Marketing Under Scrutiny: Over 70% of Companies Failed to Meet These Goals in 2024

A good marketing strategy can serve as an excellent GPS to guide companies toward an increasingly promising future. But how to calibrate it correctly so that it points to the best path? For many companies, sales metrics end up being the main references for adjusting this route—something that will not always help them achieve the desired goals. Many other data points can be used to direct the planning to be followed, and it is up to each organization to shift this focus in order to achieve increasingly better results.

According to a study by the 2025 Marketing and Sales Panorama, 71% of companies did not achieve their marketing goals in 2024. When delving deeper into the research to better understand what may have hindered this, 34% of these teams focused their actions on generating greater demand; 27% on strengthening the brand; 14% on digital innovations; and 13% on building closer relationships.

These data highlight how a large portion of businesses still prioritize increasing sales numbers when developing the actions to be implemented, which does not always contribute to achieving the company's real growth. Within marketing, there are many other pieces of information that can serve as references for defining the growth of the business in question; however, the nuances are different, and therefore, not always highlighting sales may be the wisest choice.

Other figures that can serve as a metric for the company's evolution include new customers, loyal consumers, growth in the number of social media followers, increase in web mentions, visits to physical locations, number of contacts received, among many others.

With this greater diversity of data in hand, marketing can borrow a central concept from the growth area, called the North Star Metric (NSM), through which it is possible to avoid illusions of growth and focus on the long term—showing what truly drives the business, ensuring retention, and aligning the entire company toward the same objective.

By using this results measurement tactic, it is possible to avoid potential pitfalls that other KPIs are prone to present, such as: optimizing for immediate revenue and harming the future, interpreting sales spikes as real growth, losing sight of the real value delivered to the customer, misalignment between departments, ignoring retention and engagement issues, and measuring what is easy rather than what matters.

Through the use of this tool, both marketing myopia (seeing only what is in front, ignoring potential opportunities to be explored) and hyperopia (not focusing on what is in front, aiming only for the future) can be avoided. In this way, new marketing goals can be defined, along with metrics that will truly make sense for the business.

Applying this premise to the data presented in the above study, for example, we have a portion of respondents who cite "innovating in digital" as a goal. But how can this be measured? How will this innovation impact the customer's growth? These are probably questions that cannot be answered, but should be, so that this strategy can generate value for the business.

Breaking out of the bubble of focusing only on sales-related data can be a major challenge for many companies, as it requires them to step out of their comfort zone and begin analyzing other important numbers and factors. However, viewing their operations from other angles can be much more advantageous and useful for their growth over time.