Hi {{first_name | there,}}

For more than 25 years, I’ve helped teams build marketing that cuts through noise and scales revenue.

Geoff’s Growth Guide is where I share the strategy, go-to-market frameworks, and execution systems that work in practice. Not theory. Not hype. Just the mechanics behind durable growth.

Your marketing dashboard tells you which campaigns generated clicks, leads and conversions. It can show you where your budget went, which channels delivered results and how performance compares with last quarter.

But can it tell you which investments are making your business more likely to grow next year?

That's a different question, and one that requires looking beyond conventional campaign reporting.

Last week, we explored how brands like Bilt, Rothy's and Liquid Death are investing in experiences, emotional connections and distinctive creative that don't always fit neatly into traditional attribution models. The challenge isn't simply that some marketing activities are difficult to measure. It's that measurement limitations can influence which activities get funded in the first place.

This week, we're moving from the problem to the practical application.

How do you evaluate marketing activities that influence customer behaviour over time? How do you distinguish meaningful indicators of progress from metrics that merely look impressive? And how do you connect that evidence to commercial outcomes without pretending you can attribute every dollar of revenue to a specific interaction?

I'll walk through a straightforward three-part framework for answering those questions, followed by five practical exercises you can use to uncover growth opportunities your existing reporting may be overlooking.

Because better marketing measurement isn't about producing a more impressive dashboard. It's about making more informed decisions about where to invest.

If this resonates, I’d love to hear what you think. Just hit “reply” or click here. I read every response.

Before you evaluate a marketing investment, you need to answer three questions: What are we trying to change? How will we know whether it's happening? And why does that change matter to the business?

Too often, measurement starts with the available data rather than the intended outcome. Teams build reporting around the metrics their platforms provide, then use those reports to justify future investment. The danger is that the measurement system gradually begins shaping the strategy instead of supporting it.

I think of this as a three-part framework: Objective, Evidence, Impact.

Each serves a distinct purpose, and together they provide a practical foundation for evaluating both immediate performance and longer-term growth.

Start by identifying the specific customer behaviour or business outcome you want to influence. Are you trying to generate immediate sales? Increase consideration among potential customers? Strengthen relationships with existing customers? Make your brand more recognisable in a competitive category?

Each objective requires a different approach, and each operates on a different timeline.
For example:

• Demand capture: Reach customers who are already looking for a solution and convert that interest into sales.

• Demand creation: Increase familiarity, preference and consideration among people who may not be ready to purchase.

• Customer retention: Strengthen existing relationships, encourage repeat purchases and increase lifetime value.

A campaign designed to introduce your brand to an unfamiliar audience shouldn't be judged exclusively by how many immediate conversions it produces.
Equally, a campaign designed to generate qualified leads shouldn't be considered successful simply because it attracts attention.

Start with the behaviour you want to change, not the metric that's easiest to report.

Once you've established the objective, identify the signals that would indicate whether you're making progress. The important word here is signals.
Not every useful measure provides definitive proof of commercial impact, and not every contribution can be attributed to an individual interaction.

• For a customer acquisition campaign, evidence might include incremental conversions, qualified leads and customer acquisition costs.

• For a brand-building initiative, the evidence might be more varied: improved brand recall, greater consideration, increases in branded search or stronger customer preference over time.

• For an experiential campaign, you might examine attendance, subsequent engagement, customer referrals and differences in purchasing behaviour between exposed and comparable unexposed audiences.

Ideally, you'll establish a baseline before the activity begins and determine when and how results should be evaluated.
This also helps avoid a common mistake: deciding what success looks like after seeing the results.

Good measurement doesn't require every activity to produce an immediate financial return. It requires a credible way to assess whether the activity is achieving its intended purpose.

Get marketing insights, frameworks, playbooks, and tactics.
It’s free too.

The final step is where marketing measurement becomes marketing strategy. It's not enough to demonstrate that awareness increased, engagement improved or more people attended an event. You need to understand why those changes matter commercially.

That doesn't necessarily mean calculating a precise return on every individual activity. It means developing a reasonable understanding of how marketing contributes to customer acquisition, retention, pricing power, purchase frequency or lifetime value.

For example, an experiential campaign might increase brand preference among a particular audience. That preference could subsequently improve conversion rates, reduce reliance on discounting or increase repeat purchases.
The relationship isn't automatic, and it shouldn't simply be assumed.

Where possible, use controlled experiments, customer research, cohort analysis or other methods to test whether the observed changes translate into meaningful business outcomes. And where definitive measurement isn't possible, acknowledge the uncertainty rather than assigning artificial precision to the results.

The objective is to make better investment decisions, not to make every marketing activity look successful.

Consider Bilt's experiential marketing strategy. Its objective isn't necessarily to generate an immediate transaction every time someone attends an event or engages with its merchandise. Part of the opportunity is to strengthen the emotional relationship between members and the brand.

The evidence might include event participation, member engagement, brand consideration and referral activity.

The business impact would ultimately need to appear in outcomes such as stronger retention, increased member activity, more valuable customer relationships or incremental acquisition.
That's the distinction the framework is designed to reinforce.

• Objective tells you what you're trying to change.
• Evidence tells you whether the change appears to be happening.
• Impact tells you whether that change is valuable to the business.

When those three elements are connected, marketing leaders can make more informed decisions about where to invest, what to improve and what to stop doing.

And they can do it without assuming that the easiest activities to measure are necessarily the most important ones to fund.

Understanding the framework is one thing. Using it to make better investment decisions is another.

The following five exercises are designed to help you question assumptions, investigate gaps in your current reporting and identify opportunities that deserve a closer look.

You don't need a sophisticated attribution model or an enormous research budget to get started. You need a clear question, a credible way to investigate it and a willingness to act on what you learn.

Review your current marketing investments and ask which activities receive funding primarily because their results are easy to attribute. Are you consistently increasing spending on paid search and retargeting while reducing investment in brand awareness, customer education or community engagement?

Try this: Categorise your marketing budget into demand creation, demand capture and customer retention. Compare the allocation with your actual business priorities.

If nearly everything is focused on capturing existing demand, consider whether you're investing enough in creating tomorrow's customers.

Think about why customers actually choose your business. Do they remember a useful article? Trust a recommendation? Recognise your brand from an earlier experience? Feel more confident because they've encountered your expertise repeatedly?

These influences may be commercially important without appearing in conventional attribution reports.

Try this: Ask five recent customers what first introduced them to your brand and what ultimately convinced them to buy. Compare their answers with what your analytics suggests. The differences may reveal valuable influences you're currently overlooking.

You don't need an enormous experiential marketing budget to apply the lessons from Bilt. A useful webinar, local event, customer community, educational content series or distinctive creative campaign can provide an opportunity to build familiarity and preference.
The important thing is to establish what you're trying to accomplish before launching it.

Try this: Choose one small initiative and define a specific hypothesis, such as: "Customers who participate in our educational sessions will demonstrate stronger purchase consideration than comparable nonparticipants."

Identify how you'll evaluate that hypothesis and establish a review period before committing additional resources.

A campaign generating attributed conversions isn't necessarily generating the same number of additional conversions.

Some customers would have purchased without seeing the advertising. That distinction becomes particularly important when evaluating branded search, retargeting and campaigns aimed at existing customers.

Try this: Select one established campaign and design a small, controlled holdout test where practical. Compare outcomes between exposed and comparable unexposed groups to estimate whether the campaign is producing additional business rather than simply receiving credit for transactions that were already likely to happen.

Brand building deserves accountability, but that doesn't mean forcing every activity into a short-term return-on-ad-spend calculation. A more useful approach is to track a combination of indicators that reflect how customer relationships develop.

Try this: Create a quarterly scorecard with three levels of measurement:

• Brand indicators: Awareness, consideration, preference or recall.

• Behavioural indicators: Branded search, direct visits, referrals or repeat engagement.

• Commercial indicators: Customer acquisition, retention, lifetime value or incremental revenue.

Look for consistent patterns over time, and use experiments or additional research to investigate whether observed changes are connected.

The objective isn't to prove that every initiative worked. It's to learn which investments deserve more funding, which need improvement and which should be discontinued.

None of these exercises requires abandoning performance marketing or accepting vague claims about the value of brand building. They simply encourage a more complete view of marketing effectiveness.

The next growth opportunity may not be hiding in a new channel, technology or campaign format. It may be hiding in something you're already doing but haven't learned how to evaluate properly.

And before you increase spending on whatever your dashboard currently identifies as the best-performing activity, it's worth asking one more question:
Are we funding what creates the most growth, or what makes the easiest case for next quarter's budget?

The real value of marketing measurement isn't the ability to explain what happened last quarter. It's the ability to make better decisions about what happens next.

That requires more than adding new metrics to a dashboard. It means being deliberate about the outcomes you're trying to influence, gathering evidence that reflects those objectives and testing whether the changes you're seeing actually contribute to business growth.

The five exercises in this edition are a starting point, not another reporting process to add to your workload. You don't need to implement all of them at once. Start with one area where your current measurement approach may be giving you an incomplete picture.

Maybe it's a brand initiative that's difficult to defend because its value develops over time. Maybe it's a paid campaign receiving credit for customers who would have converted anyway. Or perhaps it's a customer behaviour you know matters but have never systematically investigated.

Pick one. Establish what you want to learn. Test your assumptions. And use what you discover to make your next investment decision.

The goal isn't to make marketing easier to justify. It's to make marketing more effective.

Question for you:
What's one marketing investment you suspect is more valuable, or less valuable, than your current reporting suggests?

I'd love to know how you're approaching that question and what you've discovered. Hit reply and tell me or simply click here and share your experiences. I respond directly, and the strongest topics often shape future editions.

See you in the next edition,
Geoff

People assume that real businesses get built by other people with more resources. It's how great ideas get stuck in notes apps and conversations.

But you don't need six months and a developer's salary to validate your concept. You just need a weekend. Describe what you want to exist and Lovable builds it: a real site, a real product, ready to accept real payments from real customers. Not a mockup to show people. An actual thing they can use.

You don't need anyone's sign-off to get started. Take $5 off your first month.

Find out this weekend

_{^{Discount of $5 applies to first month of any paid plan. You need to sign up via this webpage in order to claim the discount. The discount applies to new and returning users without an active paid plan. Terms apply.}}