Likes Don't Equal Leads
I have lost count of the number of times I have sat in a meeting, or been on a call, and heard a version of the same challenge: That post didn't do too well. We didn't get many likes on that post. Engagements were a bit disappointing.
And yet, more often than not, that piece of content is quietly generating more leads than anything else. So often, organisations are looking at the wrong indicators. This is not a niche problem. We have seen it play out, at scale, across almost every industry we have worked in.
Start With the Objective
Before any conversation about metrics, there is a more important conversation to have. What is the business actually trying to achieve?
Reach, awareness, and engagement are not inherently wrong things to measure. For a brand in its early stages, building familiarity with the right audience is a legitimate and necessary goal. Reach tells you how far your voice is travelling. Engagement tells you whether what you are saying is landing. These are real signals. They matter.
The problem is not the metrics themselves. It is what happens when those metrics become the objective rather than the indicator. When a brand begins to optimise for the number rather than the outcome the number is meant to represent.
Awareness that never converts. Engagement that never leads. Reach that extends in every direction except toward the people most likely to buy. These are not signs of a thriving brand. They are signs of a brand measuring its own noise.
The discipline is in asking, at every stage: what does this metric actually mean for our business? What behaviour does it drive? What is the commercial thread that connects this number to revenue? If that thread is unclear, the metric is doing more harm than good. Not because it is dishonest. Because it is incomplete.
Where Brands Lose the Thread
There is a fundamental issue with brands that reorient their entire digital approach around social performance. Around impressions, follower growth and content volume. And do so at the expense of understanding their core audience. That oversight can be quietly catastrophic, and it rarely announces itself until the damage is already done.
The numbers are not subtle. Across industries, the average social media conversion rate sits at just 1.5%. For every hundred people engaging with your content, liking, sharing, commenting, saving, fewer than two are buying. The gap between the audience that applauds and the audience that opens its wallet is not a rounding error. It is almost everyone.
Yet 68% of marketing leaders still define social ROI primarily through engagement. The dashboard looks healthy. The business tells a different story.
Gucci is a useful lens here, it is worth acknowledging that the brand faces a complex set of challenges, of which this is just one. But the pattern is instructive. Demna's appointment has generated significant cultural heat. AI-generated campaign imagery has sparked debate across every platform. Celebrity names fill the front row, as well as the catwalk. Collections referencing the beloved Tom Ford era drive conversation. By every measure of social performance, the noise created has been considerable.
And yet the question that matters, where is that translating to sales, remains largely unanswered. Hype is not a sustainable way of moving product, particularly in a pinched financial market and at a price point that demands genuine justification. Customers today have access to more information than ever before. There is less ambiguity. They can research, compare, and validate, or dismiss, a brand's claims before they ever set foot in a store or click to buy. That access shifts the balance of power. Manufactured attention does not survive it in the way it once did.
This is not just a luxury fashion problem. It is a brand strategy problem, and it applies with equal force in B2B.
Post something on LinkedIn. Watch it perform. Ask yourself honestly: is the engagement coming from your clients, or from peers, competitors, and people who will never buy from you? Visibility is one thing. When you begin producing content that does not add value to your core customer, or the customers you want to attract, and you start chasing the metrics instead, you have drifted from your purpose. The person double-tapping is often an admirer, not a buyer. And admiration does not keep the lights on.
The Aspirational Audience Gap
Research makes the distinction uncomfortably concrete. Actual buyers and aspirational followers occupy the same social feeds, engage with the same content, follow the same influencers. In the dashboard, they are indistinguishable. In behaviour, they could not be more different.
In luxury fashion, actual buyers average incomes of £70k and shop at Net-a-Porter. Their aspirational counterparts average £57k and spend at Zara and Mango. They follow the same accounts. They generate the same kind of engagement data. The dashboard cannot tell them apart. But the till can.
This is what the scroll has industrialised. It has made the wrong choice look like the right one, because the data that is easiest to read, impressions, likes, follower growth, reflects the loudest audience, not the most valuable one. And the customer who quietly buys because something spoke directly to them leaves almost no trace in the dashboard at all.
The strategic question every brand needs to sit with is this: do we actually know who our real buyer is? Not who we think we are talking to, but who is genuinely in the market for what we offer? How do they behave online? What content do they engage with differently from a casual follower? Where do they go before they buy? What does their journey actually look like?
These are not unanswerable questions. Click-throughs, referral links, conversion tracking, and lifetime value data can begin to separate the buyer from the browser. The tools exist. The discipline to use them, and to weight them above the vanity metrics, is what so many brands are missing.
The Formula
Getting this right is not about abandoning reach or dismissing engagement. It is about understanding what each of them can and cannot do, and building a strategy where every element knows its role.
Reach earns awareness. Engagement builds familiarity. But neither of them closes the gap to revenue without something in the middle: content and creative that is genuinely designed for the person you want to buy from you, not for the broadest possible audience.
The brands that get this right share a few things in common.
They are clear on their ideal customer. Not a demographic sketch, but a real understanding of how that person thinks, what they value, where they spend their attention, and what will make them stop. They produce content with a strong point of view and a visual narrative that earns attention rather than demands it. They are not trying to stop everyone's scroll. They are trying to stop the right person's scroll, and they have thought carefully about what that person needs to see, feel, and believe before they are ready to act.
They measure what is connected to commercial reality: not just how many people saw something, but what those people did next. They understand that email consistently outperforms social on conversion, not because social is broken, but because email reaches people who have already chosen to be close to the brand. They treat that self-selection as a signal worth following.
And they do not chase. They build. There is a difference between a brand that produces content to feed an algorithm and a brand that produces content to deepen a relationship. The former is always one platform update away from irrelevance. The latter compounds.
The formula, distilled: a compelling point of view, expressed through a strong visual and editorial identity, delivered consistently to the people most likely to act on it, measured against outcomes that connect to the business rather than the feed.
It is not a complicated idea. But in a world where the dashboard makes noise look like progress, staying true to it takes more discipline than most brands give it credit for.
One Final Thought
Not every business should be competing on social volume. For many brands, particularly those operating in premium, niche, or relationship-driven markets, attempting to out-post, out-spend, or out-shout the large players is not a strategy. It is a distraction.
The brands with the biggest social presences have teams, budgets, and infrastructure built entirely around content production. Trying to compete on their terms, on their ground, is a game designed for them to win. The smarter question is not how to produce more. It is where a smaller, more focused investment will reach the right people with the right message at the right moment.
Sometimes that is a single, well-placed piece of content that speaks directly to your ideal customer. Sometimes it is a relationship built over email, over time, with people who have already chosen to be close to you. Sometimes it is showing up consistently and with conviction in one place, rather than inconsistently across all of them.
The goal was never to be the loudest. It was always to be the most relevant, to the people who matter most to your brand.
These are conversations we find ourselves having more and more. If you're working through what this means for your brand, we'd welcome the chance to think it through together.
