Marketing "Truths"

Your Boss Doesn’t Care About Impressions

Didi Gluck, vp, editorial director, Manifest

There’s a persistent belief in marketing that the idea is the hard part, and that everything after it is just execution. Get the concept right and the rest will follow. But as a content and digital agency that’s worked with hundreds of clients, we’ve seen time and again that the top causes of delays and inflated budgets generally have nothing to do with the creative. They’re about things like the approval chain, misalignment, and asset management. Operational failures … every one of them.

According to a recent survey that ran in AdWeek, 98% of campaigns launch late and 70% exceed their production budgets. Yet most marketing organizations invest enormous energy developing their creative capabilities and almost none developing their operational ones. If this sounds like your organization, it’s likely costing you more than you realize.

The new competitive advantage in marketing isn’t just a distinct creative campaign. It needs to be paired with the operational infrastructure that gives a great idea a fighting chance.

Here’s what that looks like in practice, from Manifest’s project managers who thrive in the operational trenches every day.

Alignment is an ongoing discipline

Misalignment rarely happens at kickoff. It usually happens three weeks later, when someone makes a small call without realizing it changes something else and by then, the damage can be hard to undo.

“Most project failures are caused by misalignment, which compounds over time,” says Marissa Thompson, an account operations director at Manifest. A subject-matter expert brought in for one narrow decision, for instance, unintentionally steering the whole workstream off course weeks later.

The key is to confirm direction at every major inflection point, not just the beginning, asking whether the work still matches the brief, whether priorities have shifted, and whether anyone has an unvoiced concern. This process is baked into how we operate with every client.

Go back to your brief

Contrary to popular opinion, a brief doesn’t always have to be a formal document, it can live in a kickoff call, a project plan, or sometimes, a strategic, shared slide deck. “The format of the brief can be flexible,” Thompson says. “But the objective shouldn’t be.”

What must always be concrete is a mutually agreed-upon path forward. At Manifest, great work starts with a clear picture: what we’re making, why it matters, who we’re talking to, how we’ll know it worked, and the time and resources we’ll have to get there. Without these non-negotiables, even small deviations can send a project off course in ways that aren’t obvious until real harm has been done.

Create conditions for good work

Related to having a clear objective is having a well-defined way of working so you can bring your deliverables to life. Every marketer has been on a project where the work was good but the execution was chaotic. Things got lost. People didn’t know what they were supposed to do or when. That’s not the path to success. Getting the who, when, and where established at the start of every project creates the conditions for your team to do good work, says Emma Hecht, a project manager at Manifest. That means establishing who’s doing the work, how long they need, and where the resources live, so the team can stop guessing and start producing.

Edit your approval chain

Mapping the approval chain early provides protection from people chiming in at the wrong moments and causing unnecessary revision cycles, says Abisola Alade, a project manager at Manifest. And once a stakeholder has made a decision, it should be written down in a place everyone can find it. Nick Prayner, a project manager at Manifest, calls this decision logging. In a long project, that record is the difference between moving forward confidently and spending a meeting relitigating something that was settled three weeks ago.

Define done

“‘Done’ can be an expensive word if everyone on a project is picturing a different finish line,” says Eric Kanerva, a senior project manager at Manifest. That finish line needs to be the same for everyone on the project. Does done mean the assets are delivered? That the campaign is live? That the results are in? Defining done for each deliverable at the start of a project, not the end, eliminates a category of disagreement that reliably surfaces at the worst possible moment, when everyone’s tired and ready to move on.

Take temperature checks

Marketing is a high-pressure, deadline-driven, subjective business. When people don’t feel safe raising problems, they don’t raise them and errors that can cost time and money can happen. Regular live check-ins, along with the occasional unscheduled Slack message, turn potential crises into small talk—so they don’t end up needing crisis control.

Ricky Ribeiro, svp, creative director, Manifest

There are a thousand legitimate reasons why your marketing plan didn’t have hardcore metrics like pipeline sales or lead scoring baked into it. Feel free to take your pick:

Maybe the tech team has refused to prioritize integrating the lead-gen tool?
Maybe you don’t have the plug-in you’d need to connect to the company’s CRM to tell that story.?
Or even if you did have those tools, the data coming out of them is flawed and hasn’t always matched reality.

While you might have a good reason for not having the data, that justification never really bridges the gap between marketers and many business leaders, because what leadership is ultimately asking is simple: “Is this working?”

THE SEARCH FOR VALUE IN A MESSY MARKETING LANDSCAPE

So here are my two cents: Instead of wrapping yourself up in justifications, grapple with this marketing truth instead: Your boss doesn’t care about impressions. They care about impact.

Impact is marketing’s pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and it isn’t measured in a single metric. It’s an intangible, nuanced, messy, psychological belief and feeling that any good marketer aspires to manifest (pun FULLY intended) with their audiences — both internal, like your boss and their bosses, and external, like the customers and prospects you’re trying to reach.

Before you roll your eyes and assume I’m a typical creative type who wants to dismiss quantitative data in favor of qualitative, hear me out. I love data. I actually believe there are important stories hiding in datasets and spreadsheets.

And while some of the value of your marketing activities will come through in the KPIs you set and define, the truth is, a lot of lasting perception of your marketing’s value will come through in how you connect, engage, and sell your ideas and creative to your stakeholders internally.

As a creative leader, I rely on my partners in data intelligence to help me align my ideas with what will be measured, and how I can tell that story to my leadership internally or to my clients.

Establishing Metrics of Success Is More of a Group Act, Not a One-Man Band

It’s super easy to pick on so-called vanity metrics like impressions or page views, but there’s nothing wrong with those metrics in and of themselves. The problem is leaning on them alone as a proofpoint of success and impact. They’re useful contextual data, but they can’t carry the full weight of why a leadership should believe your marketing is working or worth continued investment.

Working alongside our data intelligence team, I’ve come to see the biggest misconception marketers hold is the idea that they’re one metric, one platform, or one tech-stack change away from finally proving their program’s success. Instead, marketers must figure out what combination of metrics can actually tell the story that needs to be told, and holds you accountable to more than just pointing at rising impressions.

Part of the reason some marketers end up backed into the impressions corner is because they don’t have a data intelligence partner. This might be because that expert isn’t on your team, or, even if they are, perhaps you aren’t involving your analytics team early enough or intimately enough to alter the way you tell your impact story. Too often, data only enters the conversation at the very end, once someone asks “how did we do?” By then, all you can show is whatever happened to already be set up.

So what might a good combination of impact metrics look like? Here are a few suggestions I picked up in talking with our data intelligence team:

Pair page data with some form of conversion data. If someone hits five content touchpoints before moving further in their journey, you can say something like, “we increased the number of people hitting that threshold by 15% month over month.” That shifts you from a pure vanity metric toward a real narrative, one that connects page views to behavioral cohorts to conversion rate.
If you’re focused on brand lift or awareness, layer your data iteratively across the journey (research, evaluation, conversion, post-purchase) and let it surface where things break down. If unaided awareness is struggling even as other metrics look healthy, that can point to a memorability problem: Perhaps you’re generating visibility and brand interactions, but people simply aren’t retaining it.

And those are just a couple of starting points. Here’s a broader shift I’d encourage marketers to make as they move away from these metrics and toward ones more likely to land with leadership:

Measurement Plans and Journey Maps Point Marketers in the Right Direction

As a content and digital agency with deep experience across industries, we know measurement is a nuanced, context-dependent conversation. As part of any client engagement at Manifest, we build measurement plans for campaign creative and content programs. These plans are thoughtful and strategic, centered on understanding the client’s business well enough to know how to actually measure and optimize value.

The crafting of a measurement plan always starts with candid conversations and a workshop around the business goals, making sure everyone’s aligned, and getting a clear read on how the client is already measuring success, since most teams have something in place. From there, it’s a back-and-forth, as we identify the gaps and figure out the best way to close them.

We saw this recently with a client who hadn’t yet integrated form submits into their site analytics. To close that gap, we worked with them to build KPIs capturing the journey from impressions all the way to the key CTA engagements right before conversion, leveraging their existing site tracking ahead of a Marketo implementation still in progress.

Beyond measurement plans, we also invest heavily in customer journey analysis, pairing data with the actions marketers can actually take in response to it. At a more advanced level, this is where a platform like our own Manifest Orchestrate comes in. This tool provides identity resolution and visibility from the very first impression, tracked all the way through conversion, and paired with the ability to hit the right person with the right creative at the right time.

One reason journey analysis matters so much is that the top and bottom of the funnel tend to get all the attention, while the messy middle, where the hardest marketing work actually happens, gets overlooked. That’s exactly where a tech-driven, sophisticated approach pays off, since it’s imperative that you ensure the repeated brand interactions you’re facilitating are actually translating into the business outcomes you want.

Consider This as You Build Your Content Success Plan

If you’re tired of dying on the impressions hill, here are a few meaningful next steps you should consider as you develop your success plans:

1) Start with the business goal that your boss WOULD be happy with. That may mean educating your boss on what is and isn’t measurable, and aligning your tactics with what’s measurable, budget, and any other constraints baked into your plan. The why matters as much as the what.

2) Connect how your initiative impacts or influences that biz goal. The goal isn’t to force your measurement plan or your marketing strategy to follow a rigid journey or user flow. It’s to make sure every user journey or flow is possible and ensure those journeys are working harder for your marketing plan and, ultimately, your organizational objectives.

3) Think outside the box with KPIs. Don’t just pick from a predetermined list. The From/To table above is meant to jump-start your thinking, not box it in. Without direct engagement, any outside expert is blind to your organization’s nuances. If your impressions underperformed, dig into why: did most of them come from decision-makers at your target accounts? If so, those “meager” impressions might be far more valuable than the raw number suggests.

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