One of the keys to a strong marketing strategy is your ability to monitor and adjust it as necessary. To do this you need to use marketing key performance indicators (KPIs). These key performance indicators help measure your awareness, engagement, conversion rates, as well as revenue so you can see if your marketing efforts are working. Without marketing KPIs, you risk wasting money and not hitting your business goals. Don’t ignore this valuable data, stay up to date on the best marketing strategies by monitoring how your current ones are faring.
Define Your Business Goals
Before you can start measuring your marketing KPIs to gauge your current marketing plan’s success, you need to nail down your business goals. Your marketing plan is a tool that can help you meet these goals. Don’t just say you want to grow your business or increase sales though. These vague goals aren’t easily measured. Instead, set SMART goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. For example, you could aim to increase website conversions by a certain percentage within a specific time frame. These goals can be long-term or short-term, but they must have a deadline so you can measure how much progress you make every day.
Why Use Marketing KPIs?
While measuring marketing KPIs can greatly help you reach your business goals, it’s important to not overdo it. Not all KPIs will be applicable or beneficial to your marketing plan and trying to gather data on all of them will overwhelm you. Try to focus on KPIs that relate to the area of your business you want to improve. For example, if you’re looking to increase sales, tracking conversion rates will be far more informative than tracking your business’ number of social media followers. It’s also a good idea to only track a small number of KPIs at a time. This will prevent an intimidating amount of data from coming in and allow you to focus on the key aspects that will help you achieve your business goals.
Awareness Metrics
Awareness metrics are marketing KPIs that look at how effectively you attract attention. Even if someone visits your site without making a purchase, that interaction can provide you with great insight into how your audience views your business. For example, look at your website traffic to see where your visitors come from. This will tell you which of your marketing efforts is working the best and moving the most people to your site.
You can also use the KPI of impressions to understand how well your current marketing efforts are doing. This metric tells you how often your ads or organic content are viewed by people. Measure this alongside your website traffic to see how effective your ads or organic content are. Did visitors have to see content multiple times before clicking on it and going to your site or was once enough? If it’s the former it might mean you need to update your content to drive more visitors to your site.
Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics are marketing KPIs that measure how much your audience is interacting with your website and social media accounts. Looking at these metrics shows you which of your offerings your audience is most interested in. Look at the time users spend on your website and page views to see what content your audience is most interested in on your site or if there are any pages that are declining in traffic.
Just like how you want to monitor your website KPIs, you want to do the same with any social media accounts your business has. Look at likes, comments, new follows, and shares to see which social content is performing the best. Understanding these marketing KPIs helps you give users exactly what they want. Refining your marketing strategies like this increases the likelihood of user interaction and eventual conversion and sales.
Conversion Metrics
Conversion metrics are perhaps the most obvious marketing KPIs, showing you exactly how many leads are turning into paying customers. Measure this by looking at conversion rates or how many visitors to your site take a conversion action. This could mean making a purchase, but it could also mean signing up for a newsletter or similar step. Be sure to specifically monitor your lead-to-customer conversion rate or how many of your leads actually turn into customers. Every industry will have a different goal for these specific marketing KPIs depending on their business goals and audience. Monitoring them will keep you up to date on how your marketing plan is doing and notify you of any patterns in conversions you can optimize.
Revenue Metrics
There are several marketing KPIs you can use to generally ascertain if your marketing efforts are paying off or not. Return on investment (ROI) is a major one. To accurately measure this metric, you should monitor all of the above KPIs, so you have ample data on your marketing campaign. Calculate your ROI by subtracting the amount you spent on marketing from your generated revenue. This should give you a pretty good idea of if your marketing efforts were worth it or if they made you little profit.
Along with other marketing KPIs, ROI tells you how you can improve your marketing plan going forward. If you made a profit, look at your other metrics and see if there’s a way to optimize your marketing. If your ROI was low, you now have plenty of data to see what aspects of your marketing campaign can be improved.
How to Use Marketing KPIs Together
Marketing KPIs work best when they are used together to offer a full picture of your marketing performance across your customer’s journey. For example, when looked at together awareness and engagement metrics can help you monitor how well you’re moving prospects from initial interest to deeper engagement. On the other hand conversion and revenue metrics can show you whether your engagement efforts are translating into sales and long-term business value. Together, these marketing KPIs form a powerful system to refine your marketing plan and ensure every stage of the customer journey is optimized for success.
Start Leveraging Marketing KPIs
Staying up to date on all your marketing KPIs is crucial to ensuring your marketing plan is successful and that you meet your business goals. Observing users’ behavior from the moment they notice your business to when they finally make a purchase shows you exactly what marketing strategies are working for you, and which ones aren’t.
While you could use tools like Google Analytics to monitor your online marketing performance, this can be a time-consuming process. Strategy can help analyze all of your marketing KPIs to identify areas for improvement and growth. Schedule a free consultation today and learn how we can transform your current marketing plan into a data-driven strategy.
Enjoy content from Strategy Marketing? Make us one of your preferred sources on Google.
