Vanity vs. Hard Marketing Metrics in B2B | E75 with Alex Vince-Myers

In this episode of Blame it on Marketing, Emma and Ruta are joined by Alex Vince-Myers, Head of Marketing, to tackle the big question: which marketing metrics actually matter? Together, they sort the fluff from the facts, breaking down the difference between vanity metrics and actionable ones that drive real results. The trio dives into personal confessions about marketing missteps, the perks of sharing metrics across teams, and why getting leadership to buy into metrics is easier said than done.

The discussion doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff—like the gap between marketing efforts and revenue—and wraps up with insights on how to navigate the ever-evolving trends shaping today’s marketing landscape.

Takeaways:

• Marketing metrics are a cornerstone for growth and accountability.
• Vanity metrics might look good, but they don’t always tell the full story.
• Sharing metrics internally can boost team morale and engagement.
• Senior leaders need to get on board with understanding marketing numbers.
• Metrics should align with business goals to ensure relevance.
• Tailor the metrics you present to the audience at hand.
• Accurate attribution relies on understanding the full customer journey.
• Context matters—analyze metrics within appropriate timeframes.
• Don’t lean too heavily on vanity metrics for decision-making.
• Leadership buy-in is essential to maximize marketing’s impact.

This one’s all about making your numbers work for you, not against you.

We’re Ruta and Emma, the marketing consultants behind Blame it on Marketing. 

If you’re in B2B SaaS or professional services and looking to do marketing that actually drives revenue and profit, we’re here for it.

Visit blameitonmarketing.com and let’s get this show on the road.

Transcript

0:00

Hi everybody. And welcome back to Blame it on Marketing with Emma and Ruta And in this week's episode, we are going to talk about marketing metrics to live or die by and whether you should live or die by them. we are joined by the awesome Alex. So Alex, please introduce yourself. Hi, yeah, yeah. It's great to be great to show. Yeah. My name's Alex Myers. So I'm the head of marketing at the SEO works, which is a sort of multi -service digital marketing agency head headquarters in Sheffield. So in terms of me, I kind of have the fun job of marketing the marketers. So I'm in charge of the brand of the agency itself, which is nice. I've always worked in B2B marketing. So in -house or brand side and yeah. I just like to rant about marketing things and also be positive as well. But yeah, maybe rant slightly more. Also, by the way, how much fun is it marketing to marketers? Honestly, it was like I spent the whole first portion of my career. The biggest challenge I came up against was nobody internal understanding what I did. So I kind of like upgraded and work now with everybody that knows what I do. So that's kind of nice. And also a really weird thing happened where I think I knew this subconsciously, but someone pointed out in better words to me the other day, they basically said, you've managed to wing it so that you're your own target audience. Which is true. Like we sell predominantly like marketing managers, head of marketing, things like that. And yeah, that's also quite nice because for once when I sort of claim to know what my audience are thinking, I actually kind of do. Before we jump into the topic of metrics, which I'm obviously very excited about, as anyone who's watched anything on this podcast knows, I would love for you to share your deepest darkest marketing fuck up. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So, this was quite a while ago. I was, more fresh face, definitely had more hair So I was working at a sort of group of businesses, predominantly kind of HR businesses. was a recruitment firm, training firm, payroll firm, things like that. And I was, group marketing manager at the time. And I was working on a project for the recruitment. side of things. And the idea was a brand building campaign for the kind of construction part of the recruitment thing. And construction stuff we did was a lot of kind of, it was essentially agency stuff. So bricklayers, ground workers, things like that. And a big thing in the industry at the time was that agencies weren't really keeping up with what like the pay rates were for those roles. Anyway, so I was, I had this idea for a brand building campaign that would essentially make us look pretty caring. It would give us some really helpful information so we could do a better service and it would also kind of do a bit of brand building, brand awareness at the same time. and the campaign idea was essentially like a pay survey. So We put stuff all over organic socials saying, you let us know what you think of fair wages for your job title. And then we'll enter you into a competition. You can win a prize with sort of stuff. And in my head, it was a win -win, right? It was like, we're to get the information we need. We look like we care. And I launched it and I kind of let it sort of gestate over the weekend. I came into work on the Monday and there was just like quite a lot more probably Facebook comments than normal. and the kind of previews on them weren't necessarily what I was expecting to see. And essentially what happened is our posts became a kind of forum for people who were angry about what they were getting paid. that's exactly where I thought this story was going. Yeah. So it was basically nobody actually got in touch properly. Like all of the channels, there was like a form and like an email address. They could do it to enter the competition and no one really actually did that. Instead, basically people used it as a way of like calling out people they were angry about or, and what's funny is our reputation was pretty good and there's a very little of it was actually about us. But weirdly that made it worse because a lot of the competitors or clients of ours were like, why are you creating this space that we can get abused online? So yeah, so it became this kind of like, we got paid bloody nothing on this job and screw these guys, they pay nothing and all this sort of thing. And yeah, and that was just kind of all of the comment sections. Yeah. And if we spent about a couple of days, I tried to like reply to kind of be like, we totally get how you feel. That's why we're running it. And then eventually I think we just sort of rolled it back. think there wasn't many people that actually entered. I think we did give a prize to one of them and then just kind of moved on, I guess. Did you delete those posts? Yeah. I think, I don't know, I think we might have left. I can't remember. I can't remember to be honest. I think maybe one or two that were really bad. Yeah, I had a similar thing happen once actually, because I worked for a piece of like assessment technology. So it's like interviewing software. So like the big, you know, like if you apply for a job at Sainsbury's or whatever, that's the software that you see, as you apply for those roles. And what used to happen is we would get loads of abuse when candidates didn't get the job. So that's not us. Like you're having a go at the tech provider because it says, you know, powered by insert company name here. Yeah. and we would just get loads of... so we used to get all these shit Google reviews and stuff from people being like, your shit, I didn't get the job. And we're like, okay, but the job isn't with us. It's with someone else. It was a big problem. whether they get the job or not, right? Like Getting into the chat about metrics, one of the things that we wanted to discuss is the difference between vanity metrics and what we say are hard metrics So what's the difference between those two and is there merit to both of them or should we avoid one type and go for another? I think to me, vanity metrics, it covers anything that is a kind of broad indication of superficial performance. That's kind of the phrase I'd whereas a kind of hard metric or any of those sorts of words, that's something that shows real value essentially. And I kind of, yeah, that's a bit of a spoiler to what my answer to the second part will be. think to me, a vanity metric, It's frustrating because I think the negativity around them was kind of, it was only needed because so many people use them as real metrics. Like for me, they are not inherently useless, but they are not inherently valuable either. And the reason I spend so much time banging on about why they're bad is only because so many people treat them like a real kind of, is value, this is what we're here to do. So I think the difference between them is that, and I think In terms of whether there's merit to both, think we're there to as marketers to achieve growth in the real metrics. We're not there to improve vanity metrics. The vanity metrics are useful as indicators that we're on the right track maybe, you know, we're on our way, but they are not the value. They are simply that. So to me, short answer, do they both have merit? I would probably say no purely because I think that as soon as you say yes, people misuse vanity metrics and they end up everywhere. but within your team, like, sure, you know, knock yourself out with your impressions and engagement rate. Yeah. Yeah. We talk about that a lot, don't we? About like what is internal team metrics versus what you present externally. And externally, I think it should be a lot more of the kind of hard metrics and internally, of course, you're going to look at views and click through rates and that kind of stuff, because it's an important indicator, but it's not the be all and end all. I want to just tell a short story about my favorite vanity metrics campaign ever. It was at one of my first jobs. If you care, you can look it up. Our CMO spent, I want to say it's like a hundred to 150 ,000 pounds with a huge PR agency to do this 100 million views campaign. And the whole point was that people would talk about their product and then we would like use the campaign to promote their product and the platform was a PR tech platform. So you kind of get what's happening. Hmm. one, we didn't use our own platform to do any of that. We used a huge fuck off PR agency. So that's already really fishy. And two, we got that a hundred million views or whatever the ridiculous number was, but I remember being in the London office and I swear we had like 10 leads from that campaign. Like I'm not even exaggerating, like 10 and I don't think any of them closed either. And I'm sure he talks about it all the time and it looks great on his CV if you don't know what actually happened, but yeah. I know later on we're gonna talk about marketers shooting themselves in the foot but we may have to expedite that question to now because I think that's one of the key problems here is that for so long there have been marketers and actually I'm going to be a bit shady here and in particular quite a lot of the time this comes from agencies I think a lot of this is on the agency side and sometimes I'm really sorry Alex but a lot of this is sometimes on the brand side as well Yeah, yeah, yeah. vanity metrics are the ones that are presented forward to a CEO or board members. Like, look at all this amazing stuff we've done. Aren't we wonderful? And that's, know, like when people traditionally thought of marketing as kind of like we just do the like PR and the brand awareness and we do that stuff and they didn't think about it as the revenue generating department that it now is. And so therefore you've got still got all these people who are kind of peddling vanity metrics like, it's wonderful. Look how many impressions we got. You're like, yeah, like you say, they are kind of like leading indicators to maybe bigger, better things. Like you can start to see, you know, if you're starting from scratch, you can start to see green shoots from those sorts of things, but they are absolutely not the metrics that I would stick in front of like a CFO or a CEO. Like, but people have done for so long that like, it's almost a little bit like when you meet someone, you I that's one of my first questions like to suss them out. Like what metrics do you want to see? What metrics are you used to seeing like those sorts of things? Because yeah, like, I don't know if you guys have felt like that, but I've certainly met quite a few marketers and quite a few agencies, sadly, I've come across that have been a bit like that. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely, definitely an issue in agency land, think. So funny enough, like one of the things that we did, it wasn't, it was like semi like probably a while ago now, but like, we basically had this realization that, cause we've been around for an SEO agency quite a long time, I think about 15 years now. And so it was very different when we did SEO at the beginning and the way that was sold and that sort of thing was very, very different. something that we, we realize is exactly what you said. There was a lot of other agencies out there basically peddling like, so it took talk SEO for a sec, like keyword rankings as like only day to their report. Right. And it was like, well, obviously that's, guess the aim, but one of the things we did was essentially try and pivot around, well, Okay. But what's actually happening, you know, you know, if that keyword is suddenly at the top of Google, but nobody's searching for it, who cares? Or if that keyword is at the of Google, loads of people are going into a website, but it's for a really niche blog post. And then they just leave your website. Who cares? You know, or like, how do we as an agency sit amongst your other agencies? Like if you've got a, you know, or are you working with a specific sales thing and actually all of these inquiries getting wasted because, know, so One of the things we did was actually go, well, this isn't really good enough. And we actually started to really push this idea of like, okay, we're to work with you to understand how the work we're doing fits into revenue and reporting more of that. And I remember at the time it felt really obvious that nobody was doing it. And it was just one of these really weird moments where it was like, this shouldn't be a USP, you know, like it shouldn't be allowed that we're benefiting because this is the basics, right? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. like Ruta and I go in and consult as fractional CMOs and I can almost guarantee you that most of the time we go into a business, the reporting that was going on before is nine times out of 10, either vanity metrics or there is no reporting. And it's one way or the other. I've not walked into a single business that has had like, yeah, like hard business metrics were being reported. I feel like this also happens. The metrics look like hard business metrics, but they've been like folded and fluffed in a way that they're actually vanity metrics. Like, I don't know, MQL numbers or something like, anyone that fills in anything on the websites and MQL and it's like, well, we can argue about, you know, whether we should have them or not, but like, that's really not what a qualified lead of any sort is, even if it's a marketing qualified lead. So. you can kind of bend those hard metrics to still be vanity metrics if you're not careful. And I've, one of the ones that I saw that was probably the naughtiest thing I've ever seen was someone measuring pipeline from demos booked. So basically going onto LinkedIn, getting the number of employees, so like a totally inflated pipeline. so that's that kind of exact, like, going, they've got 200 things. I've put them in employees. I've put them into the pricing calculator, and I'm going to put that as pipeline. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So on that note, what kind of marketing what kind of metrics should the marketing team be sharing with the entire business versus the board versus the team talking about stuff internally? Because I think people think they're all the same things, but maybe not. with this, try and kind of use a mantra of like, why should they care? Like I kind of run that by everything I'm about to do. like, and because of that, I think it can vary slightly depending on your specific circumstances. But it's like broadly within the team that will be. Well, that will be the only place those vanity metrics do have a value in the sense of you're able to with a fine tooth comb, go through everything you're doing, analyze its performance and try and improve it. So if I'm doing that, let's say organic social LinkedIn posts, things like that, I am going to want to use those vanity metrics because I want to see if LinkedIn posts, which ones were received well, which ones weren't, which ones created certain actions. And then as a team, we want to improve. So we'll go through that. But I think also as a team, it's important to share the, think it should kind of be this fluid theme because I think on the board side, it would be a lot more, you know, the real stuff, important stuff, ROI, things like pipeline, anything basically what's going to help the business grow, But I think also there should be a level of that reported back into the team because I do think. as like junior marketers, there will be a level of pride taken in the fact that they feel like they're part of that growth. And I think that's often the bit that's missed is like, you know, maybe they won't care or maybe, you know, because I'm working out as a head of marketing, whatever it's, it's beyond them or whatever actually know like, showing them this is where we're going is, you know, that's important. think with the board. Again, this will vary, it depends on the size of the board. And also like if you've got people overseeing very specific parts of the business within the board, tailoring what they see to what they care about again. know, financial director, things like that. Like I would literally just go bottom line, like go straight for the numbers with people who are more maybe CEO. maybe more in charge of the direction of the business brand awareness is more important to them as long as it's like a reasonable measure, not just like a bollocks one, that gives them an idea of the vision of the business where you're going. So in my, in my role, a lot of our marketing is around showcasing the expertise that our staff has. So I'm really relying on their engagement in output. So writing blogs, putting together stuff. I tend to share what's going to make them excited about the marketing, sprinkled with enough real stuff that they think I actually do something. Hehehehehe it all for you. I want them to write blogs. I'm going to show them how awesome our reach, our blog has become and how many different people are looking at them or, you know, if they're going to do social posts, what have you seen on me? Followers things like, again, things that I call vanity, but it's really, I'm trying to get them excited about being involved. That's a really good summary. if you kind of want to think of it in a very simple way, if you don't know what to share, the marketing team gets everything, every single metric, the company gets a subset of those, and then the board gets a further subset of those. So you're almost decreasing and you're getting harder as you're going down the triangle I think you're so right about making sure that you're using metrics to also excite people. that's a point that we missed, if you've got people involved or you want people to do stuff for you, my God, should you be like, hey, look, you're posted, blah, blah, and we got some leads from it and like people get excited because they feel like they're making a difference. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think also as well, like again, that's where it kind of comes flexible because I think, yeah, as you said, it gets more and smaller, the more senior you go, especially, you know, board level, they're busy. You want to be giving them executive summaries of stuff, hitting them with the key, you know, the key stats. But then again, like that was kind of thrown in his head for me personally, because then I moved to a role where I am now, which is like, our directors want to know everything because they love marketing. So it's like that almost threw it on my head again, because like now I'm back to kind of almost going against my gut reaction in being like, their directors need to stick to just like revenue stuff and some of that. They love marketing and they do want to know the nitty gritty. And that's where that vanity metric thing gets difficult. And I think. as long as you remind them that you know the difference, that's fine. it's the way you position it to them, isn't it? It's like, mean, Ruta wrote this wonderful course on the Blame It On Marketing Community, which is all to do with like presenting back to like knowing your audience when you're presenting your metrics. And I think and obviously we should be good at that because we're marketers. So we should be able to look at the people in front of us and go, right, this is what these people want to know. But I think it's okay, as long as you know how to position those metrics. And I think you're right. I would caveat the, the sharing of vanity metrics to excite people only do that if you are also sharing the hard metrics. Otherwise, you fall very quickly into the trap of like, they just care about impressions on a LinkedIn post. Or if that's the only thing anyone ever sees from you, then you will get pigeonholed into the like, they just do the fun. So like, you know, you want to be taken seriously. So it's like, it's that balance, I just want to say it very clearly because I have seen people fall into that trap Committing to non vanity metrics is hard. Like, and it can be really difficult shitty at times. And, you know, you run a long campaign and the business makes no money from it. There's no hiding from that, which I think as marketers, we're very good at packaging. Well, things because that's our job. We're also good at doing that with data specifically vanity metrics. So I would bet a lot that there's every marketer out there can find good in every campaign they've ever done their whole life because it's our job, right? We'll find a metric that looks good. We'll package it in a certain way. You know, if the temptation is there, committing to non -vanity metrics is hard because you can't do that. There's no hiding from. If revenue didn't increase, there's no hiding from that. If you didn't get any leads from a campaign, there's no hiding from that. And I think that's where it gets difficult because, know, impressions, you know, we got some followers, things like that. That's instant gratification for you. It's an instant pat on the back. The team go, cool. I know what a follower is. So well done, you know, and that's why you have to be so careful because you'll, you'll fall into the trap. As you said, like you'll maybe share that information. Someone will say, well done. And then, know, that feels nice. And then you keep, you know, you keep sharing it, keep sharing it. And you forget like, you know, the hard stuff that isn't as sexy. It's not as interesting to regular people. It's not as, you know, quick to show that stuff just kind of gets pushed by the wayside because it's not as fun or quick, I guess. I mean, that's one of the ways that marketers shoot themselves in the foot, right? One of the things that I was going to say that I think is a big problem for people, because there's this disconnect, right, between, between those vanity metrics that you are measuring and that you're talking about as a team, and you're talking about constant improvement and optimization of things. And then how did that actually take us to the hard metrics? And I think because there is this gap in knowledge sometimes in marketing, which is like, how did that become that? Lots of people then cannot explain either how did that stuff that you did make revenue or how did that actually improve or grow the business? And I think that for me is one of the biggest things I've seen people do. They're like, yeah, but we generated leads, but we know that eventually it turned into revenue. But we cannot explain how that all worked. And sometimes that is very difficult. That's not an easy thing to be able to do. like you say, Alex, and committing to those really hard metrics is really hard for people. Because it's so hard to say how you got from A to B. Mm. you just go, I'm just not gonna do it. often that's a sign that the marketing teams become too like siloed essentially, I mean, marketing as a department, in my opinion, should literally be a sponge for the whole company. There is not a department in your company that isn't relevant to you in some way. And if you think it is, you're not thinking hard enough. You know, one of the first things I do when I start a new role or new position is I'll sit down and talk to at least one person from pretty much every team. Because I think to me, it's our job to amplify the brand, to communicate that to the wider world. And so you need to understand every single thing about that brand. Otherwise you're being disingenuous. And I think that links really nicely to the explanation of that. of that movement because if you only know when a lead comes in and when new business is signed and you don't really know anything that goes on in between, you need to go back to basics and do that homework, sit down with those teams, get those relationships in place as well, get visibility on the data, speak to people, say, what actually happens when someone inquires who's, is there like a customer success person? Is that, is it development that deals with that? Blah, blah. And actually. get to know those people, show them why it matters to you and the business, explain why you need, otherwise they'll be like, what? Leave me alone, go away, I'm trying to do my job. Start by saying please and make them a cup of tea and explain why you need to know and you need to kind of know where you sit along that whole chain rather than just kind of only up until the Yeah. and I think one of the other reasons why this happens a lot is, that kind of that incomplete chain is because people don't anticipate what they might want to track sometimes. So when you're a busy marketer and you're just like, okay, let's get some stuff out. Let's do some bits. If you don't just pause for a minute and think, okay, these are my goals. How can I make sure that I can check that we have reached our goals because you might need to create some stuff or. make some lists or whatever it might be. So before every campaign kind of just have a think, have I got everything in place to make sure I can report on this? Because you might need to do some new stuff, but also if you're setting up a new marketing team or you're a new marketing head, you know, okay, what do I need to track? What are people going to be asking about? Can I get all of those things kind of pre -prepping because it's really hard when someone then turns around to you and says like, what did this thing do? And you're like, I'm going to have to go find it. But sometimes there is no data because you You never pre -recorded that data in the first place and then you're really in a pickle and you're shooting yourself in the foot. that's why for me, like, there's no such thing as too much data, right? even if it up being useless, you can decide that at a later date, but sometimes you actually can't go back. so it's almost like throwing that net so wide and just saying, right, we're to record everything and then we can process it later on, you know, like within the, within my team, actually really the only other day I did, you know, an analysis session with, with one of our senior execs sort of like talking to them about processing data and stuff like that. And how often the having all the data is part of it. Analyzing all the data is part of it. Everyone kind of knows that for the kind of cleaning of the data and is the middle bit. But if you're good at that middle bit, that first section can be as big as you want. You can have so much data and like 80 % of it can even be irrelevant, you know, but you don't know what's relevant till after the campaign plays out sometimes. So just record as much as you want and then find out what's good later on, guess. One of my other things that I think marketers do that shoot themselves in the foot is not having, and this is not always our fault. is not having a marketing strategy that is aligned to the business strategy that then equals objectives, which then gives you, should give you what your metrics should be. Yeah. So it's like, if you do not have that chain and that's like I said, that's not always marketing's fault. Sometimes it's the fact that there's no business goals or there's no like, or that you've got a CEO that flip flops around and all of that kind of stuff. But like that is, that to me is something that I think a lot of marketers, again, are very scared of. They're like, we have a strategy. How do I make this strategy like live and breathe and actually do stuff for us? therefore but if you don't have that then how do know what metrics you should be measuring because they're not all even the hard metrics are not all just about revenue and pipe like obviously lots of people care about that but there's other stuff as we've said you should probably have metrics around how many advocates you create nobody ever has that you know like speed of things, the quality of things. Yeah. Yeah. in met your ICP. Those are all the kind of metrics that you need. And if you don't have a strategy, you cannot set out which ones of those are actually important. So yeah, like that to me is a biggie. it's kind of bring it full circle, you're probably relying on vanity metrics because you're not seeing what you're doing as fundamental to the growth and revenue of the business, I think that's also where that kind of that kind of fear thing can come in a little bit because I think it is quite scary to put yourself out there in that way, if you having a silo strategy, like a strategy that kind of is very marketing orientated, it's not really linked to business one. That's a lot safer, right? Cause you've made it and people either don't really care or they presume you understand it more than them. So they're kind of happy just letting it exist and everything's nice. it can be quite scary to tie what you're doing to the business overall, because you're putting your neck on the line, right? There's suddenly other people that can tell you what you're doing isn't working. And that's scary because even though as marketers, we spend a lot of our time being told that what we're doing is wrong, or they could do it better, or the logo is not big enough, whatever, know, like that. is still scary for us. The idea of an FD turning around and saying your strategy is not working. And I know it isn't. on the other hand, if you're not coming at it from that angle yourself and you're not controlling that narrative, I feel like someone will at some point ask you those questions and it's going to be like, well, how much revenue have you brought in? Because, you know, we're having to do budgets and, you know, we're having to make tough decisions. And if you don't have that information and that isn't where you're coming from, you're going to end up screwed anyway. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. you can't or what happens and I've seen this a lot you know we also did another episode about short -lived CMOs I'm not saying that lots of CMOs are shit but I think what happens is then they you kind of get busted you get busted and then you inevitably you know come to either some sort of arrangement where you opt to leave or you are like I need to get myself out of here and then you kind of go into the next company and you do the same thing and you keep doing it and replicating and then people like us poor bastards here have to come in and clean up your mess. you know I think... at the end of the day, nobody has ever signed off budget because of likes, you know, that's the bottom line, you know, and, and at end of the day, budget is fun because it means we can do cool stuff and, know, enjoy being marketers rather than, you know, the opposite, which is like, how much can I do for free really quietly? So nobody knows I'm here. No. Yeah. Yeah. we need to do? Yeah. You want to feel good. You want it to be, you want the marketing you're doing to be energetic and you want not necessarily in the output, it obviously depends on your brand, but like, you know, you want it at least to feel like you can be positive and go at that. And I think again, as I said, you're not going to get there with yeah, a strategy doesn't align and the wrong metrics because they just won't care. And you can't blame them. You know, like I hear a lot about marketers complaining that you know, all we're like, we're the joke of the C -suite or like, you know, in the board, we're always the part that's like, not taken as seriously and how come the sales like people like, you know, that what's the difference blah, blah, blah. yes, some of that is trying to choose the words carefully so I don't like I'm slacking off all marketers because like loads of that is out of our control, right? Like for sure. I totally agree. Like some of that is just unfortunate, like the stigma around the role and blah, blah. But I do think there is a large portion of that sort of not taken seriously. That's a bit self -inflicted. I think it's, it's, it's presuming that people will just, yeah. yeah. Marketing is important. Let's go. We need to do loads of advertising and not making them realize why and not selling it essentially selling that work. I think. Yes, other members of the C -suite don't need to sell it because it's more obvious. Like I guess with sales, sales go up, sales go down. The sales team I work closely with, they're to watch that and go, well, it's a bit more complicated than that. you know, exactly. Yeah. which I think leads us on to our next question really, really nicely. And it's, what do you think senior leaders need to understand about marketing metrics? Okay, so yeah, I think this is where I'm gonna redeem myself in the market's eye. Because I think for senior leaders, I think there is a really important realization that has happened, which is that... metrics, things like that, the abilities for marketers to do their job correctly. It relies on buy-in from their side as well. the buy-in comes in kind of two areas. it's resource buy-in and it's engagement buy-in from a resource perspective, visibility over attribution is very rarely free. Some of it is if you're really clever, but again, like if you're trying to do it for free, it's taking up a lot of your time. So it's not free, but At the end of the day, you cannot expect marketing to show their value unless you empower them to do that. And the way you can do that as a senior leader is money on things like tools, on resources, or even just human beings, like making sure the team is, you if you've got a one team, one person marketing team, you can't expect them to give you detailed reports every month because that's taking up a week of their job. Right? So it's like, from a resource perspective, you need that investment and you can't you know, scrimp on that and then wonder why you don't get that visibility. But then I think also it's engagement. It's not just money. think if they need to be engaged with what the markets are doing, because attribution is also as well as sometimes expensive, quite complicated, you know, there's a lot of those jokes around like, you know, how marketers think a customer journey is. it's like, then it's like what it really is. And it's like an absolute hurricane of just like, Well, I went on my phone and I made a cup of tea. I've got my phone down, but then two days later, I got a text from my sister and she mentioned doing like total, you know, crazy, you know, bin fire of attribution basically. And because of that, the senior leaders need to be engaged because they need to help marketers get visibility over what's happening so they can try and piece together that jigsaw because they're not going to do it with their stuff alone. They need to know the touch point, the customer service team having. the account managers, maybe conversations they're having sales team is massively important getting across their data and understanding how that works. And I think, yeah, okay, you could get the marketers are just running around the business saying, please talk to me, please talk to me. But like, really, the senior leaders need to be bought in from the beginning and engage. And also like accountability and responsibility of the marketing metrics. Cause like what I find is they go, but they're just marketing metrics. Like, no, these are business metrics. If you've got a business goal and a marketing strategy that is aligned, these are business metrics. So Marketing ROI, for example, is one of the classic ones. like it is the stick that is used to hire and fire marketers everywhere, like in lots of businesses. And I think, you know, yes, okay, it's called marketing ROI, but it's not. It's your business's ROI. You're spending this money. This is the money you get back. That is us as a growth team, if you want, or a revenue team, if you want to call it that, whatever you want to call it. So like, I would like to see more senior leaders take responsibility for those metrics and not just... like rely on marketing to provide all the answers to them with that stuff. Like you should know what your conversion rate is. You should know how quickly things move through the funnel. Like all of that's, I hate funnel, but you should, you should know that stuff because then you can do forecasting Like, and then you can resource and budget and all the rest of it. So it's like, those are business things. Those are not just things that marketers should be doing on their own. So yeah, some more of that please. add to what Emma was saying, I tend to find that I spend quite a lot of time explaining metrics to people. So what they actually mean and like how they're calculated, which I think is really, really important so that that person understands the quality of that metric. But also if you are a senior leader and you are being presented these metrics regularly. as part of some sort of check -in or board or whatever, make sure that you truly deeply understand what it is. And if you don't, that's okay. Just ask the person to explain to you, know, like, can you just explain to me, what fields are we using to calculate this? So I know exactly kind of what we're looking at or like the one that I have to explain a lot is cohort conversion rates. So like of everyone that we got in in January as leads, 60 days later, like what are they all doing? You know, and they're like, yeah, but that's not our number because we convert one in three and it's like, yeah, one in three over a year. It's not one in three in 60 days, you know, so things like that. Just make sure that you're really confident as you see in your leader with those metrics. And then the other thing I wanted to add to this is. Time periods matter. So much like I was saying within the 60 day or the one year frame, certain metrics work better over longer period time, certain work better over short periods of time, and other metrics will just fluctuate and change over different periods of time. So just have a little think about when you're being presented just a straight up static one number. Mm. Is it over a quarter year, a blah blah? Is it, you know, our rolling ROI for the last 90 days and we're comparing it to the 90 days before that, because that's going to be very different to your ROI this year if you're changing things and you're trying to look for stuff. just, again, it's kind of part of that deeply understanding, but just understand that time plays a huge, huge, huge role in the number that you get in the end and how you group your numbers. And again, understand that so you can... You can really engage and get it and you can basically help marketing do the best job they can because you're there with them. Yeah, big. I feel like this conversation could probably go on for another two hours. We will do marketing metrics part two. do that down the pub, guys. I don't know. But so to end. Much. Yeah. No, no, no. The So Alex, have you got any marketing gossip you want to share with us? Anything that has annoyed you or that you are loving or whatever that you want to share? It's annoyed me for a while. basically I, I can't, I can't deal with it anymore. I did basically like all I see every time I log on to LinkedIn, right. At the moment seems to be at least is like some, sometimes it would be like a person's profile or like maybe like a page that's been set up for it. And it's always like, you can see the caption, it's always the same. And it's always like, my God, like best marketing ever from X brand, right? And it'll be like a picture of an ad or something. And then like the comments are just like full of other people saying best ad ever. my God, this is the best creative I've ever seen. But it's literally all people who work in marketing. Yeah! I sometimes I an A I'm like, I mean, sometimes I'm like, I don't even think the ads very good, but that's like a whole nother thing. The main issue with this sort of behavior, right? Is that, and it kind of comes back to that thing of the joke of the boardroom. I'm like, does nobody here understand the irony of all working in a role, which is essentially to serve other people? Like we're putting out content, not for us, like actively not for us, apart from a little bit me now, which is a whole nother thing. But like, know, we're literally doing stuff to try and appeal to other people, a predefined other people as well, like an audience. And we're all patting ourselves on the back because we think the work is really good. And I'm looking at it, I'm going, I'm just not sure like that really artistic art direction or that really witty, clever line. I'm really not sure that would be good or like I number one that people even care like to real people other like I guess normal people like actually care like no they don't you know you have no idea how it's actually performing right. Like it could be the most glorious thing to a marketing audience, but it completely flopped and you'll have no idea because you're never gonna know those numbers. No, this is the thing. I just, spent all my time just like scrolling and angry scrolling and just being like, also as well, the other thing is a lot of them aren't even real ads. They never actually ran like often they're like award mockups. it's like, yeah, they were put in like a magazine in like, I don't know, like Sao Paulo for like a week, just so they could say that it went live. but actually on the campaign idea, it's like based in the Netherlands and it's like, hang on what? And so I think that's my big one, but I think the kind of cherry on top of the angry cake has got to be brands tweeting like humans. Like, am I going insane? think that's not good. You don't like that? Aldi and Lidl and &S get into bants with each other because I live for it. honestly, like, again, like, this was definitely one of the ones where I did feel just because there was so much positivity around it. I was like, maybe I've just kind of snapped and I just need to shut up because like, yeah, everybody else is having fun and stuff. But yeah, it's just like, that you see these tweets from like a brand. And again, it's usually shared on LinkedIn, like, my God, this social media team just keep knocking out the park. And I'm like, do they? interesting you say that, because I bet we look at it as marketers being like, that's so cool. I wish I could do that. But we're looking at it through a marketing lens of like analyzing what they're doing as a brand. So maybe, I mean, they get good engagement. So that's not a thing, right? So I guess normal people also enjoy it, but I can see it can be off putting So we'd obviously done all these marketing pranks for blame it on marketing. And then someone who I am no longer friends with came to me and said, are you not worried that what you guys have done has made you look unprofessional? And we were like, yeah, but we're marketing to marketers. So it's fine, right? So is it just a case that with all of these brands, it's a little bit like, know your fricking audience better. Yeah, totally. I mean, that's the, yeah, I think, yeah, my, my sort of my triggered, yeah, sensibility probably like overlooked that. think, yeah, there is certainly that strategy originated somewhere, right? Well, Alex, thank you so much for joining us. I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. as Emma said, we could keep going, I think for a while. But yeah, I hope that anyone listening to this found this useful. And if you have any questions, blameitonmarketing.com is where it's at. believe Alex is already a member, so you can even tag him and ask him specifically something that's on your mind. We hope to see you all there and till the next episode.