Why Content Marketing Is Dead Without Data

The competition to find the perfect mix of SEO keywords and outrank your competitors is (kind of) over. In 2026, the battlelines have been redrawn and relying solely on traffic metrics as the driver of content marketing isn’t likely to help your company win.  

“The explosion of channels and tactics in recent years has forced content marketers to rethink their strategy and the data they collect,” explains Tyler Hakes, strategy director and principal at Optimist. Where companies were once able to publish content on their websites and create a straight line from traffic to conversions, now they must consider channels like email, newsletters, LinkedIn, Substack, Reddit, Quora, and the list goes on. And now, they also have to factor in AI visibility and conversions.  

“There’s tons of things that we could or should be measuring,” he explains. “We’re not entirely sure which metrics are necessarily the best metrics to be measuring or how we stitch those together into something that…actually tells us something meaningful about the business or about what we should be doing with our strategy.”  

But overcoming this modern challenge of handling mountains of data may just require you to go back to marketing basics.  

The state of content marketing in 2025

When it comes to creating content, most marketers in 2025 are primarily trying to brand build. However, the actual benefits of content are a bit different. According to a Statista survey of more than 300 marketing professionals, over 60 percent viewed building trust with customers as the most important benefit of content creation. This shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise in a digital world where customers are increasingly required to look at content with a discerning eye to distinguish between fact and fiction.  

Marketers are also turning to a variety of channels to establish credibility with their audiences. Social media remains the most commonly used channel with nearly 70 percent of respondents relying on its broad reach. But audio platforms such as podcasts are seeing a spike in use, with more than 60 percent of marketers utilizing this channel, followed by content apps, digital events, and company websites.  

It’s clear there’s value in high-quality content. Still, creating trustworthy content that speaks to audiences on an authentic level isn’t always the easiest to execute. In fact, it’s one of the biggest challenges for marketers, who also struggle to show how the metrics they collect connect to concrete, measurable outcomes for organizations.  

To have an impact, marketers surveyed offered several remedies:

• Creating better-connected workflows.
• Identifying topics that resonate with target audiences.
• More effectively aligning across teams.  
• Accurately tracking performance with better data and tools.  

Finding your way forward

So, let’s explore how you might logically approach these solutions if you’re facing the same struggles executing a data-driven content marketing strategy.  

1. Understand who your audience really is

As Statista’s survey revealed, content marketing is about solving problems and becoming a trusted resource. Content marketers can’t solve problems if they can’t get a read on exactly who they’re addressing.

Now, many marketers may hear this and think it means collecting more data solely focusing on the characteristics of the customer, so you can deliver very personalized content. And to be clear, audience targeting with data can certainly be helpful.

But when it comes to understanding the audience, Hakes points out that marketers should also think more broadly.  

“The reality is we need to reorient the metrics around the buying journey and the specific stages of the buying journey,” he explains.  

So, it’s more than just understanding who your audience is but also understanding how they move through your customer funnel. What path do they typically take and how do they flow from individual channel to channel in the buying journey? Mapping out these stages will allow you to start stitching together the metrics that matter rather than receiving a data dump from all of the different channels that customers interact with, which would be impossible to draw insights from.  

2. Measure the real impact of your content

Can you tie the number of “Likes” you receive on a social media post to the revenue it generates? That’s a pretty tough task for a lot of marketers. And the reality is content marketers won’t always have direct ROI tied to their work.  

“We have that all or nothing mindset,” Hakes explains. “If you spend a bunch of money publishing [content] on LinkedIn and that LinkedIn content doesn’t immediately translate into revenue, then it’s a failure. That’s not the way marketing works. Marketing is a series of actions and interactions with an audience over time.”

When you create a piece of content, you should think about what you’re trying to influence the customer to do within that complex buying journey and what success looks like. This in turn will help you pinpoint the right metrics to track in order to convey the impact of your work and eventually connect it to those end goals like revenue generation.  

For Chloe Thompson, director of content marketing at Visier Inc., she ties her content goals together with larger marketing goals, which connect to product and sales goals that ultimately funnel up to organizational goals. This ladder up the organization keeps her intentional about the purpose of each new piece of content she creates.  

For example, if her company is trying to break into a new vertical, she might create case studies to establish her organization as an authority on the topic and measure her success based on the frequency those topics are mentioned in sales calls. “I think you need to focus more on reporting on the quality of what happens after people come into your funnel vs just looking at those top line metrics like bounce rate and traffic, because that’s not actually telling the through line of how your content and how your marketing is being impactful,” she says.  

3. Work smarter, not harder: Let data guide your workflow

Content marketers want to make sure their day-to-day activities are producing results. If one type of content performs really well in an email nurture campaign, you may want to drop your whitepaper albatross project and go for the shorter, more agile content pieces that get quick wins. On the other hand, if the whitepapers are pushing more leads through the funnel, then maybe it's best to invest in that format and repeat the same success for other types of leads.

Where content marketers can get tripped up is not diving deep enough into the data to truly understand what is driving success. “The first step is getting more sophisticated in how we’re tracking data and what we’re collecting,” Hakes says.  

It’s not enough to identify a LinkedIn post that performed well and simply try to replicate it. You can categorize your successful LinkedIn posts based on theme, format, style, author, and other important factors and use this data to identify patterns and trends. This type of analysis will enable you to better predict how certain types of content can effectively be used to drive the action you want your customers to take.  

With this level of data, you also have the option of testing hypotheses about your content and your audiences and running experiments to validate what you believe to be true.  

If you get that reporting line done properly, then you can be more efficient, you can be more data-driven, and you can be smarter with how you’re spending your time or your team’s time,” Thompson says. “This obviously has the downturn effect of spending budget wisely and using your resources wisely.”  

4. Build confidence and prove your value

When it comes to content marketing with data, Hakes says that a lot of leaders in organizations have outdated expectations for their teams. They still look at generating organic traffic as the number one goal. But those numbers are pretty consistently decreasing for companies, even when conversions go up.  

“That tells us the traffic as a proxy for future conversions and revenue—that link is now broken,” he explains. “So, we need to have that conversation internally so our stakeholders understand why and how we need to evolve the measurement we’re doing, and it doesn’t just seem like we’re making excuses because we can’t make the numbers go back up.”

For Thompson, the way to sell the new value of content marketing comes back to creating connections to organizational goals. “When you have data and reporting at your fingertips and you actually can see the throughline and understand content’s impact on revenue, then you’re able to be more strategic. You’re able to put together more of a plan,” she says.  

So, when she creates an eBook, she doesn’t just report how many people have downloaded the content. She directly ties that report on organic downloads to opportunities that were created for sales, which allows her to clearly show how content assets are actually impacting down-the-line revenue.  

“When you’re able to draw a clear line like that, it’s fantastic because over time you can double down on what’s working,” she said. You can be proactive and take charge of your content marketing strategy rather than being forced to listen to the loudest voices in the room who are all too often guessing about what works.  

How content marketers win with data plus Domo

Today’s content marketers should understand that sharing is caring, Thompson says. In this new framework for proving impact, you can’t make the right connections without access to data from teams across the organization. Generating valuable content performance analytics requires breaking out of your silo, talking to your other team members, and understanding what they’re reporting on and what their metrics are.

“The real magic happens when everyone is aligned around their particular strategy or their particular goal and what they’re trying to do,” she says. “And I don’t believe you can get there without having clear data you’re understanding, absorbing as a team, and then creating these goals from.”

The good news: Domo was designed as the way you put the pieces together. With 100s of connectors, Domo can ingest data for teams across your organization from a wide variety of sources, cleanse and organize the data, and funnel it into easy-to-use dashboards that are ready to analyze and visualize your findings.  

Domo also gives you a unified view across your channels so you can gain more accurate insights into the customer journey and understand how your different channels work together. For content marketers who want to break out of the old way of tracking performance, Domo gives you the ecosystem to make your data relevant to every top-level executive at your organization.  

Key takeaways for 2025

Working in content marketing requires evolving to meet the customer where they’re getting their information. Today, this information scattered across many different places and is more fragmented than ever.  

It will continue to be a challenge to wrangle data from new sources and channels, but you shouldn’t let access to data be your downfall. With Domo, you can manage the metrics you need to demonstrate content marketing ROI in terms that your company understands and cares about.  

Experience it for yourself by trying Domo for Marketing today!

FAQs

Why is data important in content marketing?
Measuring marketing content performance enables you to identify channels, formats, and themes that work best to influence your audience. Data analysis allows marketers to adjust and tweak content so that they can continually enhance their assets. And incorporating data into the content itself can add a layer of credibility to the piece.  

What are the most important metrics to track for content marketing?
While content marketers have typically tracked metrics like organic web traffic and keyword rankings, content marketing has shifted to encompass many different channels and tactics. The most important content strategy metrics to track will depend on the goal of your content.  

How can I show the ROI of my content?
To show the ROI of your content, try to connect the purpose of your content to specific outcomes that influence larger departmental or organizational goals.  

What kind of content works best for driving results?
There is no specific type of content that works better than others. Many companies are investing in social media for its wide reach, while podcasts have grown in popularity. But the format of content should be tailored to its purpose.  

Does content marketing work without data?
Marketing is focused on influencing audiences to take action. While you could choose not to engage in content measurement, it would become difficult to determine whether the resources that you are investing in content creation are generating the desired outcomes. You could be wasting money on marketing that doesn’t work.