We can measure almost everything in marketing. Except, apparently, whether it’s actually working.

Website traffic is up. LinkedIn impressions are climbing. Campaign dashboards are glowing reassuringly green.

Excellent.

But is any of it generating profitable business?

“We’re not entirely sure.”

And somewhere in Finance, someone quietly closes their laptop.

In this episode of Marketing, Properly!, Sean Makin explores why marketing measurement has become simultaneously incredibly sophisticated and surprisingly unhelpful and why collecting more numbers doesn’t necessarily lead to better decisions.

The problem often starts with measuring what’s easy rather than what’s important.

Website traffic. LinkedIn impressions. Clicks. Followers. Downloads. Leads.

All useful indicators.

But none automatically tells you whether the business is attracting the right customers, generating profitable opportunities or achieving its commercial objectives.

We look at why marketing measurement should start with business goals, why lead quality matters more than simply counting enquiries, and why following the numbers through Sales, revenue and customer retention can completely change your understanding of what’s working.

Then there’s attribution.

Google Ads claims the conversion. LinkedIn claims the influence. Sales remembers meeting the customer at an exhibition two years ago.

And the customer says:

“Oh, I’ve known about you for ages.”

Excellent.

Glad we’ve cleared that up.

We explore why customers rarely follow neat, measurable journeys and why the last click isn’t necessarily the reason someone bought.

There’s also the question of marketing activity that’s difficult to measure precisely.

Brand awareness. Reputation. Trust. PR. Thought leadership. Word of mouth. Customer experience.

These things can have considerable commercial value, even when they don’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet.

But that doesn’t mean marketers should be allowed to hide behind the argument that some things simply can’t be measured.

Not everything valuable can be measured perfectly. But everything we invest in should have a reason for existing.

We also look at how businesses can measure offline activity more effectively, why Sales and Marketing need to agree on what constitutes a lead or opportunity, and why measurement should be planned before a campaign begins rather than reconstructed afterwards through an archaeological excavation of Google Analytics.

Most importantly, we ask whether the numbers being reported actually help anyone make a decision.

Should we spend more?

Spend less?

Change the message?

Stop the campaign?

Target different customers?

Because a dashboard containing 74 numbers nobody acts upon isn’t particularly sophisticated.

It’s decoration.

So before commissioning another marketing report, ask:

“What are we trying to achieve, what evidence do we have that it’s working, and what are we going to do differently as a result?”

You won’t measure everything perfectly.

And you shouldn’t pretend you can.

But you should be able to explain why you’re spending the money, what you expect it to achieve and what you’re learning along the way.

Because marketing doesn’t need perfect measurement.

It needs useful measurement.

And if your monthly report contains 47 pages of charts but nobody can explain whether marketing is helping the business, you probably don’t need another dashboard.

You need better questions.

Marketing, Properly! - practical marketing thinking for business owners and Managing Directors who want clearer strategy, better decisions and marketing measurement that actually means something.

Hosted by Sean Makin, a Fractional CMO and Strategic Marketing Consultant with over 25 years’ experience in marketing and brand.

Produced in Scotland.

The monthly marketing meeting begins.

Website traffic is up 14%.

LinkedIn impressions are up 23%.

Email open rates remain healthy.

There are several attractive graphs. One of them even has an arrow pointing upwards.

Everything appears reassuringly positive.

So the Managing Director asks: “Is the marketing actually working?”

And there’s a brief silence.

Because that wasn’t on the slide.

In this episode of Marketing, Properly!, Sean Makin looks at the questions Managing Directors should be asking their marketing teams, not to become marketing experts themselves, but to make sure marketing is actually helping the business achieve what it needs to achieve.

It starts with a much better question than “What campaigns are we running?”

“What business objective are we trying to influence?”

Because marketing activity only becomes meaningful when you understand what it’s supposed to achieve.

We look at why MDs should ask who their priority customers really are, what the business wants to be known for and whether Sales, Marketing and senior leadership would actually give roughly the same answers.

Then there’s performance.

Don’t simply ask:

“What’s working?”

Follow it immediately with:

“How do we know?”

LinkedIn engagement might be increasing, but is it the right people engaging?

Google Ads might be generating conversions but, are they becoming customers?

The exhibition stand might have been extremely busy, but so is a pub on Friday night.

Busyness isn’t necessarily a commercial outcome.

There’s another question marketing teams should be comfortable answering:

“What isn’t working?”

Not every campaign succeeds. Not every channel performs. Some ideas fail.

A healthy marketing culture should be able to say:

“We tried this. It didn’t work. Here’s what we learned. We’re stopping it.”

That isn’t failure.

That’s good management.

We also explore why Managing Directors should ask what customers are telling the business, where potential customers are dropping out, what Sales thinks of the marketing, where money is being wasted and which activities the team would stop if it had to choose.

And there’s one question that often gets forgotten:

“What do you need from me?”

Because marketing performance isn’t solely the responsibility of Marketing. Leadership needs to provide clarity, priorities, decisions and the freedom to stop low-value activity.

A Managing Director doesn’t need to understand every change to Google’s algorithm or memorise the difference between GA4, PPC, CRO, CTR and CRM.

That’s not the job.

The job is to make sure Marketing is helping the business move in the right direction.

So don’t just ask:

“What have you been doing?”

Ask:

“What are we trying to achieve?”

“What are we learning?”

“What’s working?”

“What isn’t?”

And:

“What are we going to do differently because of it?”

Because the best relationship between a Managing Director and Marketing isn’t one where the MD knows all the answers.

It’s one where they’re asking better questions.

Which, conveniently, is rather the point of this podcast.

Marketing, Properly! - practical marketing thinking for business owners and Managing Directors who want better questions, clearer decisions and marketing that actually contributes to the business.

Hosted by Sean Makin, a Fractional CMO and Strategic Marketing Consultant with over 25 years’ experience in marketing and brand.

Produced in Scotland.

“We need to do more marketing.”

Sales are slow?

More marketing.

The pipeline looks thin?

More marketing.

Competitors seem to be everywhere? Definitely more marketing.

More campaigns. More content. More advertising. More emails. More events. More leads. More budget.

But before increasing everything, there’s a question worth asking:

Do you actually need more marketing or do you need the marketing you’re already doing to work considerably better?

In this episode of Marketing, Properly!, Sean Makin looks at why increasing marketing activity isn’t always the answer to a growth problem and why doing more of something that isn’t working can simply allow you to waste money at greater speed.

The first step is understanding where the real problem lies.

Are too few people aware of you? That could be an awareness problem.

Are people visiting the website but not enquiring? Perhaps it’s conversion.

Are you generating plenty of enquiries, but they’re the wrong ones? Look at targeting and positioning.

Are you generating good opportunities but failing to win them? The problem might be Sales, pricing, proposition, trust or customer experience.

Yet remarkably often, the answer to all of these problems is:

“We need more leads.”

We look at why more website traffic won’t fix a weak website, why filling the CRM with hundreds of unsuitable prospects doesn’t necessarily help Sales, and why producing more content simply because the content calendar has empty spaces isn’t much of a strategy.

Before increasing the budget, there’s another useful exercise:

Find the waste.

Google Ads. Agency retainers. Software. Events. Sponsorship. Content. PR. SEO. CRM. Freelancers.

Why are you spending that money? Who is it supposed to influence? What outcome are you trying to create? And what evidence suggests it’s working?

You may discover that the business doesn’t need another £50,000 of marketing budget.

It might simply need to stop wasting 20% of the budget it already has.

Better marketing can also mean doing less.

Fewer audiences. Fewer messages. Fewer priorities. Fewer channels.

But doing the right ones properly.

Of course, sometimes the answer genuinely is more. If your proposition is strong, the website converts, Sales is performing, customers stay, and marketing is reliably producing profitable opportunities, then scale it.

If the machine works, turn it up.

If smoke is coming out of the machine, don’t make it run faster.

So before launching another campaign, adding another channel or increasing the budget, ask:

“What’s preventing what we’re already doing from working harder?”

Solve that first.

Because good marketing scales.

Bad marketing scales too. It just scales the waste.

Marketing, Properly! - practical marketing thinking for business owners and Managing Directors who want clearer strategy, better decisions and considerably less wasted marketing.

Hosted by Sean Makin, a Fractional CMO and Strategic Marketing Consultant with over 25 years’ experience in marketing and brand.

Produced in Scotland.

“People don’t really understand what we do.”

It’s a surprisingly common problem.

The business has been operating successfully for years. It has customers, employees, products, services and plenty of expertise.

Everyone inside the company knows exactly what it does.

The problem is… nobody else seems to.

In this episode of Marketing, Properly!, Sean Makin looks at why businesses so often struggle to explain themselves clearly, and why the problem may go much deeper than the wording on the homepage.

Ask the Managing Director what the business does and you get one answer. Ask Sales and you get another. Visit the website and you’re greeted with something about delivering innovative solutions through customer-focused excellence.

Excellent.

But what do you actually do?

We look at how familiarity, technical knowledge and corporate language can make businesses unnecessarily difficult to understand, and why phrases such as innovative, leading, trusted, solutions and excellence often make companies sound remarkably similar to everyone else.

There’s a simple test.

Show your website to someone who doesn’t work for the company for five seconds, then ask:

• What does this company do?
• Who is it for?
• Why might someone choose it?

If they can’t answer the first question, you’ve got work to do.

We also explore why trying to say everything can result in customers understanding almost nothing, why businesses should talk about customer problems rather than simply listing capabilities, and why clear almost always beats clever.

But there’s a more uncomfortable possibility.

Perhaps the marketing is confusing because the business itself isn’t entirely clear about what it is.

Companies grow. Services get added. New markets appear. Acquisitions happen. Someone asks whether you can do something slightly different and the answer is, naturally, “Yes, we can do that too.”

Ten years later, the company offers 23 things across 11 markets and nobody can quite explain what connects them.

At that point, you don’t have a copywriting problem.

You have a positioning problem.

And the marketing team can’t create clarity that the leadership team hasn’t created strategically.

So before rewriting the website, ask:

• What business are we actually in?
• Which customers matter most?
• What do we want to be known for?
• Where do we have a genuine advantage?

Because customers don’t owe you 20 minutes of concentration to decode your marketing.

Clarity is your responsibility.

Your customers aren’t stupid.

They’re just not as interested in your business as you are, and expecting them to work hard to understand you is rarely a winning marketing strategy.

Clear beats clever. Almost every time.

Marketing, Properly! - practical marketing thinking for business owners and Managing Directors who want clearer positioning, better decisions and considerably less corporate nonsense.

Hosted by Sean Makin, a Fractional CMO and Strategic Marketing Consultant with over 25 years’ experience in marketing and brand.

Produced in Scotland.

Fractional CMO. or Fractional Marketing Director, depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re standing.

It’s a title that has become considerably more common over the past few years. Unfortunately, the more popular it becomes, the less clear it sometimes seems to be what one actually does.

So let’s clear something up.

A Fractional CMO isn’t someone who does a fraction of your marketing.

They’re not supposed to arrive every Tuesday, write three LinkedIn posts, adjust a Google Ad and disappear again.

In this episode of Marketing, Properly!, Sean Makin looks at what business owners and Managing Directors should genuinely expect when they bring senior fractional marketing leadership into their business.

A good Fractional CMO should start by understanding the business before prescribing the marketing. Where are you trying to go? What’s driving growth? What’s holding it back? Who are your best customers? What’s Sales struggling with? Where is the marketing budget going and is any of it actually working?

From there, you should expect clarity, strategy, leadership, challenge and commercial accountability.

That means connecting marketing with the wider commercial strategy, providing direction to internal teams and agencies, challenging assumptions and being prepared to ask uncomfortable but useful questions such as:

“Why are we spending money on this?”

It also means recognising that more marketing isn’t necessarily better marketing.

Sometimes the first contribution of experienced marketing leadership isn’t launching another campaign or increasing the budget.

It’s stopping things.

Software nobody needs. Agency services that aren’t delivering. Events attended through habit. Underperforming channels. Activity that exists largely because nobody has asked why it’s still happening.

We also look at what you shouldn’t expect.

A Fractional CMO isn’t an entire marketing department. Their job isn’t necessarily to personally write every article, design every advert, manage every social account and update every page of your website.

Senior marketers can and should roll up their sleeves when required, but that isn’t where most of their value lies.

You’re not hiring another pair of hands. You’re hiring another experienced head.

And over time, good fractional leadership should help build capability inside the business, developing people, improving agencies, establishing systems and creating a marketing function that becomes stronger and more self-sufficient.

Because when marketing lacks leadership, the instinct is often to do more.

More campaigns. More channels. More content. More agencies. More software.

When what the business may really need is someone experienced enough to say:

“Here’s what actually matters.”

And then make sure it happens.

Marketing, Properly! - practical marketing thinking for business owners and Managing Directors who want clearer strategy, better decisions and marketing that genuinely supports business growth.

Hosted by Sean Makin, a Fractional CMO and Strategic Marketing Consultant with over 25 years’ experience in marketing and brand.

Produced in Scotland.

Ask a marketing team how things are going and there’s a reasonable chance you’ll hear one word: “Busy.”

Very busy. Incredibly busy.

Campaigns are launching. Content is being written. LinkedIn is being updated. Emails are being built. Reports are being produced. The CRM needs attention. There’s an exhibition coming up. And somebody has scheduled another meeting to discuss what happened in the previous meeting.

Everyone is working extremely hard.

So why is the Managing Director still asking: “What is Marketing actually achieving?”

In this episode of Marketing, Properly!, Sean looks at one of marketing’s most persistent problems: confusing activity with effectiveness.

Marketing has an almost infinite supply of things it could be doing. New channels, new platforms, new campaigns and new technology are constantly being added, but very little ever seems to get removed.

The result can be a marketing function that is permanently busy without necessarily moving the business forward.

We look at why a lack of strategy creates more work, how Marketing can gradually become the company’s internal “request department”, and why technology and AI haven’t necessarily made marketers less busy, they’ve simply made it possible to produce considerably more stuff.

And that raises an increasingly important question:

Just because we can produce more marketing, should we?

We also look at the difference between measuring outputs and outcomes, why constantly overwhelmed teams have no time left to think, and why sometimes the most valuable decision a Marketing Director can make is: “We’re going to stop doing that.”

There’s a practical suggestion too: alongside your marketing to-do list, create a marketing stop list.

Look at everything you’re currently doing and ask why it exists, who it’s for, what it’s supposed to achieve and what would actually happen if you stopped.

Because good marketing isn’t about creating the maximum possible amount of marketing.

It’s about doing the smallest number of things capable of producing the greatest useful effect.

So next time someone tells you Marketing is incredibly busy, don’t automatically be reassured.

Ask: “Busy doing what?”

And then ask the question that really matters: “Does it actually matter?”

Because a marketing team running at 100 miles an hour in the wrong direction isn’t high-performing.

It’s simply getting lost more efficiently.

Marketing, Properly! - practical marketing thinking for business owners, Managing Directors and marketers who want better decisions, clearer strategy and considerably less pointless activity.

Hosted by Sean Makin, a Fractional CMO and Strategic Marketing Consultant with over 25 years’ experience in marketing and brand.

Produced in Scotland.