It is 2026, and I still meet clients who obsess over likes and followers.

Picture someone who has to swim across a lake and back. Likes and followers are the equivalent of dipping a toe in the water and celebrating. The goal was never the toe. The goal was the other shore.

If you are spending money on digital content, you deserve to know whether it is getting you across the lake. Here is how we measure it at VR&C, and what I have learned from 13 years of doing this for clients, and for myself.

Conversation wins the internet

What should you track instead? Conversation. Comments, replies, shares, questions. If your content gets people talking online, they are talking about it offline too. Win the conversation online and you are shaping culture offline.

I have seen this more than once this year. Recently I posted a short video with five tips for surviving the journey through Lungi, Freetown’s international airport. Not long after, I dropped off some equipment with a man taking it to Sierra Leone. We had never met. He told me the Lungi video had been really helpful. The same week, under another of my videos, someone commented that they had just travelled through Lungi, used one of my tips, and it worked.

Neither of those moments shows up as a like. Both are proof that the content landed. That is what winning looks like.

Streams are free. Tickets are not.

Between 2022 and 2025 we helped Drizilik grow from 2 million to more than 25 million streams. That is a great number. It is not the number that closed sponsorship deals.

What sponsors cared about most was how many people came out to his concerts. Anyone can stream music for free, from anywhere. A fan who buys a ticket is showing a different kind of value. Across four headline concerts in Washington, DC and London, ticket sales and sponsorships passed $100,000. In a market like Sierra Leone especially, an artist who can turn a digital following into a full room is an artist a brand can bank on.

The other thing that moved sponsors was positioning in real life. We facilitated Drizilik’s first trip to the BET Awards in 2023, and he went three years in a row. In 2024 I went with him and documented everything, and it became far bigger than the event itself. In 2025 he walked the red carpet. Being seen alongside other movers and shakers, in the media and next to other stars, did more for his brand than any follower count.

Digital is powerful, but you have to back it up with what is happening offline.

Following the money from content to result

For most of our clients, digital is the main marketing channel, so the path from content to result is easier to trace than people think.

• Tickets. Drizilik’s two Washington, DC concerts had no paper tickets. All the marketing was digital and the only place to buy was online. Digital marketing, digital sales. The same is true of the Sierra Leone Diaspora Investment Conference: every one of the 400 people who came to London over two days, and the hundreds who came in Maryland before that, bought their ticket online.
• Donations. For Schools for Salone, our fundraising campaigns run almost entirely through email. Not every gift arrives through the email link. Plenty of supporters still write a check. But the check is a response to the campaign and the ask they read in the newsletter, and we can see the giving rise with each campaign. Schools for Salone raised more than $1 million in 2025, the first million-dollar year in its history.
• Bookings. The same logic applies to speaking engagements, partnerships and leads: ask where they came from, and keep asking.

Promo codes and KPIs, or it’s all vibes

In our influencer guide, we tell clients to give every influencer a promo code and a brief with clear KPIs. Without them, it is all vibes. The influencers post, people see the content, and nobody knows what happened next.

Views are not conversion. Views are not sales. You can get a million views and zero sales.

The clients who skip the codes and KPIs are, frankly, throwing money away. The clients who use them can go back and see what each post actually delivered: engagement, views and sales. Better still, they learn which content works so they can do more of it, and which does not so they can stop.

A report a CEO will actually read

The CEOs and leaders I work for have no time. Time is the one thing they do not have. They trust us, and they still want to see impact. So our monthly reports are short, visual and easy to scan, with the numbers jumping off the page.

They do two jobs. First, they show trends: what is going up, what is going down. Second, they say what we will do about it. When something is not working, we stop right away or pivot. When something is working, we do more of it. A report that does not change what happens next month is just paperwork.

Small budget? Measure more, not less

If your budget is small, measuring matters even more, because you cannot afford to waste any of it. The free analytics built into every platform are enough to start. Watch what drives the most conversation and engagement, and put your next naira, cedi or leone there.

Think like you are building a community

In an earlier piece I wrote that a social media page is not digital marketing. Here is the fuller picture.

Imagine you have a piece of land and you want to build a community on it. You do not build everything at once. First you ask who will live there. Families? Young professionals? The elderly? Then you ask what they need, and over time you add homes, parks, playgrounds, sports fields, parking and trees.

Digital marketing works the same way. Start with your audience and build where they are. If part of your community loves video on Instagram or Facebook, invest there. But that does not mean dropping your email list, your WhatsApp broadcasts, X, Threads, your blog, articles, infographics or interviews. Some places get more intensity and some get less, but a healthy ecosystem grows every part.

And growth is not only sales, although sales matter most. It is how people think of you, how they speak about you, how they engage with you, and whether you are top of mind when it counts.

So measure all of it over time. How often do people repost and forward your content? How many questions land in your inbox and DMs? What are they saying in the comments? Track the conversation and track sales conversion. Everything else is a toe in the water.