Good Marketing Can Look Bad On Paper

The Case for Honest Marketing Over Pretty Numbers

There are certain numbers marketers love putting into reports. Traffic is up. Impressions are climbing. More people saw the ad. The chart has a nice little arrow pointing up and to the right. Everyone feels good.

Except sometimes, none of those numbers are helping the business grow.

That’s where marketing gets a little uncomfortable. Because good marketing isn’t always about protecting the number that looks best on a report. Sometimes it means being willing to make that number look worse.

When More Traffic Wasn’t the Answer

One of our teams recently ran into exactly this situation.

A client was investing in paid social, and the campaigns were doing a great job of getting people to the website. Traffic looked strong. On paper, you could easily call it a win. But we kept looking.

Once those visitors landed on the site, they weren’t taking enough of the actions the client cared about. They weren’t calling. They weren’t filling out forms. We were getting attention, but not enough action. So the team recommended moving budget out of paid social and into paid search, where we were seeing stronger conversion activity.

There was one catch. We knew traffic was going to drop. A lot.

Sometimes the Better Strategy Has a Worse-Looking Number

That isn’t always an easy recommendation to make. When a client has gotten used to seeing a big traffic number every month, telling them you’re about to intentionally make it smaller can sound like you’re moving backward. So we didn’t bury it in the next report. We told them exactly what we expected to happen.

“Your traffic is going to drop. A lot.”

“My job isn’t to protect a pretty number. It’s to help my client get to the outcome that matters,” says Brittany Stiffler, Account Executive, who led the strategy shift. “I’d rather have an uncomfortable conversation about making the strategy better than a comfortable conversation about numbers that aren’t moving the business forward.”

And the traffic did drop. But the phone calls and form fills increased.

That was the point. The client’s response stuck with us, too. He told the team that kind of honesty was exactly why he had left his previous agency.

The Metric Isn’t the Goal

This is where marketing reporting can get messy. A metric can be accurate and still be misleading if we give it more importance than it deserves. More traffic sounds great. More impressions sound great. A lower cost per click sounds great.

But none of those numbers exist in a vacuum.

The better question is what happened next.

Did the right people visit? Did they engage? Did they take an action? Did the campaign contribute to the business outcome we were trying to create in the first place? For healthcare organizations, that distinction matters. A campaign can generate plenty of activity without generating meaningful patient demand, referral growth, occupancy or service-line growth.

More isn’t automatically better. Better is better.

What the Right Marketing Partnership Looks Like

A good marketing partner shouldn’t be afraid of a bad-looking number. They should be able to explain why it changed, what it tells us and what we’re doing next because of it.

Sometimes that means celebrating growth. Sometimes it means recognizing that something isn’t working. And sometimes it means intentionally sacrificing one metric because the data tells us there is a better path to the outcome that matters.

That kind of honesty might make a monthly report a little less pretty. It makes the strategy a whole lot more useful.

The Bottom Line

We don’t believe marketing should be built around protecting metrics. It should be built around understanding what those metrics are telling us and using that information to make smarter decisions.

At Advance Healthcare, that means looking past the number that gets the biggest headline and asking what it means for patient growth, referrals, occupancy, service-line growth and the larger goals of the organization.

Because the goal isn’t to make the marketing report look good.

It’s to make the marketing work.