Contently: Measuring content ROI in long finance sales cycles

Ajith Babu published this piece on The Content Strategist on July 9, 2026. The subject is specific: how to measure whether content is working in financial services, where deals close months after a buyer first encounters a piece of writing and where purchase decisions involve multiple people across multiple functions. Standard attribution breaks down in that environment, and most finance marketing teams know it but don’t have a clear alternative.

The core problem Babu describes is this: last-touch attribution, which credits the final piece of content a buyer interacted with before purchasing, systematically undercredits early-stage educational material. Gartner research cited in the article shows B2B buying groups typically run five to sixteen people. Content that educates a CFO months before a contract closes doesn’t register in a last-touch model, even though it shaped the outcome.

The measurement approach he proposes replaces the single-event model with four connected methods. Multi-touch attribution at the account or buying-group level distributes credit across the full content journey rather than assigning it to one piece. Linking content to buying stages measures whether specific assets move buyers from one phase to the next rather than just capturing leads. Tracking committee-level reach counts how many functions within a buying group engaged with a piece — not just whether a single contact clicked. Combining leading and lagging indicators pairs engagement depth with influenced revenue and cycle-time reduction to give finance leaders both early signals and downstream proof.

Two numbers in the article anchor the argument. Fifty-seven percent of sales professionals say the sales cycle is getting longer. Sixty-one percent of B2B buyers prefer buying without speaking to a sales representative at all. Together, they describe an environment where content does more of the persuasion work across a longer timeline — which makes measuring that work correctly a financial question, not just a marketing one.

This is most directly useful for content strategists and marketing leads in financial services or any other sector with long, committee-driven sales cycles. It also provides a usable framework for anyone trying to defend content investment to a CFO who only sees first-touch or last-touch data.