In the midst of all the technological advancements that keep marketers feverishly jumping from one tool to another, I feel it’s time to pen this. It’s been roaming around somewhere in my brain for months. I’ve only just acquired enough knowledge to breathe at least a part of it into life.

If you work across any of the digital marketing touchpoints, you’ve most likely heard the term output. 

Put simply, output answers the question: what have you done? 

Let’s get visual for a second. A client comes on board with your firm and wants to launch a product. You assemble the project team: the graphic designer, the content/copywriter, the ads specialist, the marketing strategist, the developers. Everybody is here. It’s a three-month campaign. The overarching strategy is to use Google Ads, organic social media and blog content to drive traffic and grow brand affinity. 

The strategist says the team will need to post three times a day, excluding weekends, for the first month. Twice a day in the second month, and once a day in the third. There’s also a landing page that needs to be deployed along with the copy and UI/UX review to make sure the experience supports the campaign. 

Sounds straightforward enough. Until the content writer hears “three times a day for one month” and thinks: “Damn! That’s about 60 social media posts in four weeks.” The graphic designer thinks: “Sixty creatives, besides Google Ads and holiday content… stress!” 

The agency big boys, the developers, think: “No wham, na just one landing page. But this UI/UX review, baba, make nobody stress me oh.” 

Everybody has heard the brief. Everybody is calculating the work. But everybody is thinking about output, and no one has stopped to ask about the outcome. 

So we draw up a scope of work with metrics such as how many creatives will be designed, how many social media posts will be published and how many blog articles will be written. 

These things matter. They help define the work, allocate resources and keep the project moving. However, the trouble starts when we treat completing that scope as proof that the campaign has worked. 

Many of our clients may not be fluent in digital speak. They may not know how to articulate what they want in the language of platforms, funnels and conversion rates. But they usually know what they want for their business: to grow in one way or another.

So when a client says, “Hey, we’re launching a product. How can we get people to buy it?”, they are asking a different question from “How many posts can you make on our social media handles?” They want to know what those posts will do towards getting people to buy. 

A thousand likes can tell us something. Perhaps the content resonated enough for people to pause, take notice of the brand and respond. But who are those people? Are they part of the intended audience? What did the content help them understand? Did that interest lead anywhere? The number becomes more useful when we can explain what it means in relation to the campaign objective. 

At the end of the day, the figures can get as impressive as we want them to sound. 1K sign-ups achieved, 100 creatives deployed, 10K unique views attained, just remember, that after all the attainments, achievements, and execute-ments, you can meet the campaign targets, without fulfilling the campaign objective! 

In other words, you can be doing too much (output) activity, without nearly enough (outcome) result. 

But if the objective was to sell the product, we still need to ask how many of those sign-ups became paying customers. 

After all the attainment and achievement and execute-ment, remember this: You can meet the campaign targets without fulfilling the campaign objective. In other words, you can be doing too much without doing enough. 

You can publish every post on the calendar and still leave the intended audience unclear about the product. You can drive traffic to a landing page and lose people because the offer is confusing or the next step is difficult. 

The work was done. The intended result did not follow. 

So while you pop champagne over a “successful campaign”, the client is sitting up at night wondering how to explain to the board that they spent ₦10 million growing a following that barely engages and sits outside their target audience. 

So while you pop your champagne on a ‘successful campaign’, the client is sitting up at night thinking how he can justify to the board that they just spent ₦100 million on millions of unique views, 20k sign-ups who don’t transact, and 50k new followers who neither engage nor are part of their target range. 

It’s time to think about our processes as a form of value delivery. What’s the impact of your creative design? Are they creative, or are they just designs? What’s your copy saying? How is it saying what it's saying? Who is it compelling to make a buying decision? What do you want to achieve with creatives? What do you want to drive with blog posts? These are all

outcome-based questions, and until we start asking them, there’ll always be something missing from our marketing strategy.