerships. Reach out to like-minded companies with similar audiences. You never want to betray your audience’s trust and promote something they won’t find interesting.

Selling ads: Ah, the final frontier.

Over the last two years, marketers have started monetizing their content like traditional media outlets—particularly as brands start poaching folks from media companies.

For instance, David Beebe left ABC to run Marriott’s content program two and a half years ago. Since then, Marriott has started licensing its award-winning short films and TV shows to distributors while beginning to think about selling ads in Marriott Traveler, the company’s travel magazine.

“That money goes toward producing more content,” Beebe said. “If you scale it right, marketing starts funding itself.”

(Full disclosure: Marriott is a Contently client, and Marriott Traveler was created in partnership with Contently.)

This is easier said than done. Hundreds of people work in the ad-sales departments of major publishers. To start, you need at minimum:

• A media kit
• A sales rep
• On-demand talent to produce creative
• An audience development manager to ensure ad performance
• Someone sharp enough to produce an ad-performance report

That being said, I think we’ll see more companies monetize their content marketing through ad sales or sponsored content. It just makes sense when you reach a certain maturity, particularly in B2B.

Look no further than Contently. With the analytics tools we use (Contently Analytics, Demandbase, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, Campaign Monitor), we can see that we reach a loyal, high-value audience of several hundred thousand marketers and media executives each month. We know that B2B publishers with a similar audience sell sponsored content packages that start at $10,000. We also know that our audience responds very well to partnerships, as long as they’re carefully selected and provide real value, which is why we’ve started running sponsored content campaigns with select partners. (Email us if you’re interested!)

At a level of maturity, it only makes sense. Especially since, as Beebe said, you can reinvest that revenue back into your content marketing and drive bigger returns for your organization.

How do I create a hero brand on a low budget?

—Philippe, Kinderminster

Let’s start by defining a hero brand since not everyone speaks marketing. I’m fond of this definition from Inc.: “The Hero is tough and courageous, overcomes tremendous obstacles and persists in difficult times. They are most fulfilled when they can rise to or overcome a challenge.”

I think that small companies with low budgets have a lot of advantages when it comes to creating a hero brand. You can lean into the underdog narrative. You can move quickly. And you can talk about your company in a casual and colloquial way without pissing off some brand manager halfway across the world.

The key is that your brand needs a mission. Yes, I put that in italics because I cannot stress it enough. Your brand needs a compelling perspective on the world and a mission to change how things are done. As I wrote last year:

When you wonder what your brand believes in, it’s easy to land on something bland and broad that would sound ridiculous if it came from a person. We believe in happiness. We believe in togetherness. We believe in innovation. These are not things you would tell someone at a dinner party. (So glad you believe in happiness, Bob. Now please pass the Chardonnay.)

If you focus on what the key people in your company believe, it increases your chances of coming up with interesting content. Your CEO doesn’t believe in the general concept of innovation; he believes that very specific things lead to success in your industry. Our co-founder Shane Snow doesn’t believe in content, but he does believe that brands will win if they invest in telling great stories instead of intrusive advertising, and that a combination of great technology and superb creative talent are the keys to actually accomplishing that mission. This belief informs our own content strategy, guiding us in the right direction.

At Contently, having a real opinion and a mission is the key to building our brand and capturing an audience—especially three years ago, when we were just a dozen people and a bunch of dogs. It was glorious, and it worked. This was how I felt when we first hit 100,000 readers:

I’ll never forget that day.

Is it kosher for a writer to accept payment from a client to write a piece and post it on a high authority website (LifeHacker, Forbes, Huffington Post, etc.) without disclosing that payment? I’ve been asked to do this quite a bit and it really irks me. I figure that if I’m posting PR copy under my own byline, it besmirches MY reputation as a writer (I’ve come into copywriting via journalism). Keen to find out if I’m just being naive and that everyone’s “doing this” or if there are some kind of ethical standards to which copywriters should abide. Trying to keep myself nice, here!

—Margaret, Blayney, Australia

Hell no! That’s less kosher than the last 100 pages of Lord of the Flies.

I get emails like this all the time. There are a bunch of shady PR and SEO firms out there that try to juice their clients’ website rankings. They have two tactics: They pay writers to embed links in their stories, or they pay writers to pass off PR copy as a legitimate article to editors. They’re dark agents, taking advantage of cash-strapped writers and paying them to poison the sites they work for.

I understand the temptation. But just don’t do it. If I found that a writer was doing that, I would never work with that person again.

If you have a question for next month’s column, please submit it here. You can also tweet me @JoeLazauskas or tag me in the comments section of this incredibly creepy Facebook Live video from Monopoly.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do I Monetize My Content Marketing? appeared first on Contently.

That last startup-ism was lampooned last year in an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley when dozens of startups paraded on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to explain how they were making the world a better place: through software-defining data centers for cloud computing; through canonical data models that communicate between n-plugs; by revolutionizing the way you report bugs on your mobile platform. It’s a damn perfect parody, as evidenced by the fact that we have our own rah-rah maxim here at Contently: to build a better media world.

The primary reason I came to Contently as editor-in-chief was my belief in this mission—that by giving brands the access to world-class creative talent and powerful software, we could help them become publishers in their own right and tell great stories instead of flooding the web with intrusive advertising. Ultimately, that would mean: a) less shitty ads; b) more great stories; and c) all of my journalist/designer/filmmaker friends getting paid to do what they love.

Two years in, is this a realistic vision? I think so. I’ve seen our own editorial efforts deliver incredible business results for Contently, from cold, hard revenue to brand lift. And I’ve seen Contently clients like Amex, Coca-Cola, GE, and Marriott build internal media companies. I’ve watched the industry become more ambitious, and I’ve seen forward-thinking companies embrace content as the atomic particle that powers and permeates through all of their marketing efforts. I’ve seen journalists and filmmakers get paid well to do great branded work.

But while content marketing has positive momentum, it remains an experimental line item for most brands. It’s hard to do well, which is part of the reason most CMOs think their content is failing. Despite the good vibes, it’s easy to see the industry continuing to fall back on uglier alternatives—like the nearly $15 billion that’ll be spent on programmatic display advertising this year.

A world where intrusive advertising rules is one where no one wins—especially not consumers and content creators. And there are five main issues that keep me up at night, worrying that we’ll slink back into a dark age:

1. The undervaluing of editorial skills

All comics by Martin Kozlowski

The rise of content marketing has led to a lot more editorial positions that have popped up inside brands, which makes sense—you need people to write and edit and come up with ideas for all this content! What’s troubling is how some brands have tried to fill these roles: by trying to turn marketing managers into editors, copywriters into reporters, SEO specialists into content strategists. There seems to be a blind belief that great editorial skills are something you can develop overnight, especially with the help of a few content-ideation and headline-optimization tools.

That belief is insane. Great publications with loyal audiences require remarkable editorial talent. And remarkable editorial talent is still quite cheap. If brands don’t start hiring talented writers, editors, and content strategists, it’s hard to see them competing with the rest of the media world.

(See our guides to hiring here and here.)

2. Prohibitive bureaucracy

When it comes to content, most brands are running a race where their pit crew forces them off the track every lap.

Sure, when you’re creating a 30-second TV spot, you can afford to go through a 12-person approval chain and lengthy legal review. But not when you’re creating content every day. Editors need the freedom to experiment with new formats, different story types, and subjects that push boundaries. It isn’t just the lawyer getting cold feet, but also the brand manager mistakenly trying to force in product plugs, the comms manager killing every interesting quote with corporate banalities, and the VP of marketing who bottlenecks the entire edit calendar because he wants to sign off on everything.

So what does a successful content marketing operation look like? I’ve always been a fan of the model that Seth Godin suggested to me in an interview earlier this year:

I think the most important thing is to have an office that’s not in your building. I think what kills brands who try to be interesting is to have meetings where they’re not saying to senior management, “How can we be more interesting?” Instead, they’re saying, “How can we play this more safely?” That’s not what happens when you want to make a hit TV show or a website that people care about. You need editors, not brand managers, who will push the envelope to make the thing go forward.

So one easy way to do that is to set people up in an office down the street, only visit them once a month, and give them really significant metrics—not about pageviews, but about mattering. And give them the resources—not too much, just enough—to go do work that matters.

That kind of setup might be a little optimistic, but content creators do need some degree of autonomy within a brand if they’re going to succeed. (For another take, see John Hazard’s guide to brand approvals here.)

3. The campaign mindset

While doing research for my monthly “Best of Branded Content” column, I’ve come across tons of impressive one-off brand videos and microsites. The latter can be especially infuriating; these sites are loaded with dozens of articles and then left to die, a taxidermied ornament growing dusty in the corner of the branded content lodge.

All of this content is wasted because many brands are stuck in a campaign mindset. They’ll spend tons of money to create something shiny and awesome with an agency or publisher partner, but once that short-term opportunity ends, they don’t build on that momentum that can lead to a loyal audience over time. All of a brand’s content needs to be part of a cohesive whole, working toward clear goals.

4. Marketers who believe, “If you build it, they will come.”

There’s nothing more depressing than when a content team inside a brand overcomes tons of hurdles, creates some amazing stories, and then gets labeled as a failure because no one saw them.

When launching a branded content campaign, you absolutely need paid distribution for your content. Even if you have a million Facebook followers and a million Twitter followers, only a few thousand people, at most, will see your work.

I’ve seen brands budget hundreds of thousands of dollars on the actual content and then stop spending when it comes time to make sure people see that content. That gameplan is nuts. It’s never been easier to target the right audience for your content—from CMOs to Drake-loving yuccies—as Jordan Teicher detailed in his excellent guide on distribution platforms last week. Outbrain will drive readers from top pubs for $0.30 a click. When we promote a popular post on Facebook, we commonly see a CPC less than $0.10, a figure that drops even further if you’re promoting native videos. After all the trouble you’ve gone through, why the hell wouldn’t you spend $1,000 to put your content in front of 10,000 new people?

The math in favor of paid content distribution is stupidly simple, especially as we move toward a platform-centric universe that’ll serve up hungry audiences to anyone skilled enough to catch their attention. And to take advantage of the system, brands need to start devoting significant chunks of their media budgets to content marketing.

Bonus: Marketers’ ability to show ROI

Ultimately, content marketing will never become more than a side project for most brands if CMOs can’t demonstrate impressive ROI figures to the rest of the c-suite.

Unfortunately, there’s still a myth in the industry that you can’t really tie content to business results. (And if I hear that one more time, I’m going to lose it and run screaming through Content Marketing World in an orange speedo.) As I wrote in my content measurement playbook, it’s very possible to tie content to every stage of pipeline revenue by carefully tracking the impact your content has on the bottom line with marketing and sales automation programs like Salesforce and Marketo. And you can prove brand lift with a shoestring budget. None of this is easy, but if a bunch of English majors like us can figure it out, trust me, you can too.

But the ROI of content will be a mediocre proposition at best if talented people don’t have the freedom to tell great stories and have the resources to get those stories out there. You can’t solve one problem without solving all of them, and I hope we do. After all, when it comes to startup catchphrases, Make the world a banner-ad-infested slum just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

What content marketing issues worry you? Let me know @joelazauskas on Twitter.

The post 5 Content Marketing Problems That Keep Me Up at Night appeared first on Contently.

Content performance metrics are still being measured in the form of opens, clicks, pageviews, and shares. Thus, content marketers are getting better at leveraging a common formula: clickable headlines + paid distribution = numbers that look like success. Unfortunately, that success is often an illusion.

The real value generated from such metrics for a given content program could actually be zero, because audience engagement and loyalty may be limited to just that one campaign. The harder it is for content marketers to prove that their content results directly tie into a company’s overall financial success, the harder it is for them to ask for more money to produce better content and truly engage audiences over time. This is a huge mistake and a disservice to the marketing profession.

At companies that are attempting to link content more directly to shareholder KPIs, content marketers are quickly evolving into hybrid creatures: half editors, half data scientists. To succeed, these chimeras need a formula that goes one step further than attention time. The formula needs to consider the lifetime value of each audience member, and, more importantly, how to maximize that value from the best audience segments.

I’ve spent a lot of time in my career thinking about better ways to prove marketing attribution. That effort has evolved with the help of the latest marketing automation technologies. At Contently, we have the pleasure of looking at a treasure trove of content performance data in our own technology platform, which has allowed me to develop a pretty exciting formula for the content marketing world. We have lovingly named it ROCI [rock-ee], short for Return on Content Investment:

ROCI = (Revenue Attributed to All Content Marketing Assets – Total Content Marketing Spend) + (Share of Audience Attention * Fair Market $ Value of Target Audience)

In layman’s terms, this formula addresses the primary ROI measurement needs of direct marketers and brand marketers: revenue attribution and brand lift.

The first part of the equation focuses on revenue attribution. Revenue attribution consists of the hard dollar returns that companies gain from short-term campaigns (i.e., successful conversions from offers, discounts, downloadable assets, form fills). With the help of marketing technology, these returns are much easier to measure. However, there is a content production cost involved: the cost of the people required to make the assets and the cost of distributing those assets to their respective target audiences. When you subtract the production costs from the revenue earned, you get the first part of the formula, which is the net revenue earned in dollar terms.

The second part of the equation focuses on brand lift. Brand lift consist of the soft dollar returns, which are harder to measure but arguably just as important as hard dollar returns. These returns may never yield direct revenue, but positive brand perception earned can yield network effects that correlate to a dollar value as well. There are many documented ways to calculate brand lift, but the most important currency, in my opinion, is how much attention a brand can earn from an audience member—measured by the engaged time they spend with your brand’s content on their own accord.

Next, we can place a value on that time by calculating how much it would cost to “rent” that audience’s time through traditional and digital marketing channels. When you multiply the attention time your target audience is spending with your content by the fair market value of renting that audience (often with paid distribution metrics such as impressions and CPCs), then you have a soft dollar value for the brand lift you’re generating.

By combining the hard dollar return with a soft dollar return on content over time, you can optimize your marketing budget much more effectively. We believe that earning an audience and generating revenue organically is much better than relying primarily on paid media efforts to boost your marketing ROI.

It’s by no means a finished theorem, as solving the problem of true content value over time is incredibly hard and unique to each business model. But over the next few months, we will be working with the best minds in the marketing and data worlds to test and adapt this formula. If you have any thoughts, opinions, or insights, I hope you’ll let us know.

Ray Cheng (@Ray_Jing) is the VP of Marketing at Contently.

The post ROCI: An Exciting New ROI Formula for Content Marketers appeared first on Contently.

Improve your content measurement game with some of our best content measurement coverage:

The Ultimate Content Marketing Playbook No. 5: Measuring and Optimizing Your Content Marketing

7 Content Marketing Metrics You’re Probably Undervaluing

10 Charts That Are Changing the Way We Measure Content

Why Content Marketers Are Using All the Wrong Metrics (And What They Should Be Using Instead)

How We Calculate the ROI of Our Content—In One Duck-Themed Tale

The post Quiz: Are You a Content Measurement Expert? appeared first on Contently.

The Ultimate Content Strategist Playbook No. 5: Measuring and Optimizing Your Content Marketing

My fifth and final Ultimate Content Strategist playbook has dropped. A few reasons you should read it:

1. It breaks down not only how to measure the effectiveness of your content, but also how to put that content into action on a weekly basis to ensure that you get better over time. It’s based off the framework we use ourselves, and it freaking works.

2. If you want to know how to measure a specific brand goal, this playbook will tell you how.

3. I spent so much time on this that I haven’t finished Mad Men yet. So if you don’t, I’ll be kind of sad. Also, that flying book. Look at that freaking flying book.

WTF Is a Vertically Integrated Media Co., and Why Would I Want One?

Do you like complex media issues described through Miami Vice metaphors? Of course you do. And that’s why Contently VP of Content Sam Slaughter was put on this earth.

When I first started looking into this topic, an anonymous source led me to a well-known classic film called Miami Vice. To be clear, we’re talking about the Jamie Foxx/Colin Farrell/Michael Mann version—Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas were all about horizontal integration (hehehe). Anyway, Foxx and Farrell are talking to an informant about a Colombian criminal syndicate, and he tells them “they’re vertically integrated,” to which Foxx replies, “You mean they walk around with constant erections?”

Which actually is not what vertical integration within digital media is about—but it might as well be, given how much people seem to actually understand anything about the topic. Truth be told, the drug trafficking metaphor is actually pretty relevant to media companies. Read it.

The Financial Times Just Introduced a New Digital Ad Currency, and It Could Change the Web for Good

The end of slideshows may be near, writes Dillon Baker:

The bitcoin of digital ad currencies is here, and it’s being brought to you by your favorite 127-year-old salmon-colored newspaper.

Yesterday, the Financial Times formally announced that it will begin to sell ads based on a new currency: CPH, or “cost per hour.” Instead of selling ads per thousand impressions (CPM) or per click (CPC), as most in the industry still do, FT is betting that selling display based on time-spent with the ad in view will ultimately produce better results for both publisher and advertiser. Read it.

‘The Times Should Own Warby Parker’: Thrillist’s Ben Lerer on the Future of Commerce and Content

When I met Thrillist’s Ben Lerer on a grassy knoll, we talked about everything: girls, the Entourage movie, barbecue. Actually, we talked about none of those things. Instead, we discussed how the media and retail industries are converging rapidly, and what brands and publishers alike need to do to win. Read it.

Quiz: Are You a True Grammar Expert?

Take this quiz and feel good about yourself before you drink a 30 rack of Bud Light Lime and eat 17 hot dogs. We believe in you.

The post Content Catchup: The Ultimate ROI Guide, the Bitcoin of Ad Currencies, and More Must-Reads appeared first on Contently.

In meeting after meeting, I run across content marketers who worry that their work isn’t being taken seriously by the rest of the company. I like to give them an analogy to explain why:

Imagine that you’ve just been named the CRO of your company, and you’re trying a lot of new tactics to grow the business—hiring new people, opening new offices, or changing the price of your product. After a month or two, it would be reasonable for others to ask how each move affected the company’s bottom line. If you can’t answer with quantitative results, you’re left to conjecture—which, in our data-driven world, is a fast track to getting fired.

Unfortunately, this is how a lot of marketers are treating their content strategies; do a lot of things, but then only look at the total end result. In a way, this is understandable; content marketing is still new, and there’s a lot of debate about the best way to measure its effectiveness. Marketers are rightfully wary of investing time in the wrong content measurement strategy, but I’ve found that many are shooting themselves in the foot before they even get started.

Time and again, we see that there’s a simple, overlooked fix that produces huge results: tagging content is the foundation for successful content marketing operations.

You may be thinking that you can put this off—perhaps content isn’t a company priority, your operation is small-scale, no staff to backfill—but having a robust taxonomy can solve all three of those problems. It helps you demonstrate that content is supporting key business goals, compare content’s value in cross-channel campaigns, and optimize what your staff works on. The simple act of using tags and tracking their performance is often enough to get content marketers a seat at the big table.

Creating an effective taxonomy isn’t easy, but it’s not rocket science either. It’s important to know that at the start, you’re going to be wrong, and that’s okay! To cover the basics, considering the following categories: topic, type of content (by length, media type, etc.), audience (potential buyers, info-seekers, advocates), marketing campaigns (if you have multiple messages in digital), and business themes/goals (leads, signups, awareness).

It’s that simple. At the end of the quarter or month or week, check the results. For those that have been riding their intuition, the results can be shocking: what you thought was a great recurring topic or format may turn out to be a dud, while another may be surprisingly effective. But the important thing isn’t what’s performing—it’s that you’re accountable.

That’s the only way content marketers are going to get the budgets to play with the big boys.

The post Tagging Content: The Simple Thing Most Brands Get Wrong appeared first on Contently.