The things easiest to measure in marketing are usually the things that matter least.

I'm currently reading The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game by C. Thi Nguyen, and one concept keeps showing up in my thinking about financial advisor marketing: The Gap. Nguyen defines it as "the distance between what is being measured and what actually matters." It's a simple idea with big implications for how firms approach their marketing efforts.

Here's how it plays out: Marketing platforms give firms endless metrics: likes, impressions, click-through rates, email open rates, website traffic. These numbers are easy to track, easy to report, and easy to compare month over month. So firms do. They check them constantly. They celebrate when they go up and worry when they go down. They make decisions based on them.

But these metrics mostly measure one thing: attention. And attention isn't the same as trust. It's not the same as credibility. It's definitely not the same as a prospective client thinking, "This is the advisor I want to work with."

The things that actually lead to new client relationships—depth of connection, perceived expertise, whether someone feels understood—are much harder to measure. There's no dashboard for "this person now trusts you enough to have a real conversation." No metric for "your content helped someone realize they need help." No score for "you're now top of mind when they're ready to hire an advisor."

So advisors default to what they can measure. They optimize for engagement instead of trust-building. They chase virality instead of relevance. They produce more content to increase impressions rather than better content that deepens relationships. The scoring system focuses them on the wrong outcomes simply because those outcomes are quantifiable.

The gap between what firms measure and what actually matters widens, and they wonder why all that activity isn't translating into new clients.

The takeaway: The best marketing metrics are often the ones you can't easily track. Don't let the ease of measurement pull your focus away from the harder work of building real relationships and demonstrating genuine expertise. Those are what convert attention into clients.