Do you know the most important marketing key performance indicators that you should be tracking? Measuring the right KPIs is a key part of spending your marketing dollars wisely while also working to meet business goals.
There is endless data and analytics that your marketing team can use to track metrics. Some companies look at short and long-term revenue while others base marketing effectiveness on click-through rates.
When deciding which marketing effectiveness metrics to track, consider your business goals. What are you looking to achieve with each of your marketing campaigns? Defining success starts by defining your goals.
Here are some critical metrics that you’ll want to track to ensure that your marketing strategies are having a positive impact.
Revenue contributions
One of the most important metrics to look at is what percentage of your company’s revenue can be linked back to marketing. The more money that you can tie to a specific marketing campaign, the more effective your initiatives are.
Compare revenue before and after running a social media or email marketing campaign. You may be able to attribute some of the growth to these efforts.
Be aware that some marketing strategies, such as growing website traffic, can take longer to translate into revenue.
Lead Generation
To grow your company, you need to continuously focus on growing the number and quality of leads. The more leads you have, the greater chance there is of converting a lead into a customer.
When measuring lead generation efforts, there are several KPIs to look at including lead quality, conversion rate, and cost per lead.
Engagement
It’s one thing to post a great blog. It’s another if that blog attracts hundreds of comments and views. Measuring marketing engagement is a crucial metric to track. You don’t want consumers to see your content and scroll past it. Instead, you want them to engage by posting a comment, clicking a link, or sharing one of your posts.
When measuring marketing effectiveness for engagement, there are several metrics to focus on, including:
- Social media likes, replies, and shares
- Click-through rate
- Bounce rate
- Time on site
- Pages per visit
Having engaged consumers is a clear sign that your marketing efforts are paying off.
Customer Success
Not only do you want to increase the quantity and quality of your new leads, maintaining your current customers is even more important. There’s nothing more effective than having an ever-growing list of brand ambassadors.
In tracking customer success, focus on customer retention rate and lifetime customer value. Look at the percentage of customers at the beginning and end of a period. When calculating customer retention rate, don’t count new customers.
You’ll also want to put a dollar amount to each customer. The higher the value, the more significant of an impact your customers will have on your bottom line.
Final thoughts
Blindly running marketing campaigns without tracking their success leads to wasted time, effort, and money. The best way to market is by looking at the data, figuring out what works, and making changes where necessary.
By tracking revenue contributions, lead generation, engagement, and customer success, you can get a better idea of how big of an impact your marketing efforts are having.
