Content Reporting - How to demonstrate ROI to CEOs, CMOs, and everybody else

Content marketers face unique challenges when it comes to communicating results to stakeholders.

More than a third of  B2B marketers report that they don’t actively measure return on investment (ROI), and those that do often struggle to convey its value and performance in meaningful and compelling ways.

This can make it a lot harder to secure budget for future efforts, demonstrate your department's value, and even take pride in your work. For many marketers, it's also a recurring source of stress and frustration.

Fortunately, there are simple techniques for communicating value to stakeholders, no matter their expectations, objectives, or objections.

In this article, we look at some of the common issues content marketers face when reporting to leadership and offer guidance on how to overcome them.

Key Takeaways:

Differences in knowledge and responsibliity can cause disconnects between marketers and C-suites as well as with reporting. To remedy this, markteres should: 

1. Learn what stakehodlers care about and how they make decisions.
2. Focus on a few, high-impact, business-wide metrics.
3. Use story-telling to create a compelling narrative that's easy to understand.
4. Explain the overall impact of your results (the "benefit of the benefit").
5. Compare with competitors, industry standards, and past periods for context.
6. Stand on the shoulders of giants with existing templates, reports, and guidance.
7. Ask for feedback.

What Causes the Disconnect Between Marketers and the C-Suite?

Disconnects between content marketers and leadership often boil down to differences in familiarity and scope. As Christian Rigg, Eleven's Head of Operations puts it: 

To do their jobs effectively, marketers must “zoom in” on marketing, much the same way other stakeholders, like sales and account management, focus on their own objectives.

They may even focus on one particular aspect of marketing, such as content marketing or PPC.

The higher up the chain of command you go, though, the more “zoomed out” the focus becomes. Executives are charged with overseeing company operations holistically.

Like other disciplines, marketing can be very esoteric.

To the initiated, it’s a rich, fascinating and sophisticated balance of art and science. Marketers understand its value and are charged with ensuring its success.

But this isn’t the case with everyone you’ll be reporting to. Some of them may not be familiar with even basic marketing concepts. Plus, there’s no shortage of technical jargon to navigate.

Like generals on a battlefield, stakeholders need the right information at the right time to make decisions, free of distractions.

Ultimately, good communication is all about perspective-taking. Marketers must take time to understand their audience and report on what they care about.

Make few assumptions about what your audience knows, especially in the beginning. Focus on telling a story—the ‘how’ and ‘why’—rather than just ‘presenting the facts.’

Common issues in content reporting

All the disconnects noted above can manifest in various ways. Three of the most common are:

• Misalignment between reporting metrics and company goals. When marketing reports don’t ladder up to business strategies, the value of content marketing becomes unclear. It becomes harder to advocate for resources, and others may see content marketing as woolly or even frivolous.
  
  
• Busy reports that are difficult to digest. It can be hard to know what to include and why. As a result, many marketers find themselves including everything “just to be safe.” But even for marketing-savvy stakeholders, too many acronyms, instances of jargon, or numbers and figures can ruin a report. Don’t lose the forest for the trees.
  
  
• The data doesn’t tell a story. People understand things better when they’re framed as a series of interconnected, incremental events. To have a place in your report, each number, figure, and chart should tell a part of the story. Think in terms of Context → Event → Consequence. What was the situation, what happened to change it, and what’s the new situation? 

Best Practices for Communicating Content Value to Stakeholders 

We now know why content marketers sometimes miss the mark when communicating progress. Let’s explore strategies you can use to bridge the gap and make your case more effectively.

Know your audience

Start by carefully considering who your audience is. What information do they need to make decisions? What goals are they trying to achieve? Where do their responsibilities lie within the company? How familiar are they likely to be with marketing activity?

If you don't know the answers to these questions, set up meetings with key stakeholders to learn more about their concerns and interests. Take notes that you can refer back to when building and presenting reports, too.

Not only will stakeholders be more engaged, but they’ll appreciate the time and effort you put into understanding their needs.

Consider these starting points:

Communicate high-impact, business-wide metrics

It’s not always obvious to stakeholders why metrics like time-on-page, scroll depth, and engagement are important. But it’s hard to ignore your content’s value when you share the right metrics and connect them to broader business goals like sales, revenue growth, and customer retention. 

Bearing in mind the different priorities above, here are some metrics you may want to share with your stakeholders:

• Qualified leads measure the number of potential customers who meet specific criteria that indicate a higher likelihood of conversion. This metric helps assess marketing and sales effectiveness.
  

• Associated deal value represents the total potential revenue from qualified leads, giving insight into the financial impact of lead generation efforts.

• Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total revenue that a business may generate from a customer throughout their relationship with the brand. CLV is a useful ROI metric to show which customer segments are the most profitable over time. 

• Customer acquisition costs (CAC) measure how much you should expect to spend for a new customer, based on the customer’s potential CLV. A low CAC is a cost-effective strategy, like $1 in investment for a $3 return in revenue.

• Conversion rates show you’re attracting more people who want to complete a desired action that aligns with your KPIs—such as downloading a whitepaper or making a purchase. This metric can show the efficacy of marketing.

• Average sales cycle length helps illustrate the impact of content on customer acquisition. If deals exposed to certain types of content are closed more quickly, it’s a win for both marketing and sales. 

How do leading companies gauge success?

An Eleven SaaS client came to us with a problem. They had a large library of content, but it wasn’t clear from their existing, in-house reporting what strategies and content were performing best.

As a result, they were struggling to execute a fully data-driven content strategy.

We developed a custom report that draws on data from both Google Analytics and Jira, which houses the company's content pipeline and includes key campaign metadata.

The report focuses on five key metrics that we agreed would serve as our north stars moving forward:

New visitors, page visits, and three conversion events: free sign-ups, demo requests, and paid upgrades.

It instantly became clear how different content clusters and types of content were performing. This allowed their marketing department to paint a much clearer picture of returns on investment (ROI) and helped highlight important pain points and features for future releases.

Further reading: Check out our guide to calculating content marketing ROI for additional metrics.

Prioritize just a few key messages

Executives are busy; long, data-heavy reports risk losing their attention fast.

Streamline your reports to the three biggest takeaways to avoid overwhelming them with information they’ll only skim or may not read at all.

Limiting yourself to a few core messages will also force you to focus on the most important activities and outcomes and ensure graphs, figures, and charts all contribute to a meaningful narrative. 

Create a compelling narrative that tells a story

The best reports aren’t just clear and concise—they’re compelling, too. 

Treat reports like episodic content

This tactic comes from Jimmy Daly, co-founder and CEO of the content marketing community Superpath. Daly suggests that with each report, you remind readers where you left off and tease what’s to come.

Use the STAR method

The STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—helps you present your content marketing efforts in a structured, narrative-driven way.

• Situation: Describe the challenge or opportunity.
• Task: Define your goal or objective.
• Action: Explain what you did to address it.
• Result: Share measurable outcomes and their impact on the business.

This approach makes reports more engaging, ensuring stakeholders understand not just what happened, but why it matters.

Employ the SCQA framework

The SCQA framework—Situation, Complication, Question, Answer—structures your report as a logical progression that leads to a clear conclusion.

• Situation:  Describe the challenge or opportunity.
• Complication: Introduce the challenge or obstacle.
• Question: Define a key question that needs answering.
• Answer: Present insights or solutions that emerged. 

This method keeps reports concise and structured while leading stakeholders toward a clear takeaway.

Include visual elements

Visual elements should reinforce key insights, not just decorate the page. Use charts and graphs to distill complex data into digestible takeaways, prioritizing trend lines over raw numbers where possible.

Heat maps and flow diagrams can clarify user behavior, while side-by-side comparisons make before-and-after results instantly clear.

Every visual should have a clear label, brief contextual explanation, and alignment with the report’s narrative—if it doesn’t add clarity, it doesn’t belong.

Explain why your results matter (“benefit of the benefit”)

As a marketer, you may be familiar with the term, “benefit of the benefit.” It’s an age-old marketing technique that involves highlighting the downstream benefits of some positive change. 

For example:

“We increased organic traffic by 10%. As a result, 5% more qualified leads entered our pipeline. We were also able to reduce our reliance on paid ads, freeing up additional budget for other marketing efforts, like events.”

This is a useful technique, as it forces you to think about content marketing in terms of its overall business impacts. The further along the “benefits chain” you get, the broader the scope—just be wary of making grandiose claims unless you have solid data to back it up.

Create context through comparison

Adding context to reports will help your audience to understand the scale and importance of the figures and charts they’re seeing. 

To add context: 

• Highlight external factors that may have impacted the data, such as algorithm changes (such as Google Core Updates), industry trends, and global events (e.g. COVID-19).

• Benchmark results against KPIs to show incremental progress towards goals and add a temporal element to progress (ahead, on, or behind schedule) and against industry standards and competitors to highlight outstanding progress and identify opportunities for improvement.
  
  
• Compare results to past periods to highlight improvements or downturns in similar contexts (for example, in the three months prior or at the same time last year).
  
  
• Add qualitative data to tie numbers and figures to real-world experiences from audiences and customers. Comments from LinkedIn and feedback from leads on content they’ve interacted with can help bring successes to life.
  
  
• Provide both absolute and relative (e.g. percentage) changes: all progress is relative. Adding just 15 leads to a pipeline that normally manages 10 per month is an enormous step forward; gaining 5,000 visitors on a page that typically sees hundreds of thousands is relatively modest. 

Try to anticipate questions from your stakeholders, too. If figures have turned down from the last report or you’ve outperformed expectations, use context to explain why and put results into perspective. 

Stand on the shoulders of giants

There are hundreds of templates available online for all kinds of reporting software, including Google’s own Looker Studio (our studio of choice, especially when combined with Big Query). 

• Demand Metric offers an expansive database of downloadable templates for ROI reports
• Canva has dozens of free, professional-looking templates for all kinds of marketing objectives
• Hubspot offers free templates for Excel, PowerPoint and Google Workspace apps 
• Looker Studio has an entire section dedicated to marketing templates

You’ll also find many helpful guides out there on how to structure reports, like this one from Databox. 

Ask for feedback

Finally, ask for feedback from stakeholders and do your best to implement it for the next time. This is especially helpful when you first start reporting to a team or individual or after making changes to reports. 

Pay attention to the kinds of questions they ask during presentations, too. If you find yourself fielding the same questions over and over, you may want to add a relevant section to your report. 

Final thoughts

If you’d like help tracking and understanding your content’s performance and using data to optimize your content strategy, we’d love to hear from you..

Schedule a call today with one of Eleven’s content marketing experts today to learn more about how we’re helping companies like yours go further and do more with sophisticated reporting and analytics. 

‍