I am a content creator trying to tie our success metrics alongside business objectives to better illustrate our marketing impact. Which metrics / presentable information have you found to have the most impact in internal meetings?  (ie: I frequently share the increase in views on certain content pieces, or increased engagement on social media - but I would like to further illustrate how these views or engagements are driving leads or leading to sales)

Josh covers a lot of good points about making every piece of content trackable and gathering data on form fills—if that's the marketing strategy that content generates leads.

In my opinion though, the main goals for marketing content these days are for brand awareness and customer education/nurturing. And if that's the case, then customer surveys about what content they've seen/engaged with and market surveys about brand awareness will be more useful in building the case for the value of content.

If your marketing funnel involves form fills, track those and identify where they're coming from. Tie them in to campaigns, launches, initiatives, etc... This is the simplest way: people give you their information, and you use analytics tools to see which pieces of content they engaged with before connecting with someone.

Overall, I think you're talking about marketing attribution, which is a very tricky topic for many marketers to grapple with. But the short version is: there's a moment where the prospect and a sales person connect for the first time. Figure out how that happened, why, and which marketing assets were involved. Metrics related to those assets are what you care about.

So make sure every piece of content is tagged and trackable as much as you can.

From a strategic perspective, make sure you present the impact of your content not on its own merits, but as it links to and supports individual campaigns or sales initiatives that others are leading or participating in. That way, you become less of a competing voice in the room and more of a team player lifting everyone else up (which is, in essence, one of the primary purposes of marketing).

In terms of metrics to share, you first need to understand what stakeholders care about and identify how your content can impact those numbers. It's not just revenue, it would be something specific. So if you're talking about leads, as per my comments above, you want to be tracking where people came from before they became a lead.

Another thing to keep in mind is that every industry and business is different, and so are their customers. So try your best to apply advice you receive to your context with a grain of salt. It's not necessarily true that just because people are watching your webinar that they're also signing up, trying your product, or buying more, unless you have hard data to prove it.

But those things DO help with raising brand awareness, which is always a good thing. So if your views and engagement are high, great! You're helping people become more aware of the brand. But if you want to show how you're driving leads, you need different tools and those tools will depend on the content you're creating.

Good luck!