Sometimes when I meet people and they describe their work lives to me, I’ll listen as they tell me what they’re doing and then follow up with a simple question: “how’s that going for you?” You’ve probably done something similar, and I bet that you rarely get “I don’t know” for an answer. I certainly don’t, and it concerns me when I do since how can you not have some feeling about so important a topic that occupies much of your waking day? 
What made me think of that was a report put out by the folks at Rundown. It took a look at how companies feel about their content creation process and the subsequent content marketing. It’s instructive to any business regardless if you’re doing content marketing or not. You can look at a summary of the report here.
Almost 80% of the surveyed content marketers agree or strongly agree that their team “makes awesome content that our audience loves.” That’s great, except for that pesky follow-up question – “how is it going?” You see, 52% of these same people disagreed that ” My team has a clear understanding of what works and why.” 55% disagreed that they knew how much each type of content costs to produce, and an astonishing 82% disagreed that they have a good understanding of the ROI on the content creation and marketing investment.
I’m not going to pontificate about in which activities a business should or should not engage. I will say, however, that no matter which ones they are, it’s imperative that there is a handle on costs as well as some measure of ROI. I am cringing as I think about answering any of the people for whom I worked with “I don’t know” when asked about what something cost or how it was impacting our goals (revenue, engagement, whatever). Resources are precious. So are measurable, actionable data about the results of activities we undertake using those resources. Saying you make “awesome content” (or anything else) doesn’t resonate with me unless part of “awesome” is moving the business forward. You?
Consult Keith 