Your marketing reports might be showing impressive results, but are those results actually translating into business growth?
THIS WEEK’S RAMBLING
I’ve seen plenty of marketing reports that look impressive.
Website traffic is increasing. Social media engagement is improving. Email campaigns are generating clicks. Advertising is reaching more people, and the graphs are all moving in the right direction.
Everyone seems pleased with the progress.
Then somebody asks a question that changes the entire conversation.
“That’s great, but how much business did we actually generate?”
And suddenly, things get a little more complicated.
I think one of the biggest challenges with marketing measurement is that we’ve become very good at measuring the things that are easy to measure.
Google Analytics tells us how many people visited our website. LinkedIn tells us how many people engaged with our content. Advertising platforms tell us how many impressions and clicks our campaigns generated.
There’s certainly value in understanding those numbers, but they don’t necessarily tell us whether the business is growing.
Activity and progress aren’t always the same thing.
Think about a financial advisory firm that generates 50,000 website visits but only a handful of qualified conversations. Now compare that to another firm generating 5,000 visits that consistently turn into new client relationships.
Which firm has the more successful marketing program?
I’d argue that you can’t answer that question without understanding what those relationships are worth, how much it costs to acquire them, and whether they’re contributing to the firm’s growth objectives.
The same thinking applies to community banks and credit unions.
If your objective is to grow deposits, then website traffic alone isn’t going to tell you whether you’re succeeding. You need to understand how many new accounts you’re generating, what those relationships are worth, and how marketing contributed to bringing them in.
If you’re trying to increase lending, then clicks on a loan promotion are interesting, but funded loans are considerably more meaningful.
And if you’re an advisory firm trying to grow assets under management, the number of people who downloaded your retirement guide is only the beginning of the story.
What happened after they downloaded it? Did they become prospects? Did they schedule a conversation? Did they eventually become clients?
Those are the questions that start connecting marketing activity to business performance.
Now, I’m certainly not suggesting that every marketing initiative needs to generate immediate revenue.
Brand awareness matters. Building trust matters. Staying visible to prospective clients matters, particularly in financial services where someone might research a firm for months before deciding to reach out.
And not every new relationship can be neatly attributed to a single marketing campaign.
But I do believe we should be making a much stronger effort to connect the work we’re doing to the outcomes the organization is trying to achieve.
That starts by working backward.
What does the business need to accomplish? What customer behavior would support that objective? And what role should marketing play in making it happen?
Once you understand those answers, the metrics you should be watching become much clearer.
Website traffic, impressions, engagement, and clicks still have a place in the conversation. They’re useful indicators that help us understand what’s happening along the way.
But they shouldn’t be the entire conversation.
Because at the end of the day, a successful marketing program shouldn’t simply demonstrate that marketing is working. It should help demonstrate that the business is growing.
A FEW MORE THINGS I’M RAMBLING ABOUT
ONE THING I’M WATCHING
AI is making it easier to produce marketing activity, but more activity doesn’t necessarily mean better results.
We’re reaching a point where businesses can produce more content, more campaigns, more emails, and more social media posts than ever before.
And that’s exciting because it creates opportunities for smaller organizations to accomplish things that previously required much larger teams and budgets.
But I think it also introduces a new challenge.
When producing marketing becomes easier, it’s tempting to measure success by how much we’re producing.
More posts. More articles. More campaigns. More impressions.
The organizations that benefit most from these capabilities won’t necessarily be the ones producing the most marketing. They’ll be the ones that understand which activities are actually contributing to their business objectives.
ONE THING I’D QUESTION
If your marketing budget increased by 20% next year, could you explain what business results you would expect from that investment?
I’m not suggesting you should be able to predict exactly how many new customers or dollars in revenue every campaign will generate.
Marketing doesn’t work with that level of certainty.
But if you’re asking leadership to invest more money, I think you should be able to explain what you’re trying to accomplish, how you expect the investment to contribute, and what you’ll measure to determine whether it’s working.
That’s a much more productive conversation than simply asking for more money to generate additional traffic or engagement.
ONE THING WORTH TRYING
Take your latest marketing report and look at it from the perspective of your CEO or CFO.
Identify three metrics that connect directly to the organization’s growth objectives.
Maybe it’s qualified appointments, new accounts, funded loans, new client relationships, or assets under management.
Then ask yourself whether your current reporting can show how marketing is contributing to those outcomes.
If the answer is no, don’t throw away the metrics you’re already tracking.
Start building the connection between marketing activity and business results.
Because understanding what your marketing is doing is useful.
Understanding what it’s doing for your business is considerably more valuable.
Are your marketing efforts actually driving business growth?
Let’s look beyond traffic, clicks, and engagement to understand how your digital marketing contributes to measurable business results.
