IGNORANCE ≠ BLISS.
DON'T RISK SLEEPWALKING
INTO THE ABYSS.

marketing leaders think they can directly link content to the revenue it creates. Over half are somewhat confident, and 39% very. It’s a shame they’re all wrong, isn’t it?

Now, given the sheer might of the above stats, there is a chance you’re currently wondering what the fuss is about. You can track revenue via content, you’re thinking. The options to do this are A+.

Before we would be subjective about what it was like, we’d decide if it was good or not. We don’t need to do that because we can see in plain sight how that content is performing. That data is vital. If we see something isn’t performing to our benchmarks, we can change it and we can change it mid-campaign.

Darren Carter, Head of Marketing Campaigns, Morgan Sindall

THE DANGERS OF DICEY DATA

In reality, the pressure for marketing teams to drive revenue sees them use data—any data—to show their workings. But it’s a trap.

Think about it. Using hollow metrics (like click-throughs and bounce rates) to ‘prove’ a link between content and revenue is a bit like giving your fantasy football stats as evidence you can lease a car. This information is not useless, it’s just not relevant.

What is relevant are the drawbacks of bad data. In direct costs (like poor performance, lower productivity, flagging sales) and hidden ones (staff unhappiness, longer lead times, weak strategy) alike.

In a wondrous twist of irony, there is data (good data!) to prove the price of this. In 2022, a Forrester study showed that 21¢ in every marketing dollar spent was wasted, due to poor data quality. At enterprise firms, this means $16.5 million is lost every year, with $1.2m the bill for mid-sized firms.

The research also revealed bad data’s long tail. A third of marketing teams’ time was spent managing poor quality data, an average 26% of campaigns were negatively hit by it, and 30% of respondents lost customers as a result.

THE ART (BUT NOT SCIENCE) OF SALES

Though sales can feel self-evident, this is not the same as science. Forget the fact you can’t burrow inside the mind of your customer, so much of the buyer journey plays out in the subconscious—they don’t know the full story.

Marketing execs in our survey feel the lack of a link between content and revenue makes their job easier. (Just 1 in 4 say it makes things harder.) This either means they’re leaning into ignorance, or that the bulk of marketing leaders don’t yet grasp the gravity of the problem.

With that in mind, it’s time to put the frighteners on.

All of the data above shows that too many marketers are buoyed with wayward confidence—wrongly thinking they have all the right data. And (or) they’ve jammed their fingers in their ears. This puts marketing teams everywhere in danger, as they risk sleepwalking into the abyss.

Because, under the surface…