How HubSpot’s VP of Content delivers 50 Million impressions each month (and tells the measurement story to the CFO)

Every time I talk to a marketer who’s building a real content program, video, podcast, creator partnerships, the question that keeps coming up is the same one:

“How do I explain this to my CFO?”

This question comes up not because we don’t know how to measure content, but because the rest of the organization doesn’t know how to think about content unless it drives DIRECT SALES. But let’s be real, that’s not how content marketing works. You don’t watch a video and immediately the next step is to go spend $175,000 on a new piece of software.

The B2B buying cycle takes something like 200+ days, most of your buyers aren’t ready to purchase today. Davang Shah, VP Marketing at LinkedIn, went deep on this on a recent podcast.

But it makes sense why this question is hard to answer. Brand value is real but hard to quantify. Pipeline attribution takes time. And most execs just want to know what it cost and what it made.

I had Jonathan Hunt (VP, Media and Content at HubSpot) on our podcast recently. He’s running what is probably the biggest media operation in all of B2B right now, what he describes as ‘a media company inside a software company.’ Some stats on their operation:

• 70 people
• 17 YouTube channels
• 95 long-form videos a month
• A network of 150 creators
• 50 million people reached every month

Here are three things from our conversation worth considering, even if you’re running a smaller content marketing operation than HubSpot.

1. Frame your content program around its three jobs to make the CFO conversation easier.

Jonathan frames content in three buckets. This gives you a tangible way to talk about the real value of what you’re building.

Demand. Content still has to do short-term business for the business. HubSpot creates content that’s informed by search trends across YouTube, Google, and AI, and they build it with a clear monetization motion attached. Leads, pipeline, new customers. Non-negotiable.

Influence. Harder to measure, but possibly even more important. The B2B buying cycle has 29 steps (Gartner) and 6 to 7 decision makers. Most of the people who will eventually buy from you aren’t in-market yet. Content’s job here is to make sure you’re top of mind when they are. Not clicks or conversions. Just presence. It’s not direct response. It’s “be part of the conversation.” More here in the full episode.

Sidenote: I am a huge Bravo guy. Bet you didn’t know that…

Earned media value. This one is where the CFO conversation becomes winnable. If you went out and bought 50 million impressions every month, that would cost a ton of money. His team generates that organically through their media program. One way to frame ROI:

What would this cost us if we had to buy it?

You’re not replacing attribution. You’re making a comparison the CFO can quantify. “We generate the equivalent of X in paid impressions organically, and it compounds every year.” That should work.

2. Start with leads, then build your measurement story down the funnel over time.

Jonathan was honest about how HubSpot started with this. In the beginning: leads. It’s a leading indicator that’s easy to optimize against. Over time, they got better at connecting leads to pipeline to revenue to LTV. Not perfect, never exact science, but a directional view that builds the case.

Jonathan’s advice is worth repeating (and I say this all the time): You have to come prepared with the business rationale, the thesis, and the measurement plan. Even if the measurement isn’t perfect yet. “Even if you don’t have it perfect, you have to have a point of view on it.” A CMO who walks in with a clear theory of how this drives business is infinitely easier to fund than one who shows up with impressions and asks for trust.

3. Let AI do the parts it can, so your team can focus on ideas and judgment.

HubSpot built an AI-powered clipping engine in a six-week sprint. The old process: watch the episode, identify good moments, note time codes, hand off to an editor, hand off to a channel manager. A lot of handoffs. A lot of delays.

Now Claude identifies the clips, passes time codes to Descript via API to create, and the channel manager reviews and approves. What used to take days takes minutes. The human makes the judgment calls – which hooks work, which don’t, and the machine does the rest.

Jonathan’s framing for how their team thinks about AI: humans on the idea and what to publish, AI handling the messy middle of the production process. It’s not a threat to creative work. It’s what lets creative people do more of it.

Sprints are effective too. Identify a bottleneck, assemble a small cross-functional team, and a given period of time to get it done, and ship it. Here’s the problem, go solve it by X. You don’t need HubSpot-sized resources to work like this.

There’s a lot more in our full conversation, including how Jonathan hires, how he thinks about creator partnerships at scale, and how HubSpot built its content org from scratch.

Check out the episode on YouTube.