You know you need to invest time and money in marketing your business if you want it to thrive. Yet marketing seems so hit-or-miss. It can feel like you’re throwing money into a void without knowing whether it will benefit your business. To ensure you get the most for your money, you want to identify some key marketing metrics for your firm and track and analyze them regularly.
Key performance indicators
You are probably already keeping tabs on some key metrics for determining how well your business is performing. This can include how many inquiries result in sales, profit as a percent of total revenues, profit per project, billings vs. product sales, and more (and if not, you should be.) Similarly, you can use measurable data to evaluate how well your marketing efforts are working.
Marketers refer to these metrics as key performance indicators (KPIs). They provide insights into the degree to which your marketing materials are being viewed and responded to, acted upon by prospective customers, generating sales, and building your brand. With that information, you can assess which approaches are most successful. You can also decide which are not working. Then you can readjust your strategy and budget to get a better return for your marketing dollar.
What to measure
If you do an internet search on marketing metrics, you’ll encounter recommendations for anywhere from five to fifteen to fifty “key” indicators. Most of those are geared toward large multimedia marketing campaigns. For your purposes, you probably only need to be tracking a handful of KPIs. Keeping it to just a few will help you stay focused and aware of what’s important.
According to an article from Salesforce, you should be tracking basic KPIs for the three phases of a marketing campaign. These are Awareness, Consideration, and Post-transaction. While there are various KPIs for each of those, you need only choose a couple that best pertain to what you are trying to achieve.
Awareness KPIs relate to how much engagement potential viewers have with your marketing materials. These include measures such as how often your ad appears to potential customers (usually referred to as impressions or views), number of visitors to your website or blog, number and frequency of social media followers, mentions on social media, bounce rates (how often people leave your page immediately after landing on it), and how many subscribers you have to your email list. Most of these numbers are easy to obtain from whoever is managing your website or from dashboards like Google Analytics. Tracking changes to these metrics over time can tell you if something is working or not working. And you can adjust your marketing efforts to adapt to these numbers.
Consideration KPIs pertain to the next level of customer engagement. This is when a viewer decides to click on your ad, sign up for your newsletter, follow your social media channel, or make an inquiry through your website, email, telephone or text. At this stage, a potential customer is a lead. They are learning more information about you and your competitors in order to come to an informed purchasing decision. Typically, these encounters occur only a fraction of the time your ad or other marketing materials are viewed. But if you see those numbers trending upward, that’s a good sign that your messaging is resonating. Conversely, if your ad is not producing any of these activities, you want to rethink your marketing approach and see if you can increase these KPIs over time.
Post-transaction KPIs examine levels of customer satisfaction. What customers say about you impacts your brand and affects whether new, potential customers choose to do business with you. Especially in this age of social media, one or two bad reviews can tank an entire marketing campaign. So it’s important to keep an eye on telltale indicators, both positive and negative. This can include as number of referrals and testimonials, number and nature of comments posted to social media, and number of complaints or compliments received via email, phone or text. The frequency and rating of Google reviews can also give you valuable information.
Lastly, you want to measure the overall effectiveness of your marketing campaign. Some key performance indicators here include number of new inquiries and leads, amount of new business or revenue growth, return on investment (the expense of the marketing campaign vs. amount of new revenue growth), repeat business, and direct referrals to potential new business. Keep in mind that these marketingmetrics may not mean much from day-to-day. They are best observed over the span of weeks or months. This is so you have something to compare to and can observe real changes rather than just blips.
How to read your marketing metrics
Gathering numbers is one thing, but being able to extract meaningful conclusions from them is something else entirely. Take a look at your current and past numbers and set a benchmark. If the numbers go up, then you’ll know you’re doing something right. If they trend down, you’ll want to look for areas of improvement. Comparing yourself to other businesses or what experts consider to be standard can be helpful but also harmful. Simply striving to improve your numbers is what you should be focused on.
Measure what is meaningful
If all this sounds like too much work, keep in mind that these are general recommendations as to what metrics you might want to track to evaluate the success and value of your marketing efforts. Which to track depends a lot on what the nature of your marketing efforts is. And of course, what you hope to achieve through them. If you’re looking to expand your client base or move into a new market, then you will be more invested in tracking awareness KPIs. If you’re seeking to generate new business in the near-term, then tracking consideration KPIs will be most important. In any case, you should always be tracking the effectiveness KPIs to ensure you are spending your dollars and time well.
If you don’t have the time or means to track the marketing metrics yourself, there are plenty of services available to assist you. In the long run, you will save more money by tracking KPIs than by engaging in marketing efforts blindly.