From Content to Commercial Impact: Why Views & Clicks Are No Longer Enough
Stephen O’Toole,
Senior Integrated Marketing Manager, Dun & Bradstreet
My career spans both agency and in-house roles, giving me a rare ability to navigate complex stakeholder environments, lead cross-functional teams, and deliver results in fast-moving, matrixed organisations. I have marketed considered, relationship-led propositions across financial and professional services throughout, from capital markets and asset management to risk, compliance, and data.
For most of my early career, I sat on the agency side. Content was the product. We measured success in outputs delivered, campaigns shipped, and occasionally, creative awards won!
If a piece performed well, drove strong engagement, earned plenty of shares and picked up industry recognition, we had done our job. And, for the most part, we had.
Then I moved in-house - and almost overnight, the questions I was being asked changed. Nobody in a commercial meeting wanted to talk about impressions or open rates. They wanted to know whether our content was helping the business grow. Was it influencing buyers? Was it shortening sales cycles? Was it contributing to pipeline and revenue? For the first time, I had to connect content to outcomes the business cared about.
“If a piece performed well, drove strong engagement, earned plenty of shares and picked up industry recognition, we had done our job. And, for the most part, we had.”
The measurement paradox
Here is the strange thing about modern content marketing. We have more data, more dashboards and more tools than at any point in history, yet many teams still struggle to answer the most important question of all: is our content driving the business forward?
Data abundance is not the same as clarity. It is entirely possible to have a dashboard glowing green with engagement metrics while your commercial stakeholders remain unconvinced that content is worth the investment. The tools have multiplied, but confidence has not always followed.
Why vanity metrics fall short
Views, downloads, likes and open rates are comfortable numbers. They are easy to gather and easy to report, and they usually move in the right direction. But they measure activity, not impact. They tell us that something happened, not that something changed.
The trouble is that these metrics rarely survive commercial conversations or reporting. When budgets tighten and every function is asked to justify its contribution, “our latest guide was downloaded 4,000 times” does not carry the same weight as “our content influenced a significant share of closed pipeline this quarter.” If we cannot make that second statement, we risk content being seen as a cost centre rather than a growth driver.
Building a commercial mindset
The shift I had to make, and the one I would encourage every content marketer to make, is from outputs to outcomes. In practice, that starts long before a single asset is created.
The most commercially effective content begins with two inputs working together: product innovation and audience pain points. When a business invests in a new capability or product, the marketing opportunity is not simply to announce it. It is to understand the specific customer problem that innovation solves, and to trace a clear line from that pain point through to the message and, finally, to the channel where the audience will actually hear it.
Get this sequence right and everything downstream improves. The messaging lands because it speaks to a genuine need. The channel choice makes sense because it follows the audience rather than internal preference. And the content earns its place because it connects what the business has built to what the customer is struggling with. Skip this step, and you end up with polished content that talks about features nobody asked for, distributed through channels nobody chose.
So, my advice is simple. Start with the business objective and the customer problem, not the content format. Align your content KPIs to the priorities of sales, retention and growth teams. And always draw a clear line from product innovation, through audience pain points, to message and channel.
“Start with the business objective and the customer problem, not the content format.”
What good looks like
The best content programmes I have seen do more than attract attention. They educate markets, help buyers make confident decisions, and strengthen relationships with existing customers.
This matters more than many realise, because of a simple truth about B2B buying. Research popularised by Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, in partnership with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, suggests that only around 5% of business buyers are actively in the market at any given time. The remaining 95% are not ready to buy today, but they will be at some point in the future.
That single insight reframes the purpose of content. Our job is not only to convert the 5% who are ready now. It is to educate, inform and stay front of mind with the 95% who are not, so that when they do enter the market, our brand is the one they remember and trust. Content is one of the most powerful tools we have for building that kind of lasting mental availability.
The opportunity ahead
Content marketing has already won the argument on investment. The harder, more interesting challenge now is proving impact. That is not a threat to our discipline. It is the moment it finally earns its place as a strategic business asset rather than a line item to be defended.
The future belongs to marketers who can connect three things that too often sit apart: creativity, audience value and commercial results. Master that, and content stops being something the business tolerates. It becomes something the business relies on.
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