What’s the purpose of your blog? What’s the purpose of your newsletter?
And if you asked these questions to different roles in your company, would they agree with one another?
Robert Rose says that marketing inefficiencies often come from unclear expectations. At B2B Forum 2024, Rose shared his system to measure the effectiveness of marketing so that business departments could better align with marketing objectives.
Watch or read a part of Rose’s presentation below. And for more ways to align your staff and boost the results of your marketing, join us this November at B2B Forum 2025. With workshops, sessions, keynotes, and more, B2B Forum is the perfect place for you to get inspired with new ideas that grow your career. Tickets are available now—up to 30% off!
The biggest reason I see content marketing platforms fail is because we’re trying to do too much.
We have a blog that’s trying to drive awareness… and drive sales… and create customer loyalty… and create brand… and…
“It’s a blog! We should have a blog for everything! It should feature all the things, and we should do everything with it.”
And then when it doesn’t do anything, one thing particularly well, we go, “well, blogs don’t work.”
Well, but they do, if you just focus.
If we focus in, and build where we need to build.
So do an experience audit. Figure out, what is the purpose of our blog? What is the purpose of our podcast? What is the purpose of our website? What is the purpose of our email newsletter?
What is the purpose of all these things we’re doing?
What are its objectives? What is it objectively trying to accomplish?
Be clear, communicate, align on those things.
You’d be surprised at how wildly speculative it becomes.
I have worked with so many big B2B companies where I go in, I go, “tell me the purpose of the email newsletter,” to a salesperson.
“It’s meant to drive leads.”
And I talk to the marketing people: “what’s the purpose of the newsletter?”
“Oh, we’re trying to get reach. We’re trying to get new people in, trying to get new audiences.”
Oh, great.
Ask the CEO, “what’s the purpose of the newsletter?”
“I got no idea. They do it. They tell me it works. I don’t know.”
That’s usually where we are with content.
Here’s your take-action for that step. Set specific objectives. Set objectives. Prioritize your purpose, whatever those things are.
If it’s an integrated program, fantastic. What does that integrated program look like from a contribution basis?
If it’s a specific blog or a specific thing in the “buy” sort of part of your customer’s journey, what is the purpose of that thing?
What is its purpose? What is its overall goal? What is its objective?
And then if you get really fancy, a time horizon built into it: when is it supposed to meet that goal?
One of the other biggest reasons I see content marketing programs fail is because we either under- or over-promise when deliverable results are going to happen.
We launched the blog. Yay. Day one, we’ve got four blog posts up.
We launched it. It’s beautiful, it looks great.
And the CEO goes, “where’s the leads?”
And you go, “I don’t know.”
We got to time-horizon this thing. It’s going to take time for us to build that audience and start to see those things over time.
We have to build the business case for when will it actually start to achieve its objectives. And are there any interim objectives it could achieve in the meantime?
Frame the framework. Basically, what does it look like? How is it going to work? Measurement in integration with all the other things we’re doing.
This is especially important these days when we start thinking about, how is the blog going to work with the resource center? How is it going to work with our e-commerce program? How is it going to work with our influencer program? How is it going to work with all of these different things?
And are we overweighted in one particular area?
In other words, we’ve got a great set of experiences for awareness and reach and pulling in people and brand awareness and all the things…
And then what do we have in sales enablement?
Nothing.
We just send ’em to a salesperson.
One of my favorite stories is the fact that the salesperson will get a call from somebody and say, “I just got this amazing white paper from you guys. It’s so great. It’s so awesome. I’m so inspired by it.”
The salesperson goes, “I got no idea what you’re talking about.”
And so, how are we integrated with the other?
(By the way, you’ve just created the worst possible scenario, right? Not only is the salesperson negative-value, completely useless, because it’s like they don’t even know what… but the content itself loses value. Because now the perception is the company doesn’t even know what it’s talking about.)
How are we integrating these things in there?
And then finally, now we can start building in the structures, the sort of lattice work, if you will, the layers of how we’re going to build this measurement program.
So let’s design one together as we sort of wrap up here.
How many people are familiar with OKRs and use OKRs in their business? Okay, a few of you. Alright, so I’m a huge fan of OKRs.
Now, I’ve modified OKRs a little bit for my own purposes and what I teach, but it’s an incredibly wonderful foundation. I’m a big believer in OKRs because it’s a great structured framework for getting to measurement.
And what it talks about is starting with an objective as measured by your key results. That’s the typical way that we would create an OKR—objective and key results—hence the acronym there.
So your objective, “we will,” whatever our objective is, “as measured by,” key results.
Now, I typically will break that down a little further, but the key results can be in multiple categories. Remember, qualitative versus quantitative, right? They might be performance key results. Absolutely quantitative, unambiguous, agreed upon.
These conversions… remember, we’ve defined, we took the first step and we defined what all these things are. An MQL versus an SQL. A visit. Why is a visit important? What does engagement mean? What do all these things mean? We get alignment, all that.
So now all we have to do is start to build in, okay? Now our goals and objectives are built by these performance key sets.
So everybody knows, yes, we’re trying to drive traffic. We know what more traffic means to the business.
Great. Traffic’s fine if it means something to the business and you agree on that, what are those unambiguous results?
Then there’s of course overall learning key results because many key results are like an A or a B or a C or a D or an F. We give ourselves a letter grade, or we give ourselves a number.
“Yeah, we got five out of six,” or, “we got a B on that,” or whatever.
Learning how to use the marketing automation system. What’s the objective? To learn how to use the automated… Wait, well, we got a B on that because we got distracted with other things.
So there are key learning results that might be part of your OKRs.
And then of course there are context, key results, time horizons.
“We have this for the first quarter, but we have this for the entire year.” Or contextually, “if this happens, then the goal is this.”
In other words, if technology will get out of our way and actually let us do the thing in WordPress like we want to do, then the goal will be this.
But there’s a critical path, there’s a contextual nature to that particular objective, or it’s graded in some sort of key result way.
Published Mar 7, 2025
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