At some point, all marketers have been guilty of celebrating campaigns that drive tons of likes, shares, impressions, or engagement rate, all under the guise of “brand building” or “awareness.” Then the moment happens: someone from Finance or the C-suite asks one simple question: “What did this do for the business?”
All of a sudden, those “marketing wins” start to look a lot more like vanity metrics.
This disconnect doesn’t come cheap. It costs your brand money and the marketing department’s reputation. The solution: a fundamental shift in how marketers approach their campaigns and, more importantly, prove their impact. It’s time to become revenue-driven marketers, focused squarely on the KPIs that contribute to your brand’s financial success.
Vanity Metrics: Cheap Wins with a Real Cost
How did we get here? In part, ad platforms made it easy to chase “feel good” numbers. Vanity metrics are readily available, simple to track, and give an immediate sense of progress. Also, attributing ads to real business impact, like sales lift, market share increase, and foot traffic, has historically been complicated and expensive.
But when all you can report is vanity metrics, you’re really just:
- Devaluing your team’s contributions: If you can’t tie your efforts to tangible business outcomes, the whole marketing team’s true value is obscured.
- Wasting budget: If your ad dollars aren’t demonstrably driving revenue or growth, they’re simply an expense, not an investment.
- Proving that marketing isn’t aligned with company goals: When marketing talks about “brand awareness” and “storytelling” while finance asks about “ROI” and “customer lifetime value,” you’re just not on the same page. That’s where budget cuts and lack of marketing investment start.
The days of simply “brand building” without quantifiable results are over. Your finance department, executive leadership, and the entire company need marketing to deliver measurable business outcomes.
To Drive Revenue, Focus on Real Business Results
A revenue-driven marketer is focused on KPIs that drive bottom-line business results. That might mean Foot Traffic, Sales Lift, Check Growth/Average Order Value Growth, and Market Share Increase, for example. Think about it:
When you prove your ads drove foot traffic, you’re telling Finance that your team’s efforts inspired someone to take real-world action and visit a physical location. If your brand has a brick-and-mortar presence, proving this action is pure gold.
If you demonstrably drove sales lift, you’re not just proving that your ads led to sales; you’re proving that they increased sales. That minor distinction proves your work is yielding attributable results, and Finance will take notice.
When you drive check growth or increased average order value, you’re going to be able to prove how important your campaigns are in encouraging customers to buy more, buy more frequently, and buy higher-margin products. Most importantly, this shows company leadership that your campaigns are making customers more valuable to the P&L.
Prove market share increase, and show that your campaigns are giving your brand a tangible competitive advantage. If you can chip away at your competitor’s customer base, you’ll be able to say that your campaigns are actively changing consumer behavior in your brand’s favor.
When you can confidently say, “Our media campaign drove an X% increase in foot traffic, resulted in a Y% sales lift, or contributed to a Z% market share improvement,” you’re unquestionably proving that the marketing budget has a positive ROI. What executive or finance lead wouldn’t want to give marketing more resources to produce more return for the business, when it’s clearly laid out in black and white for all to see?
How to Get Where You Need to Go
Here’s some good news for you: You don’t need to be a data scientist to change your campaign focus, and you don’t need to spend your entire budget on an attribution machine. Just keep it simple and:
- Align with Finance and the C-suite. Figure out which KPIs (or as we call them, Real Business Results or RBRs) you can all agree on, then strategize on how to pursue them with your marketing budget.
- Make the right agency and technology partners. Find people who care about making every single ad dollar count as much as you do and can measure that impact with clarity.
- Iterate, find what works, then double down. Marketers used to have budget for endless testing. Those days are long gone. Be quick, decisive, and effective, investing more where the RBRs are found.
If you’re tired of seeing your campaign reports fall flat or feeling like your team’s achievements are undervalued, it’s time to embrace the revenue-driven marketing approach. Focus on the metrics that matter, demand accountability from your ad spend, and prove your department’s true value. Your brand’s future and your marketing team are counting on you.
Create your GroundTruth Ads Manager account today, and start exploring our platform (no minimum spend required). And, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.
