In defense of squishy reporting

Don’t go crazy tying marketing efforts to revenue. There’s value in the squishy results, too.

Author

Joe Michalowski
October 11, 2023

When I started creating content for Mosaic, the company’s website was three months old and I was working at an agency.

After about six months, Mosaic brought me in-house and I had what was probably the most eye-opening conversation of my career with the CEO.

I hopped on the Zoom chat, we spent a couple of minutes on small talk, and then he said:

“If you had told me a year ago that we’d be making sales from blog posts and ebooks on the website, I probably would have laughed.”

The Mosaic founders all have finance backgrounds. Financial statements, spreadsheets, and cold, hard numbers were their primary language for years.

But as they were running sales calls themselves, they were seeing the value of content marketing in real-time.

There was no robust reporting infrastructure for marketing, much less content. No attribution model showing which blog posts were driving leads, pipeline, and closed-won deals.

Just comment after comment from prospects saying they love our content, found us through it, or reached out because of it.

Those qualitative results were all the founders needed to double down on content investments.

But squishy, anecdotal feedback wouldn’t be enough on its own as the company matured.

And as the quantitative reporting infrastructure came to life, I made a mistake — I got away from squishy reporting.

I went all in on reporting centered around the hard numbers, trying to tie every effort to direct revenue attribution. That kind of mature content reporting is critical to showing executive leadership your efforts are effective (especially if they have finance backgrounds).

But the squishy efforts (the ones you can’t necessarily tie directly to revenue) are often the engine driving those quantitative results. They deserve a place in your reporting.

Get in the habit of carving out space for squishy insights every month.

  • Run a search for content-related terms in the last month’s worth of discovery calls in Gong. What are prospects saying about the content?

  • Collect any comments from social media or email communications that offer praise for your efforts.

  • Call out any instances where internal stakeholders called out the value of your content.

The best part? The more you surface these kinds of squishy results to key stakeholders, the less squishy they become.

Because it’s tough to argue with a relentless wave of praise for content (even if external forces have your numbers dipping lower than you’d like).

— Joe Michalowski

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— Joe Michalowski

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