The Five Marketing KPIs Savvy CEOs Care About
How CEOs can measure marketing’s impact on growth and performance.
Marketing generates a flood of activity—ads are served, emails are sent, content is shared, and social interactions accumulate by the thousands. For executives, though, the volume of activity matters far less than the impact marketing has on the business. CEOs want to understand how marketing drives growth, accelerates opportunities, and strengthens the company’s market position.
Executive leaders need metrics that demonstrate marketing’s real contribution to business performance, not just its activity. Marketing leaders must focus on outcomes that clearly connect to revenue growth, pipeline development, and opportunity expansion across key accounts. When marketing is measured this way, it becomes a strategic driver of growth, giving executives confidence that marketing investments are delivering measurable results.
The five KPIs outlined here—Reach, Engagement, Pipeline, Sales, and Revenue—provide that line of sight. They allow CEOs to see where marketing is creating tangible value and enable marketing leaders to focus on initiatives that move the business forward.
1. Reach
Reach measures how effectively your brand is becoming known in your target market. It reflects the combined impact of all channels and tactics designed to increase brand awareness, mental availability, and recall. For CEOs, reach shows whether awareness is expanding, where momentum is coming from, and how marketing investments are compounding over time.
An important consideration is that press releases, while valuable for building visibility, often generate broad, non-targeted reach that can inflate overall metrics. Tracking them separately and analyzing the sources behind your reach helps identify which channels are truly driving meaningful awareness, allowing marketing to focus on what delivers real impact.
“When marketing is evaluated by the KPIs that matter most to CEOs, it becomes a predictable driver of growth, resilience, and long-term success.”
2. Engagement
Engagement measures how actively your target market interacts with your brand’s communications. It includes both named engagement—known individuals within key accounts—and unnamed engagement from audiences you cannot identify individually. For CEOs, engagement is most meaningful when evaluated by breadth (how many of the right people are engaging) and depth (how often they return to engage). These dimensions indicate whether marketing is building interest and influence over time.
As a KPI, engagement shows CEOs how awareness is converting into active market interest. It also helps marketing expand both breadth and depth within accounts, aligning closely with sales. Engagement highlights where interest is building, which offerings are gaining traction, and where joint focus can drive pipeline, sales, and revenue.
3. Pipeline
Pipeline measures the opportunities marketing is helping to create that can turn into future revenue. Marketing’s role is to generate qualified, sales-ready opportunities that align with targeted accounts and offerings. This requires tight alignment with sales to ensure marketing promotes what can actually be sold and that opportunities are actionable.
For CEOs, pipeline provides visibility into the future revenue potential of marketing initiatives. It shows which accounts and segments are responding, where opportunities are developing, and whether the business is building a resilient, high-quality opportunity base. Tracking pipeline transforms marketing from a support function into a predictable driver of business growth.
4. Sales
Sales measures how effectively the business converts opportunities into revenue, and marketing plays a key role in driving those outcomes. As a KPI, sales can be used to measure marketing’s contribution—showing how marketing supports wins, improves win rates, and increases origination-to-win velocity while progressing opportunities through the deal stages. Marketing supports specific pursuits by advancing opportunities through each stage, influencing key decision makers, and helping close deals in collaboration with sales.
To maximize impact, marketing should support every strategic must-win opportunity as well as the broader pipeline. For CEOs, this ensures marketing is not just correlated with sales but actively driving results—helping new offerings gain traction, shaping buyer decisions, and enabling the business to proactively steer growth rather than react to it.
5. Revenue
Revenue is where all marketing efforts ultimately converge, and it serves as a critical KPI for CEOs to measure marketing’s contribution to business growth. Marketing drives revenue by influencing awareness, engagement, pipeline, and sales, and it can also be applied strategically to specific accounts or buying centers to maximize incremental revenue.
Marketing plays a central role in creating new revenue sources, strengthening existing ones, and improving the quality of revenue the business realizes. By tracking revenue as a KPI, CEOs can see how marketing directly contributes to growth, while marketing leaders gain insight into which accounts, offerings, and initiatives are delivering the most impact. Aligning the right accounts with the right offerings helps build a balanced, high-value revenue mix that supports sustainable growth, increases deal value, and makes the business more resilient to market fluctuations.
In Conclusion
Marketing is far more than a support function—it is a strategic engine that drives growth, builds opportunities, and directly impacts revenue. By focusing on the five KPIs CEOs care about—Reach, Engagement, Pipeline, Sales, and Revenue—executives gain clear insight into marketing’s impact, and marketing leaders can ensure their efforts are aligned with the outcomes that truly move the business forward.
Measuring and reporting marketing in these terms aligns the C-suite and marketing, improves decision-making, and ensures resources focus on initiatives that generate real results. When marketing is evaluated by the KPIs that matter most to CEOs, it becomes a predictable driver of growth, resilience, and long-term success.
About John Fildes
I grow the top line by connecting marketing to business strategy. By leveraging powerful positioning, content marketing, and client insights, I help organizations drive qualitative and quantitative results at scale.
I've built an amazing network of incredibly talented people over the years. What I've appreciated most is those who have invested in me, mentored me, and helped me become the talented professional I am today. I pay it forward by doing the same for other high performing professionals and entrepreneurs.
Learn More: Marketing Leader | Adept Entrepreneur | People Developer
All views are my own and not those of my current or prior employers.
