A good marketing strategy can serve as an excellent GPS to guide companies towards an increasingly promising future. But how to calibrate it correctly, so that it can point the best way? For many companies, sales metrics end up being the main references to adjust this route – something that may not always contribute to achieving the desired goals. Many other data can be used to direct the planned actions to be followed, and it is up to each organization to shift this focus so they can achieve increasingly better results.
According to a study from the Marketing and Sales 2025 Landscape, 71% of companies did not reach their marketing goals in 2024. When we delve into the research to better understand what may have hindered this, 34% of these teams focused these actions to generate greater demand; 27% on strengthening the brand; 14% on digital innovations; and 13% on building relationships.
These data show how a large part of businesses still prioritize increasing sales in the development of actions to be implemented, which does not always contribute to achieving real company growth. In marketing, there are many other information that can serve as a reference to define the growth of the business in question, however, the nuances are different and therefore, highlighting sales may not always be the wisest choice.
Other numbers that can serve as a metric for the company’s evolution include new customers, loyal consumers, growth in social media followers, increase in web mentions, visits to physical locations, number of contacts received, among many others.
With this greater diversity of data at hand, marketing can borrow a central concept from the growth area, called the North Star Metric (NSM), through which it is possible to avoid growth illusions and focus on the long term – showing what really drives the business, ensuring retention, and aligning the entire company to the same goal.
By using this tactic of result measurement, one can avoid possible failures that other KPIs are prone to present, such as: optimizing for immediate revenue and harming the future, interpreting sales peaks as real growth, losing sight of the real value delivered to the customer, misalignment between areas, ignoring retention and engagement issues, and measuring what is easy and not what matters.
Through the use of this tool, both marketing myopia (seeing only what is in front of you, ignoring possible opportunities to be explored) and hyperopia (not focusing on what is in front of you, 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 study above, for example, we have a portion of respondents who consider “innovating in digital” as a goal. But how can this be measured? How will this innovation impact the client’s growth? Probably, these are questions that cannot be answered, but should be, so that this strategy can generate value for the business.
Leaving the bubble of focusing solely on sales-related data can be a significant challenge for many companies, as it requires stepping out of their comfort zone and starting to analyze other numbers and important factors. However, viewing their operations from different angles can be much more advantageous and useful for their growth over time.
