The Value of Content Marketing Can’t Be Reduced to ROI

I once worked with a chief marketing officer who claimed you can measure every aspect of marketing. I couldn’t disagree more. The value of marketing services does not directly correlate to the calculable ROI on those services. And this is true for content marketing as well.

When I say that we cannot reduce the value of content marketing to ROI, I mean it in three senses. Logically, not all marketing is measurable or meaningfully measurable. Empirically, marketing services are very often bought and sold without understanding ROI. And strategically, you can and should measure some aspects of marketing by ROI — others, not so. The key is to proceed accordingly.

1. Not all marketing is measurable as per basic logic

Of course, you can try to put numbers to all of marketing, and there are SaaS companies whose existence depends on convincing you that you can measure every marketing effort with a dashboard.

But basic intuition tells us this is false. You can’t measure all of marketing by return on investment or the revenue it generates because you cannot measure every single step in the customer journey, nor can you calculate with absolute certainty how much each touchpoint influenced the decision to buy.

To understand this, consider your own experience as a buyer of products and services. We use Gusto for HR at Sharp Pen Media, and I’ve probably both read Gusto resources (content marketing) and seen their ads (paid media). I can’t even decipher what exactly caused me to buy. It was mostly word of mouth in the form of colleagues’ recommendations, and marketing probably had some impact.

Should an ad campaign I saw two weeks before subscribing to Gusto get the credit for my purchase? Should Gusto double down on paid ads? What was the ROI of their blog posts and SEO investments or their search ad spend?

Attribution software can attempt to solve this problem, but it cannot solve it with absolute certainty, and it is destined to overweigh the easily measurable buying decisions — such as someone who downloads Gusto after reading a blog post with a download button or clicking on an ad — over the more complicated ones like mine. So, the likely result of trying to determine ROI for all marketing campaigns is that you will 1) use tools that offer approximations at best and pretend they're absolute truth or 2) only do the parts of marketing that can be more easily measured like paid ads.

Maybe this is why SaaS companies spending $100M on paid ads only spend $1 million per year on content marketing and PR. One channel isn’t 100x more effective than the other, but one is far more measurable and can more easily be reduced to ROI. So, the CMO who spends 100x on paid ads is less likely to lose her job when marketing has a soft quarter.

2. Companies often buy marketing without clear ROI

Buyers do not buy marketing purely on the basis of calculable ROI; this is a fact of how so much marketing business is done.

I present to you as a case in point: PR agencies.

I like PR agencies. I grew up in them as a marketer. I think they do extremely valuable work. For example, let’s say (as once occurred on a PR team I was a part of) your PR agency got you an investigative report in a high-profile publication explicitly criticizing your biggest competitors for shady practices while upholding you as a rare beacon of integrity. How much is that story worth? Especially if properly amplified, the story, I’d argue, is potentially worth millions of dollars — for one hit.

But anyone who tells you the impact of PR is 100% measurable has a bridge to sell you. Because the basic unit of a PR service — for example, that one investigative story — is extremely hard to measure in its precise value. (Again, tools exist for this, but they are at best approximations, and I assure you most PR veterans share the opinion that the tools are mostly bullshit, an excuse to allay the fears of clients who demand numbers.)

And yet plenty of PR agencies charge retainers upwards of $20k/mo. The largest PR agencies reportedly have clients who pay upwards of $1 million per year. This shows that, as an empirical fact, the value of many marketing efforts, including content marketing campaigns such as a ghostwritten op-ed (similar to the PR example), is not reducible to calculable ROI.

3. Some content marketing efforts lend themselves to ROI more than others; marketers should proceed accordingly

The message of this article is not to stop measuring marketing ROI. It is that some campaigns lend themselves to ROI more than others. Marketers should measure impact where possible while recognizing that not all impact is measurable. And they should decline to judge channels by ROI when that makes little to no sense.

In content marketing, for example, it makes sense to measure whether blog post readers are turning into customers, be that right after reading the blog post or in a follow-up visit. It also makes sense to assess how many white paper downloaders ask for a demo.

But, firstly, you need the right systems in place to measure that ROI; it’s unfortunately extremely common that marketing teams do not have such systems in place and then say, “Our blog isn’t influencing pipeline!”

Secondly, you need to take the numbers with a grain of salt. Let’s say 100 people download your white paper, and three ask for a demo within a month. You may then give the white paper credit for three prospects’ worth of pipeline. But how many of those prospects were already warm when they downloaded the white paper? And perhaps even more importantly, how many of them now know your brand due to the white paper and will become customers in six, 12, or 36 months due to repeat exposure? And when that happens, will you credit the white paper? Or the retargeting campaign? This is all to say that calculating ROI is far trickier than many make it out to be.

And then there are content marketing assets whose impact is frankly very difficult to quantify. It is nearly impossible to measure the ROI on a thought leadership byline placed in a journalistic publication. The impact of social content, which often fosters a yearslong relationship with buyers before they make a purchase, is also notoriously hard to assess.

So, measure what you can. But don’t let overly simple numbers on a dashboard exert undue and misleading influence over your marketing program. And don’t refrain from doing anything that doesn’t lend itself to easy measurement. Because, in that case, you’ll miss out on half the opportunities marketing offers to connect with your customers. And your competitors may not be so unlucky.