Throughout my marcom career, I’ve had the privilege of taking on roles in organizations of various sizes—from large enterprises to marketing and PR agencies to start-up tech companies. When it comes to the influence of marketing and communications within these organizations, I’ve come to the simple conclusion that size matters. The larger the organization, the more integrated and strategic the marketing and communications function. The smaller the organization, the greater the degree of skepticism towards marketing.

Content Insights: Measurement and Optimization

It’s a strange thing to witness leadership teams, in mainly medium-sized B2B companies, casting a highly suspicious glance at their marketing team and their spend, while never questioning the value of Joe in accounting or Sally the office manager. Yet this shouldn’t be the case.

Everything about marketing’s performance can be measured. Beyond measurement, everything about marketing’s performance can be benchmarked and optimized. Uberflip’s recent eBook The Ultimate Guide to Content Insights hammers home this point with the notion of a content insight, which is, “a deep understanding of content performance through data that is used to improve your content marketing performance.” The eBook gives a comprehensive overview of marketing analytics, scoring, ROI, and reporting.

The Leadership Conversation, AKA, Company Politics

There’s a lot to learn from this eBook, though what resonated with me most was Michele Linn’s chapter on Measuring Content Marketing ROI. This chapter alone mentions “leadership teams” four times, so it’s worth noting why.

Michele sums it up in her point that, “you need to have an understanding of what success looks like in your organization and what metrics your leadership team cares about so everything can be tied to these.” The read-between-the-lines implication of this approach is that as a marketer, you need to have hard, difficult conversations with leadership. In cruder terms, you need to engage in your company’s politics.

Michele gives the reader a breakdown of some simple, effective ways to get the content marketing conversation started, which I’ll loosely paraphrase:

• Case studies and examples of brands using content to build their business
• Help leadership teams see that content marketing has benefits beyond revenue
• Show the team how content published today can be leveraged in the future (e.g., to drive traffic, etc.)
• Figure out what matters to your executive team in the short term before tying content to revenue
• Compare your content marketing program against the costs of traditional advertising to demonstrate value

Politics is a double-edged sword that has the potential to be combative or transformative. As marketers, we know that the road to transformation is lined with metrics, every step of the way. The task ahead is to spread the word, convince the skeptics and generate buy-in from the team.

Have you leveraged content insights with your leadership team? Why or why not? Share your experience in the comments below.

Leverage the best insights from your content to present to your team. Learn how in The Guide to Content Insights.