Most energy businesses have some form of marketing activity in place. There is a website. Content is being published. LinkedIn activity is happening. Perhaps there are campaigns running in the background or regular attendance at industry events.
The activity itself is rarely the issue.
The challenge tends to appear when somebody asks a simple question: what is all of this actually contributing to commercially?
At that point, the conversation usually becomes less clear. Website traffic is up. LinkedIn impressions are increasing. A post performed well. The latest email campaign generated clicks. All of those things may be genuinely positive. But none of them answer the question most senior leaders are actually asking, which is whether marketing is helping the business win more work.
The Measurement Problem Is Not a Data Problem
Most businesses now have access to more marketing data than ever before. The problem is rarely a shortage of information.
It is usually a shortage of agreement about what success actually looks like.
Many organisations end up measuring what is easiest to see rather than what is most commercially meaningful. Reports fill up with activity metrics such as: followers, likes, website visits, engagement rates, click-through rates. These are useful indicators in the right context. But none of them automatically tell you whether marketing is helping create commercial opportunities. Activity and impact are not the same thing, and the gap between the two is where most of the wasted spend and unclear reporting in energy sector marketing actually sits.
Why This Is Particularly Relevant in the Energy Sector
The energy sector rarely operates on short buying cycles.
A supplier may be researching opportunities for months before a requirement formally appears. Procurement processes can take significant time. Technical evaluation often happens before commercial discussions begin. Relationships develop gradually rather than instantly.
That means marketing does not usually create immediate transactions. Its role sits much earlier in the process, helping buyers discover a business, building familiarity over time, reducing perceived risk, demonstrating expertise and supporting confidence long before formal engagement begins.
We explored this shift in more detail in Visibility Has Become Part of the Commercial Operating Model, looking at why supplier evaluation increasingly begins before businesses realise they are being assessed.
The challenge is that these contributions are genuinely difficult to measure if the only metrics being reviewed are website traffic or social media engagement. They are real commercial effects, but they do not show up neatly in a standard marketing dashboard.
Many energy businesses can tell you how many website visits they received last month. Far fewer can tell you how often they appeared on a buyer’s shortlist before an enquiry was made. Yet one of those measures is significantly closer to how work is actually won.
What Are We Actually Trying to Influence?
A more useful question than “what should we measure” is “what behaviours are we actually trying to create.”
For most energy businesses, marketing should be helping influence three things.
Visibility. Are the right people becoming aware of the business? Not everybody, but specifically the potential clients, procurement teams, technical decision-makers and commercial stakeholders who actually shape buying decisions? If the market does not know you exist, the quality of your capability becomes largely irrelevant.
Credibility. Once buyers discover the business, do they trust what they find? This matters more than ever as buyers conduct their own research before any contact takes place. Websites, case studies, technical content, leadership visibility and industry recognition all contribute to whether a supplier appears credible enough to consider further.
Those credibility signals matter because buyers are increasingly relying on different forms of trust than they once did. We explored that changing trust dynamic in our recent article, Buyers Trust Suppliers Less Than They Used To. Here’s What They Trust Instead.
Commercial progression. Are conversations, enquiries and opportunities increasing over time? Marketing should not be measured solely against immediate lead generation, but it cannot be disconnected from commercial outcomes indefinitely either. Over time, there should be clear evidence that visibility and credibility are contributing to pipeline development, real business conversations and genuine opportunities.
The Metrics That Matter Most
The exact measures will vary between businesses, but many energy companies would benefit from paying closer attention to a different set of questions. How many genuinely relevant enquiries are being generated, rather than just enquiries in general? How often are prospects mentioning content they have seen before a conversation even starts? How frequently are new opportunities originating from digital channels rather than purely from existing relationships? How many website visitors are returning repeatedly, suggesting genuine ongoing interest? How often are buyers engaging with technical expertise before making contact at all? And how visible is the business within the specific markets it wants to enter?
These questions are consistently more commercially useful than tracking social media impressions or website traffic in isolation, because they connect directly to how buying decisions in this sector actually get made.
Measuring Marketing Against How Work Is Actually Won
One of the most common mistakes energy businesses make is measuring marketing separately from the buying process itself. Marketing then gets judged against metrics that have little real connection to how opportunities are created.
A more useful approach starts with different questions entirely. How do buyers discover suppliers in this market? How do they build the confidence needed to engage? How do they decide who makes a shortlist? How do opportunities progress once that shortlist exists? Only once those questions are answered can meaningful measurement be properly established.
This is one of the reasons businesses bringing in a fractional CMO for energy sector marketing often start there before discussing campaigns or channels at all. Defining what success actually looks like comes before deciding how to achieve it. Without that clarity, it becomes very difficult to know whether marketing is genuinely contributing to growth or simply generating activity that feels productive without being commercially connected.
What This Means for Energy Businesses
The businesses seeing the greatest value from marketing are rarely the ones measuring the most data. They are the ones measuring the right things, not just activity, not just attention, but commercial influence:
- Visibility among the right audiences.
- Credibility that supports supplier confidence.
- Progression towards real opportunities.
Because ultimately, marketing is not there to generate reports. It is there to help a business become easier to find, easier to trust and easier to choose, in a sector where all three of those things take time to build and are genuinely difficult to fake.
At AB Fiftyone, We Help Energy Businesses Measure What Actually Matters
We work with energy and industrial businesses to build marketing strategies that connect directly to commercial outcomes, looking beyond impressions and engagement rates to understand how visibility, credibility and buyer confidence actually contribute to growth over time.
This is also one of the first things we address with clients who bring us in as a fractional CMO for their energy business. Before discussing campaigns, content or channels, we look at what success genuinely needs to mean for that organisation and build measurement around it from there.
In sectors with long sales cycles and complex buying decisions, the most important marketing metrics are rarely the most obvious ones. If your business has marketing activity in place but no clear answer to what it is actually achieving commercially, it is worth a conversation.
