Halloween is a time for scary stories that keep you awake at night. So, turn off the light and pass me the torch, as I tell you a tale as familiar as it is terrifying—a tale about the bogeyman under every content marketer’s bed: ROI.

It’s the monthly reporting meeting. The applause for September’s sales numbers finally dies down as Sandie from Sales passes you the clicker. It’s your turn to reveal what Marketing has accomplished over the last few weeks.

You enthusiastically click on your slides, packed with the same kinds of graphs and charts every other department head has in their decks. You’ve pulled data from every platform available to you. Your latest blog post attracted 2,000 visitors to the site. Click. LinkedIn engagement is up 80% month on month. Click. Last month’s e-book achieved ~500 downloads. Click.

Presentation over, you wait for questions. The CEO gives you a blank stare. You reach for the water (suddenly, it feels really hot in here). A couple of others around the table share awkward glances, as if you’d just rattled off the annual rainfall in Guatemala by mistake.

Eventually, the CEO asks, “Yes, but what did we actually get from all that?”

Welcome to a nightmare world where everything you do must justify itself with immediate, measurable ROI.

**Shudder**

Whether or not you’ve had a similar boardroom experience, most content marketers will be familiar with the creeping dread that takes hold when asked to prove ROI. How? You can’t present highly attributable metrics like the SEO team does, nor can you provide unambiguous revenue metrics like Sales. Content marketing just doesn’t work like that.

Yet this obsession with ROI persists. The bottom line is everything. Revenue is king. If you’re not measurably contributing to those two things, you’re a cost centre. And cost centres must work even harder to justify their budgets.

Ironically, this one-dimensional view of content marketing’s value undermines the very thing such data-led reporting is meant to encourage and protect—marketing effectiveness.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: marketers are largely to blame for this.

According to Boundary Analytics’ 2025 State of B2B Marketing Measurement report, “71% of CMOs say they pursue marketing tactics they can measure more easily”. Instead of choosing metrics to reflect our strategic goals, we’re choosing tactics that reflect the available metrics.

We’re our own worst enemies. We’ve spent years reporting on metrics that sound impressive but ultimately mean nothing to the people holding the purse strings. Digital platforms and SaaS products make it easy by flooding us with data and analytics, but now we’re paying the price.

The content marketing measurement trap

When you build a factory, you don’t magically recoup the entire cost within a month of finishing construction. The building and everything in it are assets that will eventually generate a positive return after many years.

Content marketing works the same way. You need to build a substantial body of work, establish topical authority, and create enough touchpoints for potential customers to move through their buying journey. And all of this takes time to gain traction; even longer before you’ll start seeing meaningful results. We’re talking months and years, not days and weeks.

While content marketing is slow to ramp up, when it does achieve momentum, the gains are also slow to drop off. You could stop publishing entirely and still see benefits for 18 months or more as your existing content continues performing.

But here’s the catch: tThe average CMO tenure is roughly four years. As Forrester reports, “CMOs often find themselves on the defensive—struggling to prove ROI, hold ground with finance, and avoid being scapegoated for declining growth. Marketers tend to be the first cut and the last to be re-funded.” Never mind that a return might take two years to arrive; the question becomes what can you do for us this quarter?

The CMO is placed in an impossible position. Required to demonstrate short-term ROI, they resort to metrics that might look good in monthly reports but don’t actually prove anything. They fall into the trap of reporting on activity instead of outcomes. Publishing ten blog posts every month might sound productive, but what did those posts really achieve?

Hence why too many companies quit just before their content starts paying off. They invest for six or nine months, see limited results, and pull the plug—never realising they were on the cusp of gaining momentum.

Measuring outcomes, not activities

At some point, you may have come across the line:

“Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave.”

Lately, it’s treated as some sort of business aphorism, but the original quote is from a 1990 book by business philosopher Eli Goldratt. The following line in the book is even more pertinent.

“If you measure me in an illogical way, don’t complain about illogical behaviour.”

Requiring content marketing to demonstrate a clear ROI in a short period of time is completely illogical. But it’s no more illogical than attempting to justify continued investment in content marketing with little more than a bunch of engagement and vanity metrics.

Marketing technology has given us an unprecedented ability to measure everything in increasingly granular ways. Google Analytics tracks every page view. Email tools report open rates and click-throughs. Social media platforms serve up entire suites of engagement metrics. So naturally, we report on all of it.

But these metrics tell us very little about whether our content is working as intended.

Consider the humble white paper (or e-book, if you prefer), a cornerstone of B2B content marketing. Marketers celebrate high download numbers as proof their content is valuable. But what does a download actually prove?

It proves you wrote a compelling email and created an enticing title. That’s it. You’ve no idea how many people even opened the PDF. Who among us doesn’t have a downloads folder full of old white papers they still haven’t read?

And if some people did read the paper, was it any good? Did it deliver value to them? Did it motivate an action or influence them in any way that might ultimately return some value to your business?

I can’t give you some handy metrics to measure those outcomes, because they will largely be shaped by your own strategy and how you follow up on these downloads. In short, you need to think strategically about what you’re trying to achieve with each piece of content and find a way to measure the outcome, not the activity.

Connecting outcomes to value

All of this is much easier for B2C companies. The journey from need to awareness to conversion is usually quite short.

B2B buying journeys are much more complex, involving multiple decision-makers and lengthy sales cycles. Added to this, only a small fraction of your potential market will be actively looking to buy at any one time.

You’re never going to be able to attribute the sale of a five-million-dollar piece of industrial equipment back to a single email campaign or blog post. Content marketing doesn’t work that way. It’s the collective body of work that has value, not individual pieces in isolation.

A single blog post might introduce someone to your brand. A webinar six months later might qualify them as a lead. A case study another three months down the line might finally give them the confidence to request a demo.

Which piece deserves credit for the eventual sale? All of them? None of them? The question itself is wrong.

Business value isn’t confined to revenue or bottom-line impact. An audience of potential customers has value. A library of information-rich and topically relevant content has value. A growing and active email subscriber list has huge value.

But they’re still not outcomes. A shovel has value, but only if you use it to dig a hole. If it sits unused in the shed, the potential value is never realised. Similarly, a fast-growing email list might generate some impressive numbers, but the value is only extracted if it contributes to a business outcome.

Your strategy needs to demonstrate how the various tactics, channels and campaigns work together to deliver tangible business outcomes your C-suite won’t question.

  • Are your leads better qualified?
  • Does your content lead to a shorter sales cycle?
  • Are you reducing customer support calls?
  • Is brand loyalty increasing?
  • Are repeat sales on the rise?

Start by defining what success looks like for each piece of content, each channel, each campaign. What purpose does it serve? A blog post drives awareness of a webinar series. The webinars capture leads. A follow-up email sequence qualifies those leads. A case study helps Sales to close deals.

Each step has a different measure of success. The blog post should be measured by webinar registrations, not page views. The email sequence should be measured by qualified leads, not open rates.

Winning over the CFO

CFOs don’t care about impressions, followers, or engagement rates. They only care about metrics that appear on financial statements—metrics directly impacting profit and loss.

Reporting outcomes instead of activities makes it easier for you to translate your work into terms your CFO understands and values, connecting your content marketing with metrics they care about.

Two such metrics are: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV).

If your content marketing strategy is working, you should see CAC decrease over time. When prospects are better informed, aware of your value proposition, and already inclined to trust you, it becomes much easier to qualify leads and close sales. Fewer resources are wasted on unqualified leads, while the sales cycle shortens.

Similarly, effective content should increase CLTV. Customers who engage with your content are more likely to understand your products better and use them more effectively. This leads to longer retention, more upsells and cross-sells, and higher CLTV.

Both outcomes point to lower costs and higher profits. This is the language CFOs speak. These are metrics that justify ongoing marketing investment because they demonstrate clear business impact.

Stop chasing numbers and chase outcomes

An obsession with ROI will always push marketers towards short-term thinking and meaningless metrics at the expense of long-term strategy and growth. We chase engagement numbers and download counts because they’re easy. But eventually, someone will ask why they matter.

Stop measuring activity and start measuring outcomes. Treat content marketing as what it really is: cCapital expenditure to build long-lasting brand assets. Speak the language of finance. Be brutally honest about what content can and cannot do.

The question isn’t whether content marketing can deliver a positive ROI. It’s whether your strategy is set up to deliver (and measure) the right outcomes to bring that ROI about.

Let SALT help you with your content marketing strategy

If you’d like to know more about how SALT can help your business achieve measurable results with content marketing, get in touch to book a free video call.

In your 20-minute discovery session, we’ll discuss:

  • Your business and marketing goals
  • How our content strategy unifies your digital marketing activities
  • How to transform your content expense into a strategic investment through the creation of long-term brand assets
  • How to use AI to give you a competitive edge
  • No pressure. No obligation. Just 20 minutes of actionable insight.