While serving as a Fractional CMO for a client, I told their digital agency that I didn’t care about the metrics they were presenting. In reality, I did care. The point was to interrupt their siloed thinking that had elevated one tactic’s metrics above the client’s broader brand health and business goals — classic case of the tail wagging the dog and losing sight of what was really important.
Their intentions were good and the metrics were accurate. They truly wanted to be able to demonstrate their value, the quality of their thinking, and be held accountable for what they promised the results would be. All good. Yet, at some point, the tool was dictating the strategy and that’s when things can go wrong.
Having worked on both the client and agency side, I’ve seen too often how the need for metrics, attribution, proving ROI, and for agencies to prove their worth, took precedence over what makes the brand unique and authentic. The proverbial cart before the horse.
What actually matters
Marketing metrics do matter. But do you know what matters more? The business metrics. More clicks, higher engagement and more followers don’t mean much if sales, memberships or whatever metric moves the business forward isn’t moving in the right direction. That’s the one that counts.
There’s an order to things. Business plan first, marketing plan second. Strategy first, tactics second. Thinking first, action second. It may sound logical and many won’t argue with this. Yet, I’ve seen issues like the case above come up time and time again. Why? It’s not due to lack of caring or wanting to do the right thing. It comes down to losing sight of the big picture, a lack of experience, leading to tunnel vision.
The difference experience makes
What’s often missing is this: talented, well-meaning teams with real expertise in their craft, who haven’t had the experience of working both in the business and on the business. When you’re accountable for the business results, not just the marketing results, you develop a different kind of judgment. Your perspective is different. You learn when to question the process, when the latest approach isn’t the right one, and when a metric that looks good on the dashboard is quietly working against you. If the marketing report shows a lot of green and constant improvement, but sales or revenue are not trending in the same way, something is clearly not working. And to be fair, it may not have anything to do with marketing. The whole of the company must be working together from operations, sales, finance, HR, product development, etc., in alignment with marketing.
The marketing dashboard and reports could simply be an indicator that something else is working against you. If that is the case, it’s time to ask more questions and think about if you are simply executing marketing tactics without understanding how marketing decisions affect the business as a whole. ●
Dean Ilijasic is Co-founder of Long & Short of It
