Businesses measure sales, margins, costs and cash flow with increasing scrutiny. So why does marketing still get away with reporting impressions, engagement and website traffic? Here, Paul Houston, co-founder of Catalyst Marketing Agency, argues that SMEs need to connect marketing much more closely to the commercial outcomes the rest of the business already measures.

A business owner knows their margins, watches cash flow, monitors sales performance, and clearly wants to understand where the next deal is coming from. But marketing has tended to get away with less stringency over the years, and a report showing website visits are up, LinkedIn engagement has improved, or a campaign reaching 20,000 people quite often suffices.

That’s all valid stuff, of course, and it helps to demonstrate progress and trends, but what’s often ignored is how that has impacted business, and what changes have occurred. And crucially, whether or not it’s aligned with short, mid, and long-term commercial goals. The consensus being that we have a marketing budget, and it appears to be doing its job, is often good enough.

However, the recent IPA Bellwether report for the final quarter of 2025 highlighted the difficulty businesses face in justifying discretionary expenditure and the pressure to demonstrate a return on investment. It found that UK marketing budgets were broadly flat, while the initial net balance of businesses expecting to increase spending in 2026 / 27 was just 1.7%.

So why do businesses measure marketing completely differently? It’s an interesting question, and in my experience it has tended to be because not everybody understands its function. Or, not everyone has grasped that it can truly influence customer behaviour and positively impact the bottom line when implemented and measured, in accordance with all other commercial strategies.

Don’t just measure activity

Quite often, there’s a temptation to focus on the numbers that are easiest to get your hands on, such as website traffic, social media engagement, impressions, editorial placements, and email open rates.

But a LinkedIn post might reach 20,000 people without generating a single enquiry. Whereas another might reach 200 people, including a bunch of decision-makers in the markets you’re targeting or the businesses you’ve earmarked, and you start to see a customer journey from socials, to website, and ultimately to enquiries.

So it’s not difficult to see which was the more successful campaign, and it’s highly likely it was designed and delivered to attract and engage, rather than for reach or likes. It all comes down to what you were trying to achieve when the campaign started.

Somewhat worryingly, Marketing Week’s 2025 Language of Effectiveness research, conducted with Kantar and Google, found that only 39.2% of marketers measured whether their work was delivering business outcomes.

If marketing professionals themselves aren’t consistently measuring the wider impact of their work, it’s hardly surprising that business owners aren’t either. The cynic in me says this is because marketers are looking to protect their corner, that measurement may not put them in a great light, that they’re having none, or very little impact. And a fancy, interactive report hides the deficiencies.

But I don’t believe this to be the case. All the marketers I know are always eager to get under the skin of the business, and to be allowed to run campaigns that are fit for that business’s purpose. That’s why most will want to complete a full audit before presenting a strategy.

However, it also poses the question that maybe UK SMEs should be demanding better from their marketing team, or agency. Establishing on day one what it wants marketing to achieve, and for that to be monitored throughout, tweaked where necessary, and benchmarked against agreed KPIs. It’s not the business owner’s job to set or even understand the metrics, but it is their job to want to know what’s working, and what’s being delivered.

Start with the business, not the campaign

I’m not suggesting you abandon every metric that doesn’t immediately translate into revenue; rather, examine more closely what you’re looking to change.

If the objective is to generate enquiries, measure relevant enquiries. If it’s to reach new customers in a particular sector, look at whether you’re targeting and reaching the right people. And look at whether that activity is opening doors. If the aim is to strengthen the firm’s reputation, look for evidence that the business is becoming better known. You’ll not necessarily know how to measure these, but your marketing team should be able to, or at least when you sit down and plan a campaign, they should be able to tell you what is measurable and achievable.

For an SME, that might mean looking at qualified leads, opportunities entering the sales pipeline, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs and the value of new business. The exact measures will depend on each business, its sales cycle, and what the marketing is intended to achieve.

Measuring properly doesn’t mean pretending every pound of revenue can be attributed to a single campaign, press article or social media post. This is especially so in the B2B environment where a customer might read about a business in an article, visit its website several times, see a brand regularly across social media, and even catch a spokesperson speaking at an event months before making a decision.

Because quite possibly all of these interactions played a part, and brand-building, thought leadership and PR can influence decisions long before an enquiry appears in a CRM system. Their value shouldn’t be dismissed simply because they can’t be ticked off neatly against a transaction.

But nor should the difficulty of attribution become an excuse for measuring activity alone. Businesses can still examine whether the right audiences are being reached, whether enquiries are improving, whether the sales pipeline is developing, and whether customers are more familiar with the brand by building a picture of marketing’s contribution, and not manufacturing an answer where it doesn’t exist.

Marketing teams and agencies should be able to explain that in plain English, without hiding behind a dashboard full of stats and icons. That means being clear about the purpose of the investment, at the outset, and honest about what the results do, and don’t, tell you.

Marketing should be a driver of growth, not for vanity and definitely not for likes. And it shouldn’t be measured differently from the way you measure everything else. So, if your marketing reports are presenting how many people saw your latest campaign or liked your latest post, ask instead what are you trying to change in the business, and where’s the evidence to suggest it’s working?

Paul Houston is co-founder and director of Catalyst Marketing Agency, with more than 25 years’ experience in business growth, sales, marketing and lead generation.

He has founded, grown and successfully exited a number of businesses in the tech, and B2B space, and now works closely with businesses to develop commercially focused marketing strategies that generate growth, combining his experience in business development with Catalyst’s expertise across digital marketing, search, content, PR and technology.