When A Marketing Agency Sells Vanity Metrics.
When Marketing Agency Metrics Look Great but the Business Results Don't
Modern marketing gives businesses access to more information than ever before. Views, followers, likes, comments, shares, impressions, clicks and engagement can all be measured almost instantly. Every campaign produces numbers, dashboards and reports that appear to tell us exactly how well the marketing is performing. The problem is that the easiest numbers to measure are not always the numbers that matter most. A video can generate hundreds of thousands of views without producing a single meaningful customer. A social media account can accumulate thousands of followers without creating measurable revenue. An advertising campaign can produce enormous engagement while the company paying for it sees little change in actual business. A marketing agency should understand that attention can be valuable, but attention and
results are not the same thing.
The Rise of Vanity Metrics
Digital platforms have created an environment where marketing performance is often judged by publicly visible numbers. Views, followers and likes are easy to understand, easy to compare and easy to celebrate. They also happen to be the metrics that social media platforms prominently display. This has changed how businesses think about marketing. A company may assume that a video with 500,000 views performed better than one with 5,000 views simply because the first number is larger. Without understanding who watched, why they watched and what happened afterward, that conclusion may be completely wrong. If the 5,000 viewers included 100 potential customers and the 500,000 viewers included almost none, the smaller audience could be dramatically more valuable. A marketing agency should help a business distinguish between numbers that demonstrate activity and numbers that indicate progress toward an actual objective.
Viral Does Not Necessarily Mean Valuable
The desire to go viral has become one of the strangest developments in modern business marketing. Companies that would never define their business objective as entertainment suddenly find themselves evaluating marketing according to entertainment metrics. Going viral can certainly create enormous awareness. Under the right circumstances, that attention can have significant commercial value. The problem is assuming that virality automatically creates business. A piece of content may spread because it is funny, controversial, surprising, unusual or entertaining. None of those qualities guarantee that the people sharing it have any interest in the company behind it. The audience may remember the joke while completely forgetting the brand. For a business, the more important question is not whether content can attract a large audience. It is whether that audience has some meaningful relationship to what the company sells.
Social Media Platforms Have Different Objectives
Businesses should also remember that social media platforms and businesses do not necessarily define success the same way. A platform benefits when people remain engaged. More views, more comments, more shares and more time spent consuming content are valuable to the platform because attention is fundamental to its business model. The company advertising on that platform has a different objective. It may need leads, appointments, store visits, qualified inquiries, purchases or long term brand recognition. Those objectives can overlap with platform engagement, but they are not identical. This distinction matters when evaluating the advice businesses receive about digital marketing. A strategy designed primarily to maximize engagement may produce impressive platform statistics without producing the business outcome that justified the investment. An experienced marketing agency should understand the economics on both sides.
Marketing Should Begin With the Business Objective
Before deciding what metrics matter, a company needs to define what it is actually trying to accomplish. A restaurant introducing a new location may initially value awareness within a specific geographic area. A luxury homebuilder may care far more about reaching a small number of qualified prospects than generating broad consumer attention. A professional services company might consider ten highly qualified inquiries significantly more valuable than 100,000 video views. The appropriate measurement changes with the objective. This is why marketing strategy should begin with the business rather than the platform. A marketing agency should first understand the company, its customers, the economics of a sale and the result the business needs. Only then can it determine which marketing channels and measurements are relevant. Without that foundation, marketing can become a competition for increasingly impressive numbers that have little relationship to revenue.
The Right Audience Is More Valuable Than the Largest Audience
One of the greatest advantages of digital marketing is the ability to reach increasingly specific groups of people. Yet businesses can still become obsessed with audience size. In many industries, the ideal audience is not particularly large. A company selling a multimillion dollar product does not need millions of interested people. It needs access to the relatively small number of people who have the need, financial ability and motivation to purchase it. A specialized business to business company may operate in a market containing only a few thousand realistic prospects. Reaching the correct 500 people may be worth considerably more than reaching an irrelevant 500,000. This changes the way a marketing agency should evaluate success. Reach matters, but relevance matters more. The objective is not always to make the audience larger. Sometimes the objective is to make the audience better.
Measure What Happens After the View
Views and engagement should not be ignored. They can provide useful information about whether creative work is attracting attention and whether people are interested enough to continue watching. The mistake is stopping the analysis there. What happens next? Does the viewer search for the company? Visit the website? Watch another video? Read a case study? Request information? Call the business? Return several weeks later? Become a customer? Not every marketing campaign will create an immediate transaction. Some marketing builds familiarity and credibility over time. That makes measurement more complicated, but it does not make the business objective irrelevant. A strong marketing agency should look beyond the first visible interaction and consider the larger customer journey.
Marketing Should Produce Something That Matters
At SM Media Group, we believe marketing should ultimately be evaluated according to what the business is trying to accomplish. Sometimes awareness is the objective. Sometimes the goal is positioning, lead generation, customer acquisition, increased sales or changing how a company is perceived. The answer will not be identical for every business. What should remain consistent is the connection between the marketing activity and the reason the company is investing in marketing in the first place. A million views can be incredibly valuable. Ten thousand followers can be valuable. Engagement can be valuable. Going viral can be valuable. But none of those things are inherently valuable simply because the numbers are large. A good marketing agency should know the difference between marketing that gets attention and marketing that creates a result.
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