During the 2026 Winter Olympics, an interesting conversation broke out between some of the team at Deeply Digital: Which sport do you think you could be good at?
There was a similar debate during the 2024 Olympics, in which more than a quarter of adults surveyed believe they could qualify for the next Olympic games if they started training at that time. Our office consensus was that curling looks like a sport you could be good at.
The reality, of course, is that what makes us think this is how good the athletes are and how simple and easy they often make it look. The output that we see is at such a high level, and the results back this up when the athletes win medals.
The bit we’re missing is the input. The years of training it takes to become that good and to compete at that level. Much like great marketing.
Despite this, you could argue that if you’re getting results, the input is less important. In marketing, an example of this could be that the AI drafted marketing email and a really simple template outperforms the beautifully designed email that has been painstakingly written and copy-edited by three different people. The input for the latter was higher, and the performance was worse.
So, in marketing, what matters most - input, output or results?
Objectives guide the marketing planning process and the input that’s needed, output defines the content and marketing that the audience sees and results are both what marketers are judged by and what helps you learn what works and what doesn’t.
Which of these matters most is dependent on both subjectivity and objectivity. For example, output is subjective - whether someone likes the output or not may be opinion based.
Results, in theory, are objective - the metrics should speak for themselves and show whether they meet the goal or not.
Input is much harder to judge. More work doesn’t necessarily mean better results. Strongly designed content (a subjective viewpoint) might not lead to better results. But input is always needed to produce marketing content. So without input, there is no output, and no results.
The process is also cyclical - results help us to understand which output performs best, which in turn helps to figure out which inputs we should spend more time on for future content creation and campaigns.
It starts to feel like a chicken and egg situation.
The part that matters most is how we learn from any of the stages of our marketing and whether we choose to experiment as a result of what we learn.
Going back to the athletics comparison, the input athletes put in goes far beyond just getting up in the morning and competing in their event. They spend time working on the marginal gains, those tiny differences that mean they can beat the competition. At such a high level, everyone you compete against is going to be great, so relying on the same output for every event is a fool’s errand.
Between each competition, work goes into how to compete better in the next competition. That doesn’t mean they won’t try the same thing again, but in between events or competitions, they might be looking at those marginal gains to make their tactics that little bit better next time.
As marketers, even when something is a success and the results go our way, we have to ask ourselves why. And if we did repeat the same input, to get the same output, would we get the same results a second time around? That might be a marketing experiment in itself.
More likely, you might review the results and output and work out that there was a small something that could have provided even better results.
What matters most in marketing: the input, output or results? It’s a bit of a trick question as they’re all important, but what really matters is what you take away from each and how you make adjustments for next time.
How do you make the open rate better? How do you improve the form submission rate? How do you increase the reach of your marketing content? What happens if you change a particular word, image or button?
Experimentation and learning from past results will improve your marketing and make you think differently in how you run new campaigns.