There’s nothing quite like being asked to “prove content ROI” when you’re smack in the middle of presenting next quarter’s campaign roadmap.
You scramble to explain how that blog series probably helped a few deals move forward. You gesture vaguely at that product explainer video that likely nudged some prospects along. You say “engagement” a few times. And the CFO nods — but not in the good way.
Marketing budgets have plateaued at 7.7% of company revenue for two consecutive years, according to Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey. At the same time, the Content Marketing Institute finds that fewer than half of B2B marketers say their organization measures content performance accurately.
Flat budgets and fuzzy metrics aren’t a sustainable combo. To keep your seat at the table (and your budget intact), here are five plays that tie content to revenue in ways your finance team will actually care about.
1. Track Every Pass on the Field
If you’re only tracking last-click conversions, you’re missing half the game. Most content does its best work long before someone fills out a form by tackling intangibles — planting ideas, building trust, and answering questions a simple product page just doesn’t cover.
To show that impact, start mapping each asset to a stage in the buyer journey: Awareness, Consideration, or Decision. Then connect those stages to your CRM or marketing automation platform, so when a deal closes, you can see the full content trail behind it.
How to start:
- Look back at the past few quarters of content
- Assign a stage to each piece (gut instinct is fine to start)
- Add those tags to your lead or opportunity records going forward
This doesn’t need to be perfect or overly technical. Even a simple tagging system can surface patterns — like that one product-focused blog that keeps showing up in early-stage deals. Once you spot an asset like that, you can double down on its strengths or repurpose it for sales enablement.
2. Graduate to Multi-Touch Scoring
Content doesn’t win deals alone and rarely wins on the last touch. Think about the webinar a customer watched before even talking to sales — those moments matter. And they don’t typically show up in a last-click report.
That’s where multi-touch attribution comes in. It spreads credit across the full buyer journey so you can see which pieces actually pull their weight, even if they don’t get the glory of the final click.
There are plenty of examples of this process in action. Take, for instance, NineTwoThree Studio. The product design and engineering firm — a Contently client — used time-decay attribution to link AI-optimised articles to ChatGPT-driven sessions and generated more than $1 million in qualified leads within 90 days. The firm now ranks in the top results for 92% of its target AI queries.
You don’t need a team of data scientists to get started. Tools like GA4, Adobe, or even a well-structured spreadsheet can help you test different models, like:
- Linear, where every touch gets equal credit
- Time-decay, where newer touches get more weight
- Position-based, where you emphasize the first and last touch
Simple first steps:
- Grab six months of data from your CRM or analytics tool.
- Try out a basic model — even just assigning 40% to the last touch, 30% to the one before it, and so on.
- Compare it to your current reporting. Which pieces show up that you’ve been ignoring?
Chances are, a few early- or mid-funnel assets will suddenly look like quiet power players. And once you know what’s working, you can invest more strategically (and stop chasing disappearing clicks).
Contently’s analytics make this process even easier. Our Content Value dashboard automatically maps every asset you create on the platform to the buyer journey, and showcases how each piece contributes to pipeline, revenue, and retention. You can dig into performance by asset type, persona, funnel stage, or even custom goals, all without wrangling a mess of spreadsheets. Customers using this dashboard report seeing multi-million-dollar organic ROI and average audience growth of 40% in six months.
3. Trade Vanity for Value Metrics
Executives aren’t looking for vibes. They’re looking for value. So it’s time to swap out vanity metrics like views, likes, and bounce rates for numbers that actually tie to revenue.
Two great ones to start with:
- Cost per Assisted Opportunity: how much you spent on a content cluster, divided by the number of deals it helped close.
- Net SEO Value: a rough estimate of what your organic traffic would’ve cost if you’d paid for it via search ads.
Here’s a quick back-of-the-napkin formula:
Net SEO Value = (Organic Sessions × Avg CPC) – Content Costs
If that number beats your paid search ROI, you’ve got yourself a strong case for more investment in content — and fewer eyebrow raises at budget time.
The point of this exercise is to speak in a language your finance team already understands: efficiency, cost-per, and net return. When content starts showing up in those terms, it stops sounding like a gamble.
4. Turn Data Into Boardroom Stories
If you want your content program to resonate in the boardroom, ditch the 10-tab deck and boil it down to one powerful slide per initiative — your “Money Slide.” It should include:
- One standout chart
- One clear headline
- One quote that brings it to life
Here’s an example:
Headline: “Financial-literacy hub influenced $4.2M in Q2 pipeline — up 27% from last quarter.”
Quote: “This content made it easier to explain our product to clients.” — a relationship manager
This approach works especially well when showcasing cross-functional wins. Say your team localized hundreds of articles in a single day and saw a major bump in regional engagement. That’s a story. It’s also a great way to make future budget requests a lot less painful.
Here’s how one team turned a simple metric into a story that stuck: A leading financial-services enterprise recently localized 252 articles across 3 languages in one day, using Contently’s AI-powered workflow.
5. Tighten the Feedback Loop
Attribution is an ongoing rhythm. Set a recurring time (monthly, quarterly — whatever works) to check in on what’s performing, what’s lagging, and what needs a second life. That could mean trimming underperformers, refreshing outdated blog posts, or chopping long videos into clips people actually finish.
Small tweaks. Big lift. And just in time for the next budget review.
These days, it’s not enough to say content works. You’ve got to show how much it works — in language your finance team actually understands.
So map every piece to the buyer journey. Use multi-touch models to surface your real MVPs. Trade vanity metrics for ones that tie to revenue. Turn your reports into stories that stick. And keep refining as you go.
Do that, and the next time someone asks what content has done for the business, you won’t even need to say a word — your slides will do the talking.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):
- What if we don’t have fancy attribution software?
You don’t need a new tool to get started. A basic spreadsheet with deal IDs, content touches, and journey stages is enough to start spotting patterns. Over time, you can layer in GA4 or your CRM’s native reporting — no data science degree required.
Platforms like Contently can also help you scale when you’re ready by offering built-in attribution tracking, journey mapping, and cluster-level insights designed for marketers who want proof without pulling an all-nighter in Excel.
- Our leadership team still wants last-click numbers. Now what?
Run both. Put last-click and multi-touch side by side to highlight what’s missing from the old model. Early- and mid-funnel content that gets ignored in last-click reports often looks a lot more valuable with context — which tends to win over skeptics.
- How often should we review content performance?
At least once a quarter. Block time to audit what’s working, what’s slowing down, and where new opportunities are emerging. The more you build this into your rhythm, the easier it gets, and the faster you’ll have proof ready when budget season rolls around.
The post The Most Effective Ways to Tie Content to Revenue in 2025 appeared first on Contently.