Marketing Agencies are Lying to You – Here’s How

Marketing agencies are lying to you.

Let’s time-travel back 50 years ago. You’re researching a magazine to advertise in (the magazine is called SOBA, for example’s sake). SOBA has 70,000 monthly readers you’d like to get in front of.

Naturally, you decide to hire an agency. They create a lovely ad for your product, and you purchase a full-page ad spot in the magazine.

SOBA’s latest issue goes to print. And low and behold, among all the articles, ads, and editorials is your full-page ad. It’s real and on glossy paper, distributed to MAGA’s 70,000 readers. You carefully cut out the page, frame it, and put it on your office wall for all your visitors to see. Your face lights up as you think about all the extra sales you will make from this ad. Certainly, you will need many more cash registers.

At the end of the month, you get a call from Gary, the agency rep. “It’s absolutely amazing!” Gary exclaims, “Your ad has been seen more than 55 THOUSAND TIMES! We have been getting letters all week from people saying how much they love your ad!”

You feel butterflies in your stomach and thank Gary for the incredible work and that you send your best regards to his wife, Jane, and kids, Nicola and Mary.

In all the excitement, you glance over at your sales report. Your heart sinks as the sales numbers do not align with the feelings you’ve just experienced. Over the last month, sales have barely increased. All those extra cash registers – gone to waste.

You call Gary, a little disheartened. Gary assures you that 55,000 impressions are incredible. That kind of brand awareness is unheard of. Maybe even the Pope himself knows about your brand by now. No sales? No problem. You should be viewing your relationship with the agency as a long-term strategic partnership. You’ll definitely need to run another ad this month because impressions and sales are hard to link.

Sound familiar?

Understand this – years ago, impressions meant almost nothing. “Likes” meant almost nothing. Heck, even the value of “leads” was very debatable. Here’s what mattered and what still matters – Sales.

Money. In. Your. Pocket.

Guess what, guys? These agencies, and yes, I’m saying it, MANY marketers, are taking advantage of the fact that impressions are large, impressive numbers and manipulating you into thinking you, too, should be impressed by them.

320,000 impressions is not a metric of ad success. If you base your marketing success on impressions alone, your business will fail.

I’ll say it again: Without sales, impressions literally mean nothing. You can have a campaign that gets 1,000,000 impressions and get 0 sales out of it. Does that mean your campaign was a success? Personally, I don’t think so.

Maybe your argument is, “BuT BrANd AWaReNEsS!” Yes, brand awareness is important, but most companies can’t afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on brand awareness campaigns and get 0 sales. If you pay for brand awareness campaigns, that’s what you’ll get – impressions.

Here’s where impressions DO matter. Marketing funnels…where they are used for predictive analysis. For example, if a campaign gets 100,000 impressions every month, we know that we get 100 leads out of that. Out of those 100 leads, we get 10 sales. This means if we want to get 20 sales every month, we’ll most likely need 200,000 impressions. Very simple example.

Moral of the story: Stop buying B.S. from ad companies and agencies. If your agency keeps reporting on impressions like it’s a godly metric, WITHOUT qualified leads and sales, then it’s probably time to find a new agency.