Marketing is how a business promotes itself. You can have the most amazing product in the world, but if no one knows about it, your business won’t have customers. This is why investing in marketing is so important.
By sending a message to your target audience, you can inspire them to learn more about your product and take action to help your business succeed. But how do you know if your marketing efforts are paying off? Here are the marketing metrics!
Marketing metrics are pieces of data that help you track the performance of your marketing campaigns. It’s a quantifiable way for your marketing team to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts in getting your audience to take the desired action, allowing you to accurately track a return on your marketing investment and shows you where to measure campaigns that track key performance metrics.
The metrics you can track are almost endless, and what you choose is entirely dependent on your unique business goals. Once you know what your goals are, you can choose the metrics you need to track and create a marketing dashboard where you can easily review all of your selected metrics in one place.
Here are some examples of metrics you might want to include:
- mail Marketing – open rate, bounce rate (hard and soft bounce), Click-through rate (CTR), unsubscribe rate, new subscribers, subscriber engagement / non-engagement rate
- Digital Marketing- CTR, cost per action (CPA), cost per click (CPC), impressions, engagement, sales
- Social Media Marketing – follower growth rate, number of followers, impressions and reach, engagement rate
- Content Marketing – blog traffic, shares, content downloads, qualified leads via form fill lead generation
- Site – total traffic, bounce rate, page views, unique page views, time on site, average time on page, traffic sources, conversions, retention rate, pages/sessions
- Video And Streaming Ads – impressions and total watch time
You may read other articles that tell you to track x, y, and z, but the truth is that choosing metrics is very personal to your business and marketing goals.
For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you’ll want to track impressions, page views, shares, likes, and so on. If your goal is to increase sales, then you’ll be much more interested in click-through rates, lead generation, and conversions. Someone liking your post isn’t going to mean much in this case!
We know data can be interesting and often want to keep track of everything, but we’d rather focus on a few and see success than keep track of everything and waste time and money.
If you’re not sure where to start, here are some of the top indicators to look out for. This is key information that will help you gauge how people are reacting to your brand, whether they’re engaging, and how much you’re spending versus the revenue you’re making.
1. Creating Leaders
This can include metrics such as cost per lead (CPL), click through rate (CTR), sales qualified (SQL) and marketing qualified (MQL). Leads are users who have the potential to become customers/buyers, so it is very important to measure the volume of these leads.
Leads can be generated in many ways, including contact forms, landing pages, email campaigns, blog CTAs, online events and seminars, and more. If you see a good number of leads, then your strategy is working and your customers see the value of your offers.
2. Conversion Rate
A conversion happens when a user takes an action that you want them to take, whether it’s making a sale, signing up for your mailing list, sharing your article on social media, or simply… respond to a survey. To calculate your conversion rate, simply divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors.
The type of conversions you track depends on your goals, but whichever you choose, conversion tracking will tell you what drives your leads to action and increases your chances of converting buyers.
3. Keep
It’s great to generate interest in your brand, but it’s also important to keep your existing customers in mind. Customer retention means keeping them in mind throughout the customer journey and building brand loyalty by responding to blog post comments, providing discount codes and not taking all of their pay stub, asking for feedback on their own through surveys/quizzes, accepting contributions from visitors, etc.
To track retention, you might consider tracking customer lifetime value (CLV), bounce rate, revenue growth, and net promoter score (NPS). Take a look at your returning visitors to see what they like and interact with, then incorporate that into your marketing campaigns.
4. Commitment
Customer engagement metrics tell you how people are interacting with your brand and whether on social media, search engines, email, or your website. This is an important metric that will tell you a lot not only about your audience but also about what marketing is working and what isn’t.
The specific engagement metrics you decide to track depend on your overall goals, but can include anything from general social media activity (shares, likes, and followers) to CTR, time on page, subscriber list growth rate, sessions, etc.
The best way to know if you are succeeding in this field is to look at your audience engagement rate. You can do this by taking the total number of interactions and dividing it by your impressions or reach. A high percentage means people find your content interesting. The engagement report should also include different networks so you can see which platforms perform best.
Now that you know the basics of what metrics to track, you can choose the ones that best match your business goals and marketing strategy and build your dashboard. Here you can keep all your metrics and data organized so you can better identify trends and areas for improvement. Integrating all analytics tools into one dashboard will cut the amount of work required to track and report on metrics in half.
Metrics are measurable values that give you insight into the impact of your marketing campaigns and whether you’re using your marketing budget effectively.
