Way back in the Mesozoic Era that we often refer to as 2012, I read an article on HubSpot that significantly changed the way I think about marketing.
The article, titled Why I Fired My Marketing Agency, is only available courtesy of the Wayback Machine but its message remains as relevant now as it was during the social media boom rush (more on that in a minute). Author Brian Signorelli tells the tale of when he was a cofounder at a startup that was in the exciting and tumultuous early days. As part of their rollout for a product launch they hired a marketing agency.
While Brian and his cofounders made it clear that their priority was lead generation, the agency instead encouraged proposed building out Facebook and Twitter presences along with press releases. As customers started coming in, Brian realized that none of this work could tangibly be tied back to the marketing agency itself. After sitting down and outlining a plan, clearly illustrating both his responsibilities as well as the agency’s, things didn’t improve and Brian pulled the plug on the relationship.
Three months later and a grand total of $70,000 poorer, it was time to say goodbye. The agency just never produced the results we cared about. And probably worse, they felt like they did but could never produce a report to prove it to us. All we had to show for this mess was a new website design (which we ended up changing twice in the following 6 months), 600 Twitter followers, a few ad designs, about 10 feature articles about our business in unknown news outlets, and 3 press releases (which, by the way, we wrote, and had to pay $600 a pop to release). We fired the agency, and it was about time.
There’s a lot to analyze in this one paragraph – chiefly, $70,000 is a hefty price tag for a startup to learn the cost of a marketing agency that can’t deliver the specific deliverables you asked for. The part that stood out to me, highlighted, is that the agency felt like they delivered results but couldn’t actually prove it.
Fast forward fourteen years, and unfortunately, this is still a very common phenomenon. Let’s take social media marketing – a marketing channel I consider largely past the peak of its relevance or influence in most (but not all) circumstances as an example.
I deal with quite a few marketing consultants and marketing companies. These run the gamut from solo social media strategists all the way up to account managers for very large marketing tech providers, and one thing that I’ve noticed lately is quite a few “strategies” for social media amount to nebulously defined “content calendars” with evergreen content that goes out to local business pages, usually resulting in a few upvotes. These upvotes also conspicuously tend to be from the agency, the employees, the employees’ family members, or other people who are clearly not customers.
Even worse, sometimes there will just be no engagement at all – which you’re likely to find on Facebook and Instagram pages of plumbers, lawyers, medical offices, and other sorts of businesses and organizations where the utility of most public facing social media becomes more questionable.
There’s a very common rebuttal when you point out that literal months of social media calendar posting has resulted in an absolutely negligible amount of engagement, growth, or business that can be directly tied to these sorts of marketing efforts. “People can still reach out to you without reacting to the post!”
Let’s unpack this claim for a second, because it contains a kernel of truth that gets stretched paper thin into what is essentially an unfalsifiable defense of bad performance.
Yes, it is true that social engagement is not inherently tied to business results. Someone can see a social media post or ad and never interact with it. They can still later visit a company’s website, call them or even walk into the store. People not being logged into social media, people using social media privately or just doomscrolling are all real cases.
That being said, it is an Olympian-level leap to go from that to “Our post got two likes, but you don’t know how many people are silently becoming customers!”
You’ve probably figured the problem out by now: By this logic, no social media strategy could ever perform badly. The assumption that there’s some sort of huge, silent majority gradually working through an invisible customer acquisition process is based entirely off vibes, not data that social media should on paper be providing for you.
There’s also a second, more glaring problem here: Engagement is itself part of the distribution of social media. That’s why it’s called social media in the first place. Content is designed to be liked, commented, shared, or filtered out if you’re irritating people. The interactivity is part of the game. If you’ve got 2,000 followers and you’re posting evergreen content about how “We at Acme Plumbing Solutions are proud to be part of the local community!” and it gets a single upvote from the owner’s brother every time, then I’m sorry to say it: You’re not posting content. You’re posting slop. Eventually, the client is going to ask the fateful question: What is this even accomplishing?
I should clarify that on some level I agree that not every post needs huge levels of engagement. A restaurant posting a weekly special or a closure alert due to a blizzard serves a useful informational purpose. I’m certainly not demanding that every local Instagram page have Coca-Cola levels of engagement.
Except that’s extremely different from an agency selling social media marketing services professionally, with the explicit intent of making a client money. If you’re charging somebody every month to create and distribute social content, you need to be able to directly tie that time, money and effort to dollars going into the client’s pocket. Whether that’s qualified leads, website traffic, there needs to be actual evidence that the platforms are contributing to it. Otherwise the supposed invisible audience you’re cultivating behind the scenes isn’t the problem.
In short, there’s an easy response when a social media strategist or firm says “Well…engagement isn’t the point.”
It isn’t? Okay, then why are we paying you to post on an engagement-based platform? Whatever the actual objective is behind the social media marketing, like any other channel, there has to be a causal connection. Anything other than that is the equivalent of “The ROI is there, trust me bro.”
“I manage the company’s social media presence” was a common enough answer in 2012 when that blog post was written, and arguably, it wasn’t enough even then. Now in an era where social media marketing’s value and merits is under a lot more scrutiny than it used to be, demand results from it instead. If every disappointing metric can be dismissed by invoking some kind of unseen audience that might be reading content, that’s not a social media strategy. That’s the unfalsifiable analysis I mentioned earlier.
“Trust me, it’s working” isn’t going to matter when payroll is due.