Two weeks ago, I shared the biggest content marketing mistake I ever made.
As penance, we climbed back on the hamster wheel, and started doing things "they way they're 'supposed to be' done" and cranking out a high-volume of soulless SEO content, and I swore from that point on, never again.
In retrospect, there are two things I'd have done differently:
- Connect vision to our relevant business metrics [obvious]
- Quantify the hidden cost of more volume beyond my production budget [not so obvious]
These are now the first things I do when I start an engagement, and it never fails how surprised people are when they realize just how much money, time, and human resources their company's burn when they neglect a narrative driven approach.
Over the next few emails we're going to cover:
- The research and math behind where money is wasted and why
- How to audit costs and deal with internal politics
- How to make every dollar you spend work harder in 2026.
Whether you're working in-house, at an agency, or as a freelancer looking to move into a strategic role, take notice, because you're going to want to share this with your stakeholders.
Sales ignores up to 80% of marketing's leads...
This comes from Marketo, which also found that half of sales-people's time is spent chasing dead-ends.
With just these two stats in mind, let's do some back of the napkin math using industry benchmarks and what I know about the average in-house marketer on this email list.
Let's say your company makes ~$2.1 million ARR.
Gartner reports that the percentage of total ARR that goes to marketing in 2025 is around 7.7% (so $161,700 / year or $13,475 / month.)
Of that marketing budget, 20–30% typically goes to content — let’s call it 27%, or about $3,600 / month.
Now let's say with that, you're driving between 10-15k unique visitors / month, and at a conversion rate of 2%, generating between 200-300 leads.
At that rate your cost per lead comes in around $12.00 and $18.00
Not bad, right?
Well hold on a minute.
If Sales is ignoring 80% of leads because they feel only 20% of them are qualified, that means:
- You're generating 160 - 240 bad leads every month.
- With a CPL of ~$14.40, that means we're wasting $2,880 on useless contacts.
Some benchmarks put the sales qualified leads to closed won conversion rate at 12% meaning only 5–7 real deals ever close.
That puts the customer acquisition cost for content marketing between $514 - $720.
Yikes.
But that's not all.
Since the average Sales salary is $84,000 per year, and Sales is wasting 50% of their time trying find good leads, that works out to about $42,000 for a single rep — or $3,500 / month — virtually the entire content budget down the drain.
Factor all that together, and the actual cost of customer acquisition is ~$1,014 - $1,400.
(and that's not considering the content marketer's salary either.)
See why "content marketing" is often perceived as a cost center?
Of course, that's not all on content teams.
There's a much larger systemic issue that can be mitigated by having sales & marketing come up with service level agreements, lead nurturing, sales training, and better lead followups...
But tell me honestly, is your company doing this well?
From my experience, while many business leaders are aware of the leak, they don't know why it exists, or the full severity of it.
Instead, they push content marketers for more volume to get more leads, while flooding Sales with unqualified leads, who get berated for not closing more deals.
(I've got a ton of research on this too, let me know if you'd like it.)
Why "more volume" is not the answer
But ok, let's say you double your output and start generating 18,750 unique visitors a month, and your conversion rate of 2% miraculously holds steady.
That means you've successfully increased leads from 300 to 375. That's a ⬆25% lift in leads and traffic!
At first glance this looks great...
...but without addressing the systemic issues, the downstream effects are devastating.
Doubling the output without more resources means content producers have to cut corners (and risk burning out) and because of that, content quality will inevitably drop.
Because of that let's say sales qualified leads drop from 20% to 15%.
That leaves us with only 56 SQLs.
And since we're increasing the number of junk (or ignored) leads from 80% to 85%, we're handing off around 319 bad leads; significantly higher than the original 240.
That leaves you with only 56 sales qualified leads, which is ↓ DOWN from the original max of 60.
More work for fewer qualified opportunities.
But remember, Sales still has to find those 56 leads, and since we've given them an additional 79 bad leads to sort through, it's reasonable — if not overly conservative — to assume they'll be spending 55% of their time sorting through leads.
Ready for the new final math?
With an average sales base salary of $84,000, that 55% of lost productivity works out to $46,200 per year, per rep, which now exceeds the entire $43,200 in annual content budget
Now you're in the worst possible position:
The pursuit of "more volume" has reduced the total number of quality opportunities, while simultaneously driving up the hidden costs.
Without fixing the systemic issues, the only options now are to:
- Hire more sales people (can cover more leads, but adds to payroll)
- Extend the sales cycle (gives reps more time to qualify, but prospects drop off)
- Increase the content budget (improves content quality, but scales broken system)
No matter the approach, you're either spending money and making the issue worse, or leaving money on the table by "nurturing" people who are never going to buy.
There are, of course, other hidden costs too:
- You have to pay to store unqualified leads.
- If you're using enrichment software like Clay or Apollo, you pay for those credits.
- Sales reps have to work harder to differentiate because content is commoditized.
Now, again, this is not an inditement of content marketers.
If you've read this far, I sincerely hope you forward this Sales, the CMO, your founder founders, or whoever else, and kickstart the conversation about working on these fundamental issues.
This won't get fixed overnight, but in the meantime...
There is something content marketers can do to make a difference without having to retool everything.
If the mandate is "to do more with less," we need to reframe our thinking from "produce more" to "make our content work harder,"
That means using Narrative Design to pull people further in, by "telling a better story."
And for leaders who are skeptical about the ROI, consider this:
A recent study by Content Square found that when visitors improved their "pages visited in a session" by 10%, they increased conversion rates by 5.4%.
That means more, more qualified leads.
More sales ready leads, shorter sales cycles, bigger deals, less churn, and a higher LTV.
But that's a conversation for another time.
If this resonated, please forward this to the stakeholders who need to see where and why the money is really being wasted.
Until then...
Tommy Walker | The Content Studio
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P.S: While these numbers are centered around sales-led growth organizations, the same principles apply to product-led companies. I've done extensive research around product-led growth too, and I'd be happy to share that with you, just drop me a line.
