Day 22: Well I’d say enough is enough. If someone wants you to prove the content ROI on your website, or asks you to provide the business case for spending money on content, your best course of action is to tilt your head in disbelief and walk away. Okay, that might be extreme, particularly if it’s your supervisor or the CFO, but it’s not extreme to answer their question with your question; I’d fire back with what’s the ROI of eating an apple?

Or helping an elderly lady with her grocery bags. Or returning a lost wallet with the money and credit cards intact. Or taking a moment out of your day by helping someone who is unable to help himself. What’s the ROI on that? The fact is, these are the right things to do, and if people don’t understand that, so be it. My take is this. You can talk about the content requirements of Google’s algorithm, you can discuss the relationship between content, search and conversions, you can cite statistic after statistic about traffic lift, stickiness and lead generation, videos and brand preference, and testimonials and the trust barometer. But if someone is looking to poke holes in your arguments as if you were a digital voodoo doll, then poke away they will. If someone wants to know the precise return on investment for a particular content campaign, then you might not win the day.

Unless it’s today. Join me on the dark side of this argument. We understand loss far better than we have the capacity to understand gain. A loss is tangible, a gain is pie-in-the-sky. Make them do the work; figure out what the loss of an average customer is over the course of your company’s average customer retention time. Depending on your revenue model, it could be thousands of dollars or millions of dollars. It could be one worker or dozens, and all the associated costs with layoffs and furloughs. It’s just not worth the risk, which is, of course, the catalyst for loss.

Look, it’s high-time we took the marketing out of content marketing. It’s content selling, and it’s the new approach to preventing loss, so at least you have the prospect of gain well within your sights.