Latest / The Marketing Career Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Jobs, Skills, and Career Growth / How Marketers Measure Invisible Influence
Transcript
- Lucas: The hardest thing I see marketers struggle with isn't creative strategy or even media buying. It's defending the work that doesn't have a direct link to yesterday's sale. Luna: Right, because if it didn't convert in the last hour, why did we do it? But brand building is literally about creating future demand, not capturing existing demand. Lucas: Exactly. And the industry has gotten obsessed with last-click attribution. You run an ad, someone clicks, they buy, you get credit. Simple. But that ignores everything that happened before that click. The video they watched three weeks ago. The billboard they saw on their commute. The word of mouth recommendation from a friend. Luna: So you're saying the current standard model is actively lying to us about where value comes from? Lucas: It's not lying. It's just incomplete. It's like trying to understand a movie by only looking at the final frame. You miss the plot, the character arcs, the buildup. For fast-moving consumer goods companies like Unilever, this distinction is critical because their purchase cycle is low consideration but high frequency. People don't research every bar of soap. Luna: I remember reading about how Unilever changed their reporting structure a few years back to account for this exact problem. Lucas: They did. And they moved away from pure performance metrics toward a blend that included what they called Brand Lift. Instead of asking did this ad cause a sale? They asked did this ad increase my awareness of the product? Did it improve my perception of the brand? Did it make me more likely to consider it next time I shop? Luna: That feels like a massive shift in mindset for a CFO to approve. How do you quantify awareness in dollars? Lucas: You don't always start with dollars. You start with probability. If you know that a ten percent increase in unaided brand awareness correlates with a two percent increase in market share over the next twelve months, then you can build a financial model around that correlation. It's not perfect, but it's better than ignoring the variable entirely. Luna: But most junior marketers aren't building financial models. They're sending spreadsheets to managers who just want to know why the CPA went up. Lucas: Which is why the career opportunity here is huge. Most marketers are trained to be order takers. They optimize for the metric their boss asks for today. The ones who advance are the ones who educate their bosses on the difference between leading and lagging indicators. Luna: Leading indicators being the brand health stuff. Lagging being the sales data. Lucas: Precisely. Sales data tells you what happened. Brand health tells you what will happen. If you can speak both languages, you stop being a cost center and start being a strategic partner. That's how you negotiate a twenty percent raise without even mentioning money. Luna: I love that framing. So how does a marketer actually prove they understand this nuance during an interview or a quarterly review? Lucas: By presenting a balanced scorecard. Don't just show me your conversion rate. Show me your impression share, your share of voice compared to competitors, and your sentiment analysis. Contextualize the efficiency metric within the effectiveness metric. Luna: Efficiency versus effectiveness. Those two words change the entire trajectory of a campaign strategy. Lucas: They do. Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things. A lot of teams spend all their time getting more efficient at running ineffective ads. They lower the cost per click while the click quality drops because nobody cares about the brand anymore. Luna: That sounds like a trap a lot of performance marketing agencies fall into. Chasing vanity metrics to keep clients happy. Lucas: Absolutely. And that's why internal marketing roles are often safer for long-term career growth. You get to see the full lifecycle. You can run a brand campaign, watch the search volume spike, track the retail traffic increase, and finally see the checkout conversion. You own the narrative instead of just owning a channel. Luna: So the skill set required is less about mastering one platform's algorithm and more about understanding the customer journey holistically. Lucas: Yes. And that requires curiosity. You have to talk to the product team. You have to look at the customer support tickets. You need to understand why people return products. All of that feeds back into whether your brand messaging is accurate or just attractive. Luna: Accuracy over attractiveness. That's a tough pill for creative directors to swallow sometimes. Lucas: It is. But accuracy builds trust. Trust drives loyalty. Loyalty reduces churn. And reducing churn is the cheapest form of growth available. Retaining a customer is almost always cheaper than acquiring a new one, especially in saturated markets. Luna: This ties back to what we discussed in previous episodes about decision journals. If you document why you chose brand over performance, you build a case study for later. Lucas: Exactly. You create a historical record of your strategic reasoning. When the quarter goes well, you can point to the brand investments that fueled the pipeline. When it goes poorly, you can analyze whether it was execution failure or strategy failure. Either way, you're learning. Luna: I think a lot of people fear that admitting to brand investment looks like weakness. Like they couldn't drive hard enough numbers. Lucas: That's insecurity speaking. The strongest marketers are the ones who admit complexity. They say the market is noisy. They say attention is fragmented. They say we need both short-term hits and long-term foundations. That kind of honesty commands respect. Luna: It does. Because it shows you're thinking like a business leader, not just a channel manager. Lucas: Right. And that's the promotion path. From specialist to generalist to director to VP. Each step requires broader context. You can't lead a department if you only understand one piece of the puzzle. Luna: So for listeners wanting to move up, the actionable takeaway is to start measuring and reporting on the invisible stuff. Lucas: Start small. Pick one brand metric. Maybe it's net promoter score. Maybe it's social sentiment. Track it alongside your revenue. Present them together. Watch how the conversation changes. Luna: It’s fascinating how much power lies in simply changing the question we ask our data. Lucas: It really is. We spend so much energy finding answers that we forget to question the questions themselves. What if the best marketing result is a sale that never happened because the customer decided not to buy from a competitor? Luna: Defensive marketing. Protecting your turf. That’s an invisible win that rarely makes it into reports. Lucas: Yet it keeps the lights on. It maintains the status quo until you can push forward. Both are necessary. You just need the vocabulary to describe them. Luna: Thanks for breaking that down, Lucas. It gives me a lot to think about for my own dashboard updates. Lucas: Anytime. It’s a complex space, but clarity always wins in the end. Luna: Before we sign off, I wanted to mention something real for a second. A handful of listeners chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that's literally what funds making this many of these conversations possible. Lucas: Yeah, it’s just a small group keeping the lights on so we can stay independent and ad-free. No algorithms dictating what we cover. Just us talking about the stuff that matters. Luna: If that resonates with you, checking out buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo is the easiest way to help. But no pressure at all. We appreciate every single listener tuning in regardless. Lucas: We do. And honestly, the fact that you're listening means we're already winning. Keep questioning those metrics, and we'll see you in the next one.