Business Insights

If you don’t have effective marketing, do you have a business? How will you ensure growth? Secure leads? Build brand awareness? How will you hold on to your existing customers, or bring new ones through the door? Without a full and joined-up marketing strategy, businesses struggle to make sales – and eventually, to exist altogether.

No profit? No business. That’s why ROI – Return on Investment – forms the backbone of successful business leadership. Marketing ROI, on the other hand, remains a problem for some. It’s easy to lose sight of what your marketing spend is actually doing for you. Marketing consultants and agencies often lean on ‘vanity stats’ to justify their work, like Facebook views or being followed by X number of influential individuals on social media.

We originally wrote this post way back in 2016, a lifetime in social media years. Since then, LinkedIn has been acquired by Microsoft and the platform has undergone some significant changes. It’s time for a fresh look at what’s changed.

“Ah, I....erm....well, it’s....erm.....how about that engagement, though?” A lot of marketing consultants tend to go a bit ‘Hugh Grant’ when they’re confronted about return on investment (ROI), preferring to lean back on easy stats – vanity metrics – to prove their marketing effectiveness.

“I regard [rebranding] as the most asymmetrical corporate strategy of them all. There is literally no upside...there is only pain if you get it wrong. And inevitably it goes wrong a lot of the time.” So said columnist and marketing professor Mark Ritson in a recent article for Marketing Week.