Contently’s recently published snapshot of the Marketing world, and its very modern anxieties, provides plenty of food for thought. Even allowing for the nature of the beast, it’s surprising to learn that only 9% of the industry are very confident their key metrics are effective in relation to content strategy. For which reason, it’s also instructive to look at their wish-list as well:

• 60 percent said that they wish they
could measure how people’s opinions of
their brand are changing because of
their content.

• 54 percent said that they wish they knew
how much more likely people are to buy
their products because of their content.

• And 47 percent said that they wish they
knew how much overall brand awareness
their content is driving.

What I want to think about here is accepting these same limitations, in an effort to work around them, instead of wasting time on fruitless attempts to roll them back. My reasoning for this is simple: you have to give the incalculable its due. All the more so when, as in the case of content strategy, you’re not primarily in the business of selling people products — these are more the glorious incidentals — so much as expressing the nature of a brand. And if you accept these frames of reference, the following is also worthy of acknowledgment: you cannot build an accurate spreadsheet of hearts and minds, even if these are your primary consideration. Which is why it’s better to accept this fact, as a starting premise, than hitch your strategy to a bunch of bogus KPIs. Similarly, it makes sense to devote more time and resources to creating a proactive vision than trying to quantify these same intangibles.
Or, to put it another way, in the absence of bankable data you need to get (and stay) on the front foot.

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Content?

Listening to customers in relation to products and services, and when gearing up to create content, are two different propositions, with distinctive considerations.
Confusing these separate demands is a recipe for big trouble.
Most great sales strategies are servile, in the truest sense of the word, answerable to the dictates of their customer base, dead-set on giving these people exactly what they want. This makes for a reciprocal arrangement which can be measured easily enough. For proof positive (or negative) of performance, we look to the sales channels, modify accordingly — with corresponding tweaks or herculean pivots — and account for these results in turn. All of which makes for an operation with plenty of working parts, a recognizable bottom line, and a logbook of cause and effect for us to refer back to and use wisely. Although content strategy is still about listening to the client/consumer, it’s not about answering her explicitly in each case. For while people are only too happy to tell you what they want from their tablet, or a pair of running shoes, or internet service provider, nobody is going to sit you down and explain which stories you need to tell in support of them. Nor do these stories always effect the same results. This is why there needs to be a more sophisticated awareness of what content can deliver upon, both in terms of brand value and increased revenue. Of course the two aims are closely aligned, but they’re never equally realizable (and there lies the rub).
So while sales strategies are demonstrative in nature, content strategies need to be highly expressive — in the service of what a company represents, as well as its product line. This not only involves dramatizing its composite legacy and core values, but also redefining the sum total of people’s perceptions over and over again, in answer to the present moment and the future up ahead. Translating these perceptions into words, images, moving pictures, and much more in the process: creating that vital shorthand by which the brand will come to be known. And while that’s a daunting challenge, it also represents a tantalizing proposition for anybody with an ounce of ambition. One which gives you a hell of a canvas to work with — if you’re only granted the proper license. Not a blank slate, by any means, but a narrative design which needs to be constantly redrawn with subtlety, imagination, and great purpose.
Given the scale of the challenge, and the nature of its complexities, it’s only natural for marketers to get antsy. The same goes for pretty much everyone else: not least those companies who’ve made an art form out of measuring their performance as a whole. And yet the dictates of content marketing, and the string of hyperactive unknowns that go with them, aren’t going away any time soon. In fact they’re only set to become more pronounced.

Just Because It Isn’t Rocket Science Doesn’t Make It A Piece of Cake

So what should we give our attention to, content-wise, in the absence of definitive measurements?
Excellence, wit, flair, generosity, educative drive, dynamism, rigor, bravery, wildness. The list goes on and on. If there’s one general principle, then it’s never to apply any of these qualities in equal measure, but always in specific relation to the project at hand. This, as much as anything, is what content strategy amounts to:
Painstaking care of duty to the brand by way of addressing the specifics and then providing a greatly imaginative response.
Given this daunting remit, it’s essential to bring the best people on board, give them the tools to work with, the freedom to do so, and the patience to evoke a story which can be woven into the fabric of the company itself. One which will produce lasting benefits, meaningful affiliation, and fandom in the best of all worlds. None of which is going to happen over night. Nor can it consist merely of what you think your customer base wants to hear.
Everything needs to be stretched.
For any of this to happen there also needs to be a recognition among senior management that KPIs on a daily or weekly basis do not always serve a content strategy well. Not only is this insistence on fleeting indicators different from content effectiveness; it’s just as likely to jeopardize any enduring results. And while it’s no doubt important to heed analytics, and make sure that you remain properly briefed by them, it also makes good sense to assert a creative vision and a commercial ethos and seek to determine an identity for yourself.