I was confident paid social would convert. It didn't — and here's why I believed it anyway.
A few years ago I was confident paid social would drive conversions for a flagship enterprise event I was running marketing for. It's the standard modern-marketing move — every platform, every case study, every account rep tells you social converts. So we invested.
The engagement numbers looked great. Awareness climbed. What didn't show up was proof of actual conversions — nothing I could trace from an ad to a closed deal.
The moment that actually forced the question wasn't a dashboard. It was my boss, in a meeting, asking me directly to show the connection between the spend and the pipeline — and realizing I couldn't. That's a worse feeling than any chart. I'd been confident in a channel because it's what "good digital marketing" is supposed to look like, not because I'd tested whether it fit how our actual buyers were deciding.
We shifted the approach — dynamic ads and customized landing pages built around specific target-account signals instead of broad reach. Conversions became visible almost immediately, because I could finally trace them: the accounts we were deliberately targeting were the ones converting.
I still don't think paid social was the wrong channel in the abstract. I think I borrowed a tactic built for short, impulse-adjacent decisions and applied it to a long, multi-stakeholder enterprise buying process, because that's what the playbook says to do — and platforms selling ad inventory have no reason to correct you.
I don't have a clean rule to hand you out of this. What I have is a habit now: before I commit budget to a channel because "it's working for everyone," I ask who actually benefits if I believe that — and whether it's the buyer I'm trying to reach, or someone selling me the channel.