Is content marketing a waste of budget?

Can content marketing ever drive ROI? Yes, here’s how.

Teams publish tons of content, most of it just goes into the void. Is it even worth doing?

It can be. I built my entire business on content – no salespeople, no ads. Over 3 years on LinkedIn, I got 90K followers and 22M impressions, and loads of new customers. But here’s the crazy part – half of my reach came from just four posts.

But that's 4 out of 315 posts. A 1.3% success rate.

So yes, creating content that actually drives business is possible, but it’s hard.

So let's reverse-engineer those four bangers and figure out how to create content that actually moves the needle.

The pattern behind my most effective content

This week, I fed my top 50 and bottom 100 posts into ChatGPT-5 to understand how to create more effective content.

My best posts do four things well:

1. Start with a high-stakes topic – A problem my audience is already losing sleep about. Not “top 10 growth tips” but the specific 3AM worry. Like “Matt, should I fire my VP of Growth?”

2. Offer a fresh take – Reframe the problem in an unexpected way that offers a new solution. For example, I know people struggle and even resent OKRs. I took the other side: “OKRs don’t cause problems, they surface them.”

3. Wrap it in a story – People scroll past “advice” posts, but nobody can resist a good story. My all-time best post opened with: “At PayPal, I once wasted $1M building customer personas… Here’s what we actually learned, plus what I now do instead.”

4. Open with an intriguing hook – Your first 120 characters (plus image) determine everything – you need to grab them. For me, “Save time is not your value prop” worked because every SaaS founder has written that phrase and wondered why it didn’t convert.

Choosing a high-stakes topic for my audience was the largest factor in post success.

You don't have to tick all four boxes, but for sure start with a question your audience cares about – start with their 3AM worry.

How do you find your audience’s high-stakes topics?

If I know my audience, it’s because I spent the past 10 years helping entrepreneurs crack the growth puzzle, and before that, I spent 15 years doing it myself in Silicon Valley.

What if you don’t have 25 years? Is there a faster way? There’s no true replacement for walking in your customers’ shoes, but audience research can get you 70% of the way there.

The world’s #1 content marketing expert, Amanda Natividad, explains her whole process in her post: How to turn audience research into content ideas.

Here’s a quick summary:

1. Research – Use tools to find your audience’s main pain points and questions

2. Engage – Wrap the answers in compelling narratives

3. Test – Test like crazy. (My 315 posts yielded 4 bangers and one formula.)

If content matters to your business, Amanda’s post could change your life. (If it doesn’t matter to your business, then why are you creating content?)

If this feels futile...

It sure does. Remember, I got 50% of my views from four posts, but I had to write 315 to get there. Each of those posts took hours. Some performed okay, but at-least 100 of them were genuinely bad, even embarrassing. But I learned from every one, and I kept posting.

Don’t see duds as failures, see them as practice and learn from each one.

Is it worth doing? Only if your failures make you smarter, your wins move the business, and you have a thick skin.

I hope this helps!