One of the most important areas of marketing to get right is expectation. That means setting it properly, aligning it across the business, managing it as circumstances change and, occasionally, challenging it when what is being asked bears little relationship to the budget, resource or timescale available.
The longer I have worked in marketing, the more important I think this has become. I have seen perfectly competent marketing teams lose the confidence of senior leadership despite delivering reasonable results because the expectation they were being measured against was never realistic in the first place. I have seen agencies criticised for failing to deliver outcomes they were never really in control of, and campaigns described as disappointing because nobody agreed what success should look like before the money was spent.
Without a properly defined expectation, most marketing metrics become surprisingly difficult to interpret. A number can tell you what happened, but it cannot tell you whether what happened was good unless you first understand what you reasonably expected to happen. Marketing can also appear successful because a particular metric moved in the right direction, even though the result made very little meaningful difference to the business.
For me, good marketing leadership starts with setting expectations properly. It means agreeing what success should look like, making sure that expectation reflects the available budget, resource and timescale, aligning it across the people responsible for delivering the outcome and then measuring performance against it honestly. Just as importantly, it means being prepared to challenge the expectation when the evidence suggests that what is being asked is unrealistic, or to revise it when circumstances change.
Marketing cannot succeed against an expectation nobody has defined
One of the most difficult environments for any marketing function is one where everybody expects something different from it.
The board may expect revenue growth. Sales may expect more qualified opportunities. The marketing team may be focused on lead generation, website performance and engagement. An external agency might be working towards channel-specific targets, while the Managing Director simply has a feeling that marketing should be doing more.
None of those expectations is necessarily unreasonable on its own. The problem is that they may have very little relationship with one another.
This is often where marketing performance starts becoming difficult to assess. Marketing can report an increase in leads while sales insists that quality has deteriorated. An SEO agency can demonstrate significant growth in organic traffic while the leadership team sees no obvious commercial impact. A paid media campaign can generate enquiries at an acceptable cost while the sales team converts very few of them.
Everybody can be looking at accurate numbers and still reach completely different conclusions about whether marketing is working.
The problem is not always measurement. Sometimes the problem is that nobody agreed what marketing was expected to achieve in the first place, how the different parts of the customer journey would contribute to that outcome or who would own each stage.
A good marketing strategy should therefore do more than set out campaigns and channels. It should establish what marketing is expected to contribute to the wider business, how that contribution will be measured and what assumptions sit underneath the plan.
That conversation needs to happen before the work begins, not when somebody asks six months later why the numbers do not look the way they expected.
Ambition needs to be connected to budget, resource and time
There is nothing wrong with ambitious marketing targets. Businesses should want to grow, enter new markets, win more customers and improve profitability. Marketing should be expected to make a meaningful contribution towards those objectives.
The difficulty comes when ambition becomes expectation without anybody working through what would actually need to happen for the target to be achieved.
A business might decide that it wants to increase revenue by 30 per cent over the next twelve months. That is a perfectly reasonable commercial ambition. But if marketing is expected to drive a significant proportion of that growth, the next step should be to work backwards through the numbers.
How much additional revenue is required? What is the average customer value? How many additional customers does that represent? How many sales opportunities would be needed based on the current conversion rate? How many qualified leads would marketing therefore need to generate? How much demand exists in the market and what is the realistic cost of reaching it?
Then there are the operational questions. Can the website convert the additional traffic? Can the sales team handle the volume? Is lead follow-up consistent? Does the CRM accurately record the journey? Is there enough marketing resource to deliver the plan properly?
This is where expectation becomes useful because it forces the commercial ambition to interact with reality.
If the numbers suggest the objective is achievable, the business now has something meaningful to manage against. If they do not, that does not automatically mean the ambition needs to disappear. It means something else needs to change. The budget may need to increase, the timescale may need to move, conversion needs to improve, or the business needs to find another source of growth.
What does not make sense is leaving every input unchanged while expecting a dramatically different output.
The same principle applies to time. Different areas of marketing operate over different periods. Paid acquisition can often generate demand relatively quickly, although optimising it properly still requires enough data to make sensible decisions. CRM improvements can sometimes produce faster gains because the business is improving what happens to demand it already has. Brand building, organic search, market positioning and reputation typically require a longer view.
Assessing all of those investments against the same short-term expectation creates poor decisions. It can lead businesses to stop activity that is working before it has had time to mature while continuing to fund activity that produces immediate numbers without necessarily creating long-term value.
Being realistic about timescale is not an excuse for poor performance. It is part of managing performance properly.
Marketing expectations need to be aligned across the business
Marketing does not operate in isolation, which means marketing expectations cannot be set in isolation either.
Marketing may generate demand, but it usually does not control every stage between the first interaction and the final sale. A campaign can produce a strong enquiry that is followed up poorly. The website can generate a lead that disappears into a badly configured CRM. Marketing can deliver a qualified opportunity that sales does not contact for several days.
Equally, marketing should not use those dependencies as a convenient excuse whenever performance falls short.
The point is that the customer journey crosses departmental boundaries, so expectations need to cross them too.
I have always believed that sales and marketing alignment becomes much easier when both functions are working from the same definitions. If marketing believes it has succeeded when it generates an MQL, sales believes the opportunity only becomes meaningful at a completely different stage, and the board is measuring revenue, there are three different versions of success operating inside the same business.
That eventually creates frustration.
Marketing believes it is delivering. Sales believes marketing is sending poor-quality leads. Senior leadership sees expenditure increasing and wonders why the commercial result is not following.
The answer is not simply another dashboard. The business needs to agree what the stages mean, what good looks like at each point, how responsibility transfers between departments and which measures matter commercially.
The same applies to agencies. If an agency is responsible for paid media, it should be clear what it is expected to influence and what sits outside its control. If it is being measured against lead generation, the business also needs to understand what happens after the lead has been generated. Accountability becomes stronger when responsibility is clear.
Poor expectations damage good marketing teams and agency relationships
One of the reasons I care so much about expectations is that poor expectations do not simply produce inaccurate reporting. They change behaviour.
When a marketing team believes that nothing it delivers will ever be considered good enough, people naturally become defensive. Reporting can start concentrating on the metrics that look most positive rather than the ones that genuinely help the business understand performance. Difficult conversations are delayed. People become reluctant to experiment because failure carries too much political risk.
Over time, marketing can become extremely busy without becoming any more useful.
I have seen good marketers gradually lose confidence because they were working against a set of expectations they had little realistic chance of meeting. I have also seen people blamed for not delivering across a remit that would realistically require several different specialists.
That is often visible in recruitment. A business advertises for a Marketing Manager, but the role is expected to cover strategy, brand, CRM, SEO, paid media, content, websites, social media, communications, events, analytics, sales support and agency management. The salary reflects one level of responsibility while the expected impact reflects something considerably more senior.
The person joins, naturally prioritises some parts of the remit over others, and several months later the business concludes that marketing is still not performing properly.
The same problem appears with agencies. A specialist supplier is appointed to solve one part of marketing and gradually becomes responsible for the success of the entire function. When commercial results disappoint, the agency becomes an obvious target even where the underlying issue sits somewhere else.
Sometimes the team or agency genuinely is underperforming and needs to be challenged. Managing expectations should never become a way of protecting poor performance.
But there is an important difference between holding somebody accountable for something they control and blaming them for an outcome they were never realistically equipped to deliver. Good marketing leadership needs to know the difference.
Marketing performance means very little without context
One of the reasons marketing reporting can become so complicated is that numbers are rarely meaningful on their own.
Imagine a campaign generates £500,000 in revenue. Is that good?
It sounds good, but there is not enough information to make a sensible judgement. If the campaign cost £50,000 and the business expected £250,000 in revenue, it may have performed extremely well. If the campaign cost £750,000 and was forecast to generate £2 million, the same result represents a serious problem.
The £500,000 did not change. The expectation around it did.
The same applies to almost every marketing metric. Ten thousand website visits can be impressive or irrelevant. Five hundred leads might represent exceptional performance or a significant shortfall. A conversion rate of 3 per cent could be strong in one market and weak in another. Marketing performance needs context.
That context should come from sensible expectations built around historical performance, market conditions, investment, capability and the commercial objective of the business. It should also be flexible enough to change when new evidence becomes available.
This is why I think marketing reporting should do much more than show whether individual numbers went up or down. A good board-level marketing report should explain what happened, how that compares with what was expected, why there is a difference and what the business should do as a result.
That is a much more useful conversation than presenting a dashboard full of green arrows.
It also changes how marketing investment is managed. If performance is ahead of expectation and there is evidence that additional investment could generate further value, the business can make that decision with more confidence. If performance is behind expectation, leadership can investigate the cause before simply increasing or cutting the budget. Expectation makes the number actionable.
Managing expectations sometimes means saying something people do not want to hear
Perhaps the hardest part of expectation management is honesty.
It is relatively easy to set expectations when everyone agrees with them. Marketing leadership becomes more valuable when the evidence suggests that what somebody wants is unlikely to happen in the way they currently imagine.
Sometimes the growth target does not match the budget. Sometimes the proposed timescale is unrealistic. Sometimes a campaign idea is unlikely to work. Sometimes the agency is not the problem. Sometimes the website does not need replacing. Sometimes the marketing team needs more capability, and sometimes marketing itself simply is not performing well enough.
Being responsible for marketing means being prepared to say those things.
Managing expectations should not mean constantly lowering the bar or finding reasons why marketing cannot be held accountable. It means making the expectation credible enough that accountability actually means something.
If I believe a target can be achieved, I should be capable of explaining the assumptions behind that belief. If I think it cannot, I should be prepared to explain why and what would need to change to make it realistic.
There will also be occasions where the honest answer is that we do not know yet. Marketing involves uncertainty. New markets, new campaigns and changing customer behaviour mean there will always be assumptions that need testing.
I would rather make that uncertainty explicit than replace it with a confident forecast that has very little evidence behind it.
In my experience, those conversations may be less comfortable at the beginning, but they usually create much stronger working relationships later.
Good marketing leadership aligns expectation with reality
For me, this is one of the most important responsibilities of senior marketing leadership. It is not simply to write the strategy, approve campaigns or produce a monthly report. It is to create a shared understanding between the leadership team, marketing, sales, agencies and other stakeholders about what marketing is expected to achieve, what success should look like and what will realistically be required to get there.
That means setting clear priorities, agreeing meaningful marketing metrics, understanding the relationship between investment and outcome, being realistic about timescales and making sure people are accountable for the areas they can genuinely influence. It also means ensuring that those expectations are understood across the wider business rather than existing only within the marketing team. If sales, marketing and the board are all working towards different definitions of success, even good performance can become difficult to recognise.
Those expectations also need to be continually reassessed. Markets change, competitors move, budgets are adjusted, and conversion rates improve or deteriorate. New information becomes available, and assumptions that looked perfectly reasonable six months ago may no longer reflect the environment the business is operating in.
If performance is significantly ahead of expectation, the question should be why and whether there is an opportunity to invest further or apply what has been learned elsewhere. If performance is behind, the business needs to understand what has changed, whether the original assumptions were sound and where action is required. Where the evidence shows that the assumptions supporting the original plan are no longer valid, the expectation itself should be updated rather than continuing to measure performance against something that no longer reflects reality.
There is little value in judging a marketing strategy against a version of the business, customer or market that no longer exists. Good marketing leadership should be able to distinguish between underperformance that requires action and a change in circumstances that means the original expectation needs to be reconsidered.
This is also why expectation provides such important context for individual marketing metrics. Revenue, ROI, conversion rate, customer acquisition cost and pipeline contribution all matter, but none of them tells the complete story in isolation. They become considerably more useful when the business understands what it reasonably expected those numbers to look like, why that expectation was set and whether the assumptions behind it still hold true.
Expectation provides that reference point, allowing marketing performance to be judged against something more meaningful than whether a number simply moved up or down.
Why expectation gives marketing metrics meaning
Expectation may not appear as a conventional marketing metric alongside conversion rate, customer acquisition cost or return on investment, but it still sits underneath how all of them are interpreted. It provides the context that allows us to decide whether those numbers represent good performance, poor performance or something broadly in line with what the business should have expected.
I think it is one of the most important things in marketing because it determines how every other metric is interpreted. It shapes how budgets are agreed, how teams are judged, how agencies are managed and how boards decide whether marketing deserves more investment.
When expectations are properly aligned, marketing becomes much easier to lead. The team understands what matters. Agencies understand their role. Sales and marketing have clearer responsibilities. Leadership knows what it is paying for and performance conversations become considerably more useful.
When expectations are poorly defined, even reasonable marketing performance can become a source of constant frustration.
After more than 20 years working in marketing, I have become increasingly convinced that some of the biggest marketing problems are not caused by a lack of ideas, activity or technology. They start much earlier, when the business has not properly agreed what marketing is expected to achieve.
That is why I would set the expectation before I set the campaign and align it before I begin measuring performance against it. If the evidence changes, I would change the expectation rather than pretending the original assumption is still true. That, to me, is an important part of good marketing leadership.
When marketing expectations and performance no longer match
If marketing is busy and expensive but the leadership team is still unsure what it is contributing, the problem may not be another campaign or another channel. It may be that the expectations, strategy, reporting and responsibilities across the marketing function are no longer properly aligned.
That is one of the areas I look at through my Fractional CMO work and Marketing Function Reviews. I work with founders, CEOs and leadership teams to understand what marketing is supposed to achieve, what is actually happening and where the gap between the two has come from.
Sometimes the answer is better marketing. Sometimes it is better data, clearer reporting, different capability or stronger sales and marketing alignment. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is reset the expectation before spending another pound.