Imagine hiring a personal trainer. A few months later they proudly tell you: “We’ve completed 47 workouts together.” Technically, that’s true. But it’s not really what you care about. You care about whether you’re fitter, stronger, healthier. Whether you’ve achieved the reason you hired them in the first place.
Marketing isn’t much different. Yet it’s surprisingly common for businesses to focus on what was delivered rather than what was achieved. For example, the new website launched, the brochure was printed, the campaign went live, the social media content was posted, the exhibition stand looked great.
All good things but none of them are the goal. They’re just the work. The goal is what happens next.
Did more people visit the website? Did enquiries increase? Did customers better understand what the business does? Did sales improve? Did people remember the campaign? Did the perception of the business change?
Those are the questions that really matter. The challenge is that deliverables are easy to measure. Results are harder.
You can count the number of social media posts that went out this month. It’s much harder to measure whether those posts actually moved the business forward.
You can launch a beautiful new website. But if nobody visits it, or it doesn’t help customers take the next step, what have you really achieved?
We’ve all seen projects that looked fantastic but didn’t make much difference. We’ve also seen projects that weren’t particularly glamorous but delivered incredible results.
Given the choice, we’d take the second option every time.
That’s why one of the first questions we ask on any project is:
“What does success look like?” It sounds simple, but you’d be surprised how often nobody has properly defined it.
Sometimes success is more sales. Sometimes it’s attracting a different type of customer. Sometimes it’s increasing membership numbers, event attendance or brand awareness.
The answer changes from project to project. The important thing is having an answer. Because if success hasn’t been defined, it’s almost impossible to know whether a project worked.
It’s a bit like setting off on a journey without deciding where you’re going. You might end up somewhere brilliant but you might not. Either way, it’s difficult to call it a success.
This is also why we believe every project deserves a conversation after it has launched. What happened? What worked? What didn’t? What would we do differently next time?
The creative industry has a habit of moving straight onto the next thing. The next campaign. The next website. The next deadline. But some of the most valuable lessons come after the work has gone live.
That’s where the real evidence is because clients don’t invest in marketing to receive deliverables. They invest in marketing because they want something to change.
And when something genuinely changes for the better, nobody remembers how many pages the brochure had or how many rounds of amends the website went through. They remember the result.