The Real ROI of Content

This edition is written by Prakruti Maniar.
(More about her at the end)

My former client was celebrating their 10-year anniversary. The plan? Release a series of videos and carousels. Best projects, before-and-after photos, and lessons from the founders. Trace their journey; tell their story.

We hit a tiny roadblock. There was not a single piece of data from 10 years ago! 

Okay, we could fix this. 

I set up a Google Drive and asked the team to share whatever photos they had from before. I made sure to follow up with each team member. I got a bit upset when no one responded. Laughed it off (and cried a bit and punched the air a bit more). Decided to go ahead with the motion graphics style marketing videos that companies have been making for nearly three decades.

I’ve been in the content industry for 8 years. Trends come and go. One thing stays true: everyone wants to “show the ‘real’ story.” But when it comes to execution, what do you go back to? 

The graphic design template. That collection of your employee photos could make our passport pictures look like model portfolios. 

Or worse, you ask your team to write a sketch to “make it relatable,” putting uncomfortable employees in front of the camera and calling it ‘Employee Generated Content.’ 

Every brand is now a media house competing with a meme page and, in the effort to keep up with the trends, becoming a big joke themselves.

Now, more than ever, you need these three must-haves in your content marketing toolkit:

1. Media training for everyone facing the camera

2. A lot of B-roll to build a visual world for your brand

3. Not just tools to record your meetings, pitches, and coffee conversations — but a way for you to contextualize them into content. 

With or without AI.

Now more than ever, your story matters. It is the only thing that does. 

(Example: Some popular ad campaigns actually came from organic moments captured in the B-roll, including one with Nike x Tiger Woods!) 

The question is: how do you find the right story? How do you track it over time?

You won’t find the answers in a brand or marketing book. For that, turn to journalism. Journalists do three things very well:

1. Find the right hook of a story

2. Gather data liberally. Then recognise patterns, trends, and highlights across long periods of time. 

3. Archive and manage the data so that it can be easily referenced, even a century later (yes).

In the content industry, hooks are all the rage today. Branded podcasts try to establish thought leadership by talking about trends and patterns. The content marketing industry recognizes the importance of extensive organic data collection.

Gary Vee is most vocal about documentation. Authenticity has always triumphed. And with AI making engineered content easy, it’s going to sell at a premium. 

However, all the data in the world is useless if you cannot access it and make sense of it even many years later. If you cannot capture and contextualize organic life.

If you are building a business for the long term, and if you think your marketing funnel is going to be content-first, ask yourself:

1. Where is my historical data? Can I set up a system to build a central archive of all the documents, videos, photos, and snippets that we have created so far? Reach out to former colleagues and current colleagues and ask them to upload it all on a drive. 

2. What happens when my content head leaves? Is there a centralized knowledge management system that the next content head can access? Remember — metadata is still gold. Tagging, categorizing, and sorting systems still work. 

3. How is the data we gathered today going to be relevant 2, 5, or 10 years later? Who is thinking long-term for you? 

4. How do we contextualize all the b-roll and the interviews for the long term? What should we keep, and what should we discard? You cannot store everything. You have to curate what you keep.

The era of creating one-month content calendars is over. The time of templates is past. If you are committing to content, commit to it properly.

Otherwise you are just wasting your money on cloud storage. You might as well delete everything and be content with AI slop. 

Prakruti Maniar is a Mumbai-based writer and content specialist, focusing on building efficient content creation and execution pipelines across formats.

She is also building the Purple Pencil Project, an Indian storytelling studio. Her substack is called Mad Millennial Stories, where she writes about life, culture, relationships, trends, and more.