The weird, the wild, the WTH…every month, we’re sharing the industry observation, marketing mystery, or growth dilemma that gets our team fired up.
This Month: Your Metrics Aren’t Going Deep Enough
If you're leading marketing at a growing RIA, wealth management, or fintech firm, chances are you're tracking familiar metrics: follower growth, rising impressions, and increasing website traffic. Those data points can look encouraging on a dashboard, but they only tell part of the story.
There's a more important question to ask:
Is any of that growth moving people toward becoming clients?
A larger audience doesn’t automatically translate into business growth. Reach is not the end goal; it’s simply the first step in a journey that should ultimately lead to a conversation or demo. But many firms only measure the beginning of that journey, losing visibility into everything that happens afterward.
A Three-Stage Framework for Measuring Marketing Performance
“Is our marketing working?” is too broad a question to be effectively answered. Instead, focus on three more specific questions that measure how prospects are moving through your funnel:
Stage 1: Are You Growing the Right Audience?
The first question is whether or not your audience is growing with the people you want to serve.
Measure the percentage of your audience, whether followers, subscribers, website visitors, or some combination, that aligns with your Ideal Client Profile (ICP).
For example, if your firm specializes in serving dental practice owners, attracting a broad audience outside of that group has limited value. Success comes from consistently attracting more of the right people. If your audience grows 20% quarter over quarter but your ICP percentage remains flat or declines, you're optimizing for visibility instead of business growth.
Key metric: ICP-fit growth rate
Stage 2: Is Your Target Audience Engaging?
Once you've attracted the right audience, the next question is whether they're engaging with your efforts.
Track how many ICP-qualified prospects are taking meaningful actions such as:
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Downloading educational resources
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Registering for webinars
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Opening emails
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Liking, commenting on, or sharing content
Engagement signals that your messaging is connecting with the problems your ideal clients are trying to solve.
It's also one of the earliest indicators of future pipeline performance. Engagement trends often shift weeks or even months before meeting requests increase or decline, making this an important leading indicator for your marketing strategy.
Key metric: Engagement rate among ICP-qualified audience
Stage 3: Is Engagement Converting Into Action?
Ultimately, this is the metric that matters most.
Of the prospects actively engaging with your content, what percentage takes the next meaningful step?
Action can look like:
In this stage, marketing transitions from generating awareness to driving measurable business growth.
Unfortunately, many firms lose visibility at this point. If your marketing platform, CRM, and scheduling tools aren't connected, it's difficult to trace a prospect from downloading a guide to booking a meeting. Without that connection, you're not measuring movement through a funnel; you're measuring disconnected activities, making it challenging to understand which of your efforts are driving results.
Key metric: Meeting conversion rate among engaged audience
Identifying the Gaps
Following this framework gives you real visibility into where prospects stop progressing and why. Each stage highlights a different opportunity:
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Growing audience, but declining ICP fit? You're attracting the wrong people.
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Strong ICP growth, but weak engagement? Your messaging isn't resonating.
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High engagement, but few meeting requests? There's friction between interest and action, whether that's an unclear call to action, a difficult scheduling process, or gaps in the sales handoff.
Rather than tracking surface-level metrics, the deeper questions this framework raises helps you pinpoint exactly where you can make improvements.
What to Benchmark
Once the three metrics we outlined above are in place, benchmarking becomes much more meaningful. Consider tracking:
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Your own performance
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Industry peers
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Market maturity
What Gets Measured Gets Improved
The question here is if you're measuring the metrics that matter.
Three percentages tell the complete story:
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How many of the right people are you reaching?
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How many of those people are engaging?
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How many ultimately take action?
When you can answer those questions consistently, marketing stops being a reporting function and starts becoming a measurable growth engine.
Ready to get started? Download our interactive worksheet to audit your firm’s performance across the three stages outlined here. Feel free to reach out with any questions!
