But while investors, finance teams, and SME leaders have just been happy to see growth in the amount of content marketing a company was doing, that situation is changing fast. In a challenging economic environment, financial leaders increasingly want to see clear evidence that all that funding of marketing has been worthwhile.

The problem is that, at the moment, many marketers and SMEs are failing to provide this. This could have serious repercussions for their companies’ strategy, sales funnels, and even marketing jobs. They need to employ new, technology driven ways of proving that content marketing is creating actual income – and fast.

There is a tendency to rely on well-used but fairly blunt measures of content success, such as page visits, video engagement and even qualified leads. But these really don’t show how a piece of content has directly led to a sale or other form of income. They show that a potential customer interacted with a company but there’s no clear path to revenue.

We have clients who have spent thousands producing and distributing high-value content, such as video, that gets good numbers of clicks or views. So they are going to push more money towards this type of work. But when you examine things more closely, it might be that their thought-leadership has had fewer clicks but led to much more in-depth engagement and actual sales, whereas video would work better for other companies. Clicks and downloads are vanity metrics here. They simply measure quantity, not quality.

Marketers and SMEs rely on such measures out of habit. They are also easy for senior leaders and other parts of a company to understand. These are habits that need to be broken.

If such basic metrics fail to attribute ROI to a project or function, it’s not going to be invested in, in the future. This can lead to companies neglecting valuable sales channels. It can undermine their messaging and inventiveness in their external communications. It may ultimately reduce their customer reach and income.

I know of clients who have been on the verge of ripping up certain marketing strategies because they didn’t have the data points to prove their worth. When that data has been sourced, it’s clear that scrapping the strategy would have been a really bad decision. They would have been scratching their heads at the sudden loss of revenue, asking “What went wrong?”

An inability to demonstrate the worth of content marketing, can also lead to marketing teams being marginalised or disconnected from other parts of a company, particularly sales and finance. This leads to silos and reduced company efficiency.

I even know people who have lost their job because their business didn’t understand the value their role was bringing.

Almost half of marketing leaders say they have felt a growing expectation to deliver revenue. Now is the time to prove their real worth by using centralised computer and AI platforms that provide a much more nuanced and granular link between content and revenue than simple page likes and downloads.

SME teams and marketers need to make growing use of technology that records and analyses customer pipelines, and intent and influence signals that content creates.

Platforms such as HubSpot and Marketo, or even platforms that have been built in-house can be effective tools here. Turtl’s revenue content platform provides clear evidence of the ROI of different marketing activities.

One of our clients, Kantar Worldpanel [now Worldpanel by Numerator] had no way, beyond downloads, of proving that content was leading to sales. This made it hard for it to optimise content or budget strategy and led to missed opportunities. But using Turtl helped it see which content worked best and it went on to triple sales opportunities through one pipeline.

AI is a particularly effective tool for bridging the gap between revenue and content.

It can analyse thousands of data points within seconds and, when part of a reporting platform, can provide constant feedback on content success. This can lead to continuous refinement and exponential revenue growth.

It is impartial too. It will provide objective, data-driven summaries of how content is performing, whereas analysis from a marketing team or director may be a little more guarded or qualified.

Content can continue to have a bright future as marketing tool for SMEs and other companies. But it is time that the latest technology was harnessed to reveal its true worth. If not, it is likely to be overlooked or, conversely, overused to the detriment of sales and even an organisations’ long-term viability.