You are not paying for likes. So why is that what you are measuring?

I have sat across the table from dozens of business owners over the years. Smart people who have built something real. And almost every one of them, when I ask what they expect from their marketing, talks about reach, engagement, and follower growth.

Then I ask: how much of that converted to revenue? The room goes quiet.

Let me give you a real example of what this looks like in practice.

There is a brownie brand I have been working with — over a decade in the market, a genuinely loyal customer base, a product people love. By any measure, this is a business that has earned its place. But somewhere along the way, the owners started feeling the pressure that every SME feels: competitors were posting more, other brands seemed to be everywhere, follower counts were being thrown around as proof of success.

So they did what felt logical. They leaned into content. They hired people to run their social media. They started measuring what everyone else was measuring — reach, impressions, engagement rate. The numbers looked good on a report. The audience was growing.

But the money was not growing with it.

They were getting the reach, the awareness, the content — but at the end of the month, the revenue did not reflect any of it. The problem was not the execution. The problem was that nobody had ever connected the marketing activity to the actual business goal.

This is the 80/20 problem playing out in plain sight. The Pareto principle tells us that roughly 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers and activities. For a business like this brownie brand, that 20% is almost certainly repeat buyers — loyal customers who order for events, gifting, and habit. Not new followers who liked a reel and moved on.

When you chase awareness without anchoring it to a specific commercial outcome, you end up investing the majority of your budget into the 80% that does not drive the business. The owners were not wrong to want growth. They were wrong to assume that what works for everyone else automatically works for them.

And that assumption is exactly what a structured strategy is designed to break.

Top-tier consultants charge $10,000–$50,000 for a marketing strategy engagement — not because the frameworks are secret, but because the translation is hard. Taking Rumelt's diagnosis framework, Binet and Field's 60/40 principle, and real market evidence, and turning it into something a business owner can hand to their team on Monday morning and say: this is our strategy, these are the numbers we move, this is how we hold every vendor accountable — that is what has always been out of reach for SMEs.

A real strategy document names the central challenge your business actually faces. It defines who you serve and — just as importantly — who you do not. It replaces vanity metrics with proof metrics that connect directly to revenue. And it becomes the single source of truth that stops every campaign, every agency, every social media manager from running in a different direction.

The brownie brand does not need more reach. It needs a document that says: here is our highest-value customer, here is what makes them come back, and here is how every piece of marketing we do serves that goal. Everything else is noise.

When strategy is that clear, the question simplifies. Not "how many likes?" — just: is the business growing?