What Growth in Digital Marketing Really Entails
This article was published on January 29, 2026
Categorized in: Digital Marketing
How do you measure growth in your digital marketing? We tend to look at specific metrics when assessing if things are really growing as they should, such as traffic, leads, engagement, and other external marketers. While it’s great to look at the data, you have to know what you’re looking for in order to measure real growth. Understanding what growth means also contains signals beyond pure data. How do you sort through everything to determine what true growth really is?
Create a Thoughtful Strategic Plan
Growth really does start with your strategic plan. It is all too easy to string together a series of digital marketing-related tasks and call them a strategy. Well, this isn’t a real strategy. It’s a to-do list filled with items, and this creates busy work and not necessarily results. A real strategy is created based on data, goal alignment, and a variety of other factors.
A great strategy will also include both short-term and long-term strategies that will build over time. Some strategies, such as traditional SEO and improving AI search visibility, may take several months to really get going. Others, like paid advertising, should yield results a lot sooner.
Look for Compounded Growth
One thing we have noticed is that people often get hung up on the day to day, week to week, month by month data spikes. The real story is that true growth is cumulative. It’s in the comparisons year to year, month by month. Your data is allowed to spike occasionally, in fact most businesses experience spikes and seasonal patterns. The real measure is, how is your data doing over time?
If you’re working a solid digital marketing strategic plan, you will experience the right amount of growth. The goal here is to keep an eye on the data to look for early signs that the program is working, but you do have to give the strategy enough time to do its work. We really believe that you need at least six months of pure data before determining if things are trending int he right direction.
Understand What Success Really Means
Before you really assess if your digital marketing is “working”, you need to determine what this really means to you. For many digital marketing teams, this means getting past the pure metrics. Sure, traffic increases are great, for example, but does this really correlate to an increase in business? The way to truly assess this is to know what the business’s objectives for the year are. This is where the real measure of success is.
That’s why it is so important to stop treating marketing as if it is in a silo. Alignment between marketing and the business is crucial. That’s because the digital marketing strategy should be composed with the pure objective of helping the business achieve its goals. If it isn’t put together in this way, that represents a missed opportunity for the business to grow.
Sustainable growth for digital marketing is directly related to business growth. If the business is growing, your digital marketing is working great!
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About the Author: Brick Marketing President, Nick Stamoulis
Nick Stamoulis is President of Brick Marketing and has over 25 years of digital marketing experience. He works directly with clients on strategy and implementation, helping solve complex challenges through SEO, AI Search Optimziation (GEO), content marketing, social media, PPC, and conversion optimization. Nick Stamoulis has worked with over 500 companies across virtually every B2B industry and also provides digital marketing consulting and training classes, helping companies improve performance and achieve the digital marketing outcomes they are looking for.
