Let’s get fiscal: translating content impact for business leaders

This is part 1 of a 2-part guide to content impact measurement. Part 1 focuses on the strategic side of things. Part 2 focuses on practical and tactical implementation.

Content has a translation problem when it comes to measuring impact and communicating value. There’s a disconnect between what we care about as content professionals, and what matters to the leaders we report into.

One of the things I love most about content folks is how much we care. We care about doing the right thing, about the user, and their experience. We care about accessibility and inclusion. We care about quality, principles, and standards. We care about processes, governance, and spreadsheets. 

But the leaders we report into don’t care about any of that. They might feign interest because they’re a good leader and/or a good person, but it’s not what matters to them, and it doesn’t help them. 

Leaders care about:

• How content contributes to their overall strategic goals, whether that’s at an organisational level, or at a marcomms, digital, or product level
• How content is supporting success for the priority projects and initiatives they’re focused on
• What makes them look good to their boss, their peers, their board or trustees

And ultimately:

• The return on investment content is delivering

This mismatch leads to a lot of frustration. And it’s perhaps the reason for one of the most enduring frustrations in content: lack of recognition and the lack of investment that follows (especially when compared to other parts of the digital design system). 

To change this and for our value to be seen, we need to measure what matters to our leaders, speak their language, and keep the content nerdiness under wraps. In short, we need to think like a business/organisation leader, not like a content practitioner.

What you need to do to help leaders understand content impact

Above everything else, we’ve got to connect content actions to business/organisational outcomes. And to do that you need to have a really good set of KPIs (key performance indicators).

To work out what your KPIs should be, think about the business/organisation model and the overall thing it is trying to do. If you’re selling products or services, this might be about creating profit through sales or subscriptions. If you’re a nonprofit, this might be about progress towards a mission through connecting people to services or getting donations. There should (hopefully) be some ‘north star’ KPIs for your department or the organisation as a whole that you can use as a foundation. 

With a clear understanding of what the organisation wants to do, you can start to think about the role content plays in that. This is about unpicking your strategy and being able to show your working out for why you think this content is the right way to reach the goals.

There are a few different angles that you might want to consider the problem from:

• Conversion attribution: How can you assign credit to content for a meaningful conversion or interaction? For example, the number of people that content brought into the funnel, conversion rate of users who interacted with content vs users who did not, number of qualified, relevant leads from content behind a sign-up. 
• Cost reduction: How is content saving the organisation money? For example, money saved by ‘help’ content deflecting customer support queries (support tickets avoided × average handling cost), how customer/donor acquisition cost via content compares to other channels (direct mail, events, telemarketing), or how content governance reduces the risk of costly legal action.
• Retention and life-time value: How is content helping to retain customers and create more valuable customers? For example, the impact of content interventions on customer churn.
• Benchmarking: How does our content impact compare to other similar organisations? (This is a great idea in theory, but in practice, it can be hard to get this data.)

We’ll explore how to do this in more detail in part 2.

Conversion attribution modelling can be painful for content

Attribution modelling is a pain point for many content teams. It favours channel/platform/product owners rather than content teams. It can be hard to show where content makes a difference, because everything is content and nothing is content at the same time. For example:

• The content team produces a landing page, but the revenue is attributed to the paid media team who ran the campaign driving the traffic to that landing page.
• The content team produces a video asset, but the social media team gets credit for the engagement it drives when they share it on their channel.
• The content team creates UX copy that plays a critical role in the revenue from a product, but that’s attributed to the product team.

Multi-touch attribution can help address this, but it doesn’t fix everything. Speak to the teams who are publishing, sharing, using, or reworking your content and ask them about how content factors into their success and failure. They might be able to do some of the impact measurement for you, or help you to tell the story. For example, how a change in copy on a landing page increased conversion. 

You can also look outside conversion attribution, and focus more on some of the other areas. If the way your content is published and shared with users is totally out of your control, cost reduction might be a better area to focus on. For example, showing how you’ve saved costs by increasing reuse of content assets.

Dealing with poor leadership or a lack of direction

Sometimes you’ll be working in a situation where direction or leadership is lacking. Maybe there’s no strategy to guide you, or no sense of what those north star KPIs are.

There are loads of reasons this can happen: external disruption, periods of uncertainty, someone new joining and needing time to get up to speed, poor internal comms, and sometimes, people who are just not great leaders.

In these kinds of situations, you have options:

• Ask. If you have access to, and a good relationship with, your leader, you can ask for the direction you need. You might get what you need, or you might spark them to start thinking about it.
• Guess. You might be able to have an educated guess about what matters. Some organisations – especially smaller ones – don’t have a strategy or those core KPIs because there’s a sense that they’re obvious. This can be risky – so check your assumptions.
• Run. This is also a big red flag that you might want to get away from – fast. It might be by moving your focus away from impact measurement and onto something else, or by looking for a new, better role.

…and what might harm your credibility (AKA vanity metrics)

You’ll notice that none of the things we just listed are the metrics that often get thrown around when it comes to content. They’re things that can ultimately be translated into cold, hard, cash terms.

All too often it’s vanity metrics that are causing the translation issues between content teams and business/organisational leaders. These numbers don’t really say anything meaningful about the impact content is having. 

Some key examples of vanity metrics include:

• Page views: A page view means nothing. The user could have bounced, the view could be a bot, they might not be from your target audience.
• Engagement rate: Things like page engagement, scroll depth, time on page can be helpful to content folks in iterating and optimising content, but to leaders they’re meaningless.
• Publishing volumes or frequency: Lots of content ≠ effective content and a busy content team ≠ effective content team.
• Downloads: The download is just the start. Who downloaded it? What did they do next? 
• Search rankings: Ranking number one for something might sound good, but what matters is whether that keyword drives the user interactions you want. 

Handling people who are happy with vanity metrics 

You might encounter leaders who don’t want your elegant and strategic KPIs and ask you for the chart from GA4 showing page views.

Sometimes this is because those vanity metrics are a comfort zone. Maybe it’s what they’ve always used, maybe they feel uncomfortable because they don’t understand the new KPIs, maybe they see this as a risk.

Solving this could be another translation issue. To get them on board with a new KPI, you might need to show your working out in detail. Or it might be about a compromise and doing both. For example:

• 50K page views on Key Content Page becomes
• 50K page views on Key Content Page > Leading to 5K using the map tool to find their nearest in-person service > Correlating with 5% more self-referrals at in-person services

An imperfect impact model is better than nothing

Once you have an impact model and your KPIs, you might be able to think about working out your Return on Investment (ROI).

The basic formula for ROI is: 

(Return - Investment) / Investment × 100 = ROI

For example for a charity, this might look like:

Return of £1.08m in tracked donations - Investment of £184k = £896,000

£896,000 / £184k investment x 100 = 486% ROI

Investment is pretty straightforward. For content, investment means things like:

• Personnel (staff costs, freelancer/agency fees)
• Tools and technology (CMS, analytics, design software)
• Distribution costs (paid promotion, email platforms)

But the return side of things is tricky. It will depend on what your KPIs are, how easy it is to turn them into something cash based, and whether you can access the data you need.

In my experience, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll be able to work out your ROI right away. And maybe you won’t ever be able to get it down to that single, perfect number. There are a lot of barriers. You might not have the analytics you need. Maybe there’s no CRM system. Maybe the different tools aren’t connected. Maybe you don’t have the time to gather and analyse all the data.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t communicate impact to your leaders. Showing impact with an imperfect or incomplete model and KPIs is better than nothing. By moving past vanity metrics and starting to track solid, strategic KPIs that connect content actions to business/organisational outcomes is powerful. Sharing a one-page document that gives a clear breakdown of how content makes a measurable difference to a single core strategic objective will almost certainly make more of a difference than a 30-page report stuffed with vanity metrics. Leaders are likely to notice and appreciate the effort you’re making to speak their language.

Impact measurement to-do list

1. Speak to your leaders about what they want to see and what matters to them (if you don’t already have a handle on this)
2. Make sure you know the relevant strategies, goals and KPIs that your work feeds into back to front and inside out
3. Study the content you’re producing – what’s the mechanism by which it creates business/organisational value? And what are the KPIs that you can use to evidence this?
4. Pick one KPI and make a plan for how you will start measuring and reporting on it

Reading list

• Nicole Michaelis, The future of content is not what you think it is, Lead with Tempo
• Ruth Stokes, Tracking the impact of our content design work
• Clifford Sheppard, How service-specific performance indicators can improve a service, GDS
• Tim Stobierski, How to calculate ROI to justify a project, Harvard Business School