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@Pranav Kale Most marketers worry about the output (numbers, traffic, and conversions), and not enough about the input (content quality, wow-factor, relevance, structure, and formats). If you’ve just started a new content marketing role (or are revamping your old one), dedicate six months just to experimentation. Create your best work — work you actually enjoy making and consuming afterward — and publish it as often as you need to. Don’t worry about the numbers at this point — that will only hold you back. This isn’t just a psychological hack to keep you focused — it’s also because it takes time for your content to get indexed and rank on Google, so tracking tiny changes to your traffic daily or weekly is unproductive. You’ll quickly get demotivated because you’re not getting results fast enough. At this point, it’s a lot more important to track other signals of content resonance: 1. Are people leaving positive comments under your social posts? 2. Are they replying to your email newsletters with feedback? 3. Are they referencing your content in sales calls? 4. Are they tagging their colleagues and friends in your content? 5. Are you getting called onto other people’s podcasts to share your insights? These qualitative signals are much more indicative of content success than ‘traffic’ or ‘clicks.’ Of course, getting buy-in from your manager or team is key to run a content marketing playbook this way. If they want to see instant results from content marketing, tell them to experiment with paid social or PPC for faster results — if they have the budget for that — while you do the slow, ongoing work of organic content marketing. To answer your question, content can play into both brand and performance marketing, depending on how fast you need results. For the former, you need time and creative freedom. For the latter, you just need money for ads. Of course, you can run both at the same time to support your overall marketing efforts.

Over and above everything else, I try to focus marketers (content or otherwise) on business impact. It's well and good to have a 10000% conversion rate on something but if it didn't have business impact it doesn't mean much. So whatever the actual job is, I try to have people think about: a. What the intended outcome is from a biz perspective (eg leads) and in what time frame? Treating everything like a hypothesis helps (ie If I do x, I expect to see y, measured by z) b. What did it cost to achieve those outcomes in that timeframe? You can get results but you have to do it in a cost-effective manner for the biz to succeed. The problem with the "don't worry about numbers" philosophy is that it lacks context. There is always a certain minimum of biz results that have to be achieved no matter what for you to then say that for x kind of activity don't worry about numbers. I think people miss out on that necessary foundation on which you build out a lot of these less measurable type activities.

1. If you are a content marketer, you will be focussing on input metrics as @Mo mentioned. 2. On the other hand, as a overall marketing team you would focus on output metrics, around traffic but also the user interaction with your content, time spent, next action, did people who signed up and became MQL, SQL, Customer interact with your content etc. This would involve instrumentation and user journey analytics.

@Mo that was brilliant. Thanks so much. Really appreciate the long, thoughtful reply.

@Pranav Kale This is why I said all of these conversations need context. At an early stage startup you cannot afford to do less measurable activities - the startup will die/not make its next round of funding. The reason you do direct response stuff early is because it is measurable and feeds the engine by building in predictability. At a certain point, the marginal returns of this work will decrease and you have to move higher in the funnel to more nurturing activities - but the systems and processes you build to measure effectiveness of direct response stuff helps you understand how to evaluate higher in the funnel activities. (Even here when its difficult, you can get directional info by simply asking your leads what tipped them over - it works very well) Only when these efforts mature does it even make sense to build broad awareness that have limited ways of measuring them. So again, it's very important to match the playbook to the stage, which means understanding whether you need to build a foundation first or whether you're building on a foundation.

makes sense @Anuj Adhiya.I really appreciate the thoughtful responses