Every so often, usually when budgets are being looked at, someone senior asks me what the return on our content is. It’s a fair question, and I dread it, because the real answer is more complicated than the person asking wants, and less flattering to content than I’d like.
Content has a measurement problem that paid search doesn’t. When someone clicks a paid ad and buys, you can draw a line from the pound spent to the sale. When someone reads three of your articles over six months, learns to trust you, and eventually buys after searching your brand name, the reporting credits that final brand search, or whatever ad they clicked on the way in, and the content that did the actual persuading gets nothing. On a last-click view, content always looks like the weakest thing you do, which is exactly why it goes first when money is tight.
My argument, the one I make every time, is that content builds the demand the “efficient” channels then harvest. Cut it and nothing bad happens for a quarter; the pipeline you filled last year is still converting, so it looks like you saved the money for free. A few quarters on, the top of the funnel is thinner, your paid costs creep up because you’re working harder to convert colder people, and nobody connects that back to the content you stopped making.
That’s the case, and I believe it. But the other side has a point too, and pretending it doesn’t hasn’t helped me win the argument. Marketers over-claim for content. We produce a lot of it nobody reads, we measure the wrong things, and “brand awareness” gets wheeled out to defend work that genuinely isn’t earning its keep. A sceptical finance director isn’t being a philistine; they’ve been shown fluffy content metrics before and learned not to trust them.
So I don’t win this outright, and I’ve stopped trying to. What I aim for now is a fair hearing: keep the content that can show it’s doing something, be ruthless about the content that can’t, and stop asking for the lot to be judged on a last-click basis it was never going to survive. That’s the position I take into the meeting now, and it holds up better than the one I used to argue.
