This week I cover why most marketers are measuring the wrong things, and the leading indicators that reveal future pipeline long before revenue shows up.

At some point in every budget review, someone asks about the newsletter. Or the podcast, or the LinkedIn posts, or whatever else doesn't show up cleanly in the pipeline report. The question is always some version of "what did that actually drive this quarter?"

It's a fair question. And I've spent a lot of issues telling you to invest in exactly this kind of work — the owned audience, the consistent presence, the long game. So I owe you the other half: how do you measure it? Because "trust me, it compounds" is not an answer you can bring to a CFO.

The math behind the problem

There's a piece of research I think every marketer should have in their back pocket. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, working with LinkedIn's B2B Institute, found that at any given time only about 5% of your potential buyers are actually in-market. They call it the 95-5 rule. Companies switch vendors for big services roughly every five years, so in any given quarter, the slice of your audience that's ready to buy is tiny. The other 95% aren't shopping, and no amount of clever advertising will make them shop before they need to.

Here's the part that gets me. The same research found that 96% of B2B marketers expect to see the main effect of a campaign within two weeks.

So we're marketing to an audience that's 95% out-of-market, and measuring the work like all of them should convert by Friday. When the dashboard says your brand content "drove nothing" this quarter, it's not wrong exactly. It's just answering the wrong question. The work aimed at the 95% pays off when those buyers eventually enter the market — and at that point, the brand they remember is usually the brand they call.

Most of your influence is invisible anyway

Even when your content is working, you often can't see it. Someone shares your newsletter in a Slack channel. A post gets forwarded in a group chat. Someone hears you on a podcast during their commute and Googles your company two days later. Researchers call this dark social, and the studies on it suggest most sharing happens in private channels that never touch your analytics.

This creates a genuinely expensive misread. Branded search or direct traffic gets credit for the conversion, and the two years of content that made someone search your name in the first place gets called into question. I've watched companies cut the thing that was actually working because the attribution report gave the credit to the last click.

What to track instead

The signals I trust most, roughly in order:

Branded search volume. Nobody Googles your company name by accident. If more people are searching for you by name every quarter, your content is building memory somewhere. This is the cleanest trend line you have.

Direct traffic. Visitors with no traceable source usually came from the dark funnel — a private share, a podcast mention, a forwarded email. If direct traffic is climbing while your paid spend is flat, something organic is working.

How your audience behaves, not how big it is. Subscriber counts are flattering. Reply rates, forwards, and consistent opens tell you whether people actually care. A thousand readers who respond are worth more than fifty thousand who don't.

Self-reported attribution. This is the cheapest fix in marketing and almost nobody does it. Put "how did you hear about us?" as an open text field on every form, and have sales ask it on every call. The answers will surprise you. "I've been reading the newsletter for a year" shows up constantly at companies that do this — and it never shows up in the software.

Whether you're getting invited. Podcast invitations, speaking requests, people tagging you in threads you weren't part of. When the right people in your niche start bringing you up without prompting, that's the market telling you the work is landing. It's not a dashboard metric, but it's real.

Report it in two tiers

Here's where most marketers hurt themselves: they report everything to everyone. The CFO doesn't need your open rates, and burying the important trend lines under thirty operational metrics makes all of it look like vanity.

Split it. Leadership gets a quarterly view with a handful of trend lines — branded search, direct traffic, what the self-reported attribution says, audience growth — shown next to pipeline. The story you're telling is simple: these numbers predict next year's pipeline, and here's the pipeline that last year's numbers predicted.

Your team tracks the weekly stuff — cadence, replies, downloads, engagement. Those are inputs. Keep them out of the board deck.

The point of the split isn't presentation polish. It's that you stop asking leadership to believe in the long game and start showing it to them arriving on schedule.

One caveat, because I'd be lying otherwise

None of this is cover for marketing that just isn't working. "Brand takes time" has excused a lot of mediocre content over the years, and hiding behind it is the fastest way to lose the budget argument for good. The deal has to run both ways: leadership judges the long-term work on leading indicators and gives it more than a quarter, and in exchange, those indicators actually have to move. If branded search is flat after a year of consistent publishing, you don't need more patience. You need better work.

That's the honest version of measuring the long game. Track the memory being built, ask people how they found you, keep the CFO view simple, and hold yourself to the same trend lines you're asking leadership to trust. The case for long-term marketing doesn't need faith. It just needs the right numbers.

If you're looking for guidance on building a measurement framework for your content and brand marketing, you can contact me here.If you're looking for guidance on building a measurement framework for your content and brand marketing, you can contact me here.