All marketing that you invest money or time in should have measurable expected outcomes.

That makes sense but the next question is, what are you measuring (in business school parlance, what is the metric)?

On a recent call with a (now former) PR firm, the comment was made:

‘Why don’t you care about sentiment? If we get you press in a lot of publications your sentiment would increase.’

My response was ‘as soon as I can pay your firm with sentiment, I will care about that as a metric.’

While my response may sound curt, I didn’t mean it to be. My goal for hiring the firm was to spread the word about a new company and get more paying customers. The metrics I was paying attention to were: Quantity of new Customers and Revenue. This is something shared at almost every meeting and discussion.

If the customers were unprofitable, it didn’t matter at that point.  The test was to see if the company would work. Adjusting cunsumer behavior would be a different bridge, we wanted paying customers.

Sentiment and how people feel about you in the marketplace is important, but without customers… it is hard to keep the lights on. If your company fails because you were focusing on sentiment, you can’t provide value to your customers.