Likes are the easiest number in marketing to grow and the hardest to take to a board.
They're nice. They don't turn into business results on their own. And in cyber security, where a handful of people at a handful of accounts decide whether you win the year, a big number at the top of a report can hide the only thing that matters: whether those people are moving towards a meeting.
What the big studies actually license
The case for attention is real, and it is routinely stretched past what it says. Les Binet and Peter Field's work for the UK's Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, drawn from hundreds of campaign records, found that long-term brand building and short-term sales activation work best together, with budgets weighted roughly 60/40 between them. What that work licenses is patient visibility with a purpose. What it does not license is reporting applause as achievement. A like sits at the very top of the brand half: necessary weather, not a result.
The trouble starts in the board pack. 'Engagement is tracking well' sounds like motion and costs nothing to produce, because the platforms hand you the number precisely so you keep posting. A director who asks the follow-up question, which of our forty target accounts did any of this reach, is usually met with silence. That silence is the distance between marketing that performs and marketing that counts.
What we count instead
Every campaign we run starts with a target map: the accounts a client wants to win, and the two or three people who decide in each. From then on, the numbers we report are about those people.
Meetings with named targets: who on the map you met this month, and what brought them to the table. Opportunities started: conversations that became real deals, with a problem, a budget and a date. Pipeline we touched: deals where our content, our rooms or our coverage played a part.
Underneath those, we track each target's stage: reached, engaged, met, opportunity, client, advocate. The most useful numbers are the rates between the stages, because that's where you find the stall, and the stall is where the next week's test should go.
Attention still counts
None of this makes attention worthless. A target has to see you before they can meet you, and reach is the first stage for a reason. Buyers shortlist from memory, and memory is built in the quiet months before any brief exists, which is the real work a like faintly signals. The mistake is stopping there, and reporting the top of the funnel as if it were the bottom.
We back creative work with data for the same reason. Every piece should trace back to a target and a stage. If a piece of content can't be connected to either, it's decoration, however many people liked it.
Four hundred likes and no meetings is a quiet month. Four likes from the right four people can be the best month of the year.
