Among marketers, there's growing popularity in tying content to revenue. While it's reasonable to justify dollars spent on content marketing, a one-size-fits-all approach may add risk to your small business.

Customizing your message still makes plenty of sense: Not all content needs to be salesy and designed purely for conversion because if you're not careful, such a strategy may erode the audience's trust in the content, and ultimately in your business.

In a February interview with Contently, marketing guru Seth Godin was asked what kind of content builds trust: “I think that it's human, it's personal, it's relevant, it isn't greedy, and it doesn't trick people." He adds that a business will not be trusted “if you're constantly measuring and tweaking and manipulating so that someone will buy from you."

Ways to Tie Content to ROI

Tying content to revenue may involve several approaches, depending on the type of content you publish and on which channels. Using analytics, you can track:

• Additional visitors to your webpage

• Extra email addresses you're collecting

• Increases in leads or conversion rate

• Added views on your blog, email, or video

• Improvements in social media shares

Given the constant pressure to deliver results (the average tenure of marketing execs in corporate America is less than two years), marketers often use the paradigm of the conversion funnel, which aims to steer online visitors along a path by tracking (1) how people interact with a platform such as a website, (2) how they navigate a system, and (3) how the interaction converts the lead into a buyer.

For example, a marketer may calculate that each lead is worth $100 in lifetime value to the business. Thus, spending $10,000 on website content that generates 200 additional leads would result in $20,000 in added revenue or a gain of $10,000.

Value Visitors Who Don't Buy

Beware of falling into the all-too-common trap of altering your content to increase conversion in the short term while you erode trust and alienate potential allies in the long term.

Not everyone is ready to buy, but that doesn't mean those who are not sales-ready should be ignored. Some visitors might be industry researchers, consumer brand advocates, the media, or other stakeholders, all of whom can be responsible for referrals or building your credibility. In other words, lots of visitors still need nurturing before arriving at a potential decision point to purchase (or not).

Says Godin: “I don't have any problem with [content] measurements, per se; I'm just saying that most of the time when organizations start to measure stuff, they then seek to industrialize it, to poke it into a piece of software, to hire ever cheaper people to do it."

If you plan to measure the return on your content, don't forget the long-term metrics:

• Do my visitors still trust my website, emails, YouTube videos, and brochures? (Check this through a monthly survey.)

• Have I alienated visitors who are not buyers at the moment? (Measure this by tracking your number of return visitors.)

There's sound logic to ensuring the appropriateness of the content for the entire conversion process: There's a proper introduction, informational exchange, and perhaps eventually the (holy matrimony) of a sale. Just as you wouldn't pitch a first date to marry you, your business will benefit if you respect a gradual courting process throughout the purchasing cycle.