When we talk to marketers about their challenges and needs in digital, measurement always at the center of the conversation. As with any other part of your business, you need insightful marketing key performance indicators (marketing KPIs) to measure and monitor your marketing strategy to ensure that you are reaching your goals. Knowing what is working for you and what is not is a crucial factor in building a marketing plan that works for your business. We’ve all heard the old management adage “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”, a thousand times and it’s truer nowadays than it has ever been.
Marketing KPIs are a way for you to clearly track your marketing efforts. For a variety of reasons many business and marekting managers don’t track their marketing performance and this can be hugely detrimental to making improvements to your strategy. It’s crucial to gather data so that you can make adjustments to where you are targeting your clients, how you are reaching them and what deliverables are proving to be more successful than others. Armed with the information KPI’s provide, you can fine-tune your marketing campaigns, reach more people and ultimately increase your bottom line.
Continue reading below to learn which metrics are most important for B2B marketers and how you can clearly set measurable objectives going forward.
The Most Important Marketing KPIs to Grow Your Business
With an abundance of tools available to business owners and marketers, there are no excuses for not tracking what’s going on in your business. However, with so many tools available, it’s often easy to find yourself in a state of ‘information paralysis’, where you have so much information you don’t know, where to start.
To avoid reaching this unfortunate position, it’s important to focus on the key marketing KPIs to grow your business successfully.
Sales and ROI Figures
It might seem like an obvious place to start but the success rate of a particular product or service can very quickly be measured by looking at your sales figures. In particular, sales by channel is an important metric. For example, do you know how much sales your eCommerce site is producing relative to overall sales? If you do, great. You would be surprised how many businesses don’t have a clear idea how much sales their website or e-commerce site is producing.
When looking at sales, you need to look at the entire picture and be sure to include:
- sales volume overall and by channel
- margin achieved
- cost to acquire sale
- customer satisfaction levels
These are the primary results metrics that move the needle for your growth objectives. They are referred to as lagging indicators because they focus on the end results/outputs. But, they are not the only metrics you should be monitoring. In fact, if you only track these metrics, it might be too late and you would be missing on many proactive leading metrics to direct your marketing success.
Track Your Leads
As every marketer knows, leads are crucial to closing more sales. Without leads, you will have far less opportunity to make a sale.
However, it’s important to note that there are strong leads and weak leads and the strength of your lead will have a major impact on the likelihood of you closing a sale. When looking your leads as one of the marketing KPIs to grow your business, be sure to qualify your leads.
There are two main leads you need to be concerned with:
- Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): A marketing qualified lead is one which will have gained the attentio of your marketing team. These generally relate to people who have engaged with your content and are sales-ready. You may need to take some additional steps to convert them to customers but they are interested in what you have to say, offer or provide.
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): A sales qualified lead is a person who is already a paying customer or is primed for a direct sales follow-up. Every marketer knows the value in follow-up marketing. These people have already bought from you once or have been primed to buy, so there’s a good chance you can go through the sales process and turn them into a regular customer or upsell and turn them into even more to brand advocates.
You should also be concerned with the following metrics
- Cost Per Lead: How much does it cost you to generate a lead
- Lead to Customer Ratio: How many leads it take to generate a customer based on marketing tactics and campaigns
Customer Metrics
When looking at data in relation to your customer, there are two main metrics you need to consider.
- Cost of Customer Acquisition (CCA) –From a B2B marketing perspective, the cost of customer acquisition is tracked to find strategies to reduce the difference in the amount of money that can be earned from a customer and the amount it costs to receive those earnings.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) –B2B marketers will typically use CLV to measure how much profit a customer brings to the business during the entire period of time they are a customer. This can be a very useful KPI in determining which relationships are worth spending more time on developing and pursuing further.
Analyze Your Website Traffic
Each and every visitor to your website is a potential lead, and for eCommerce websites, these leads can be converted directly into sales. Track where your visitors are coming from, which pages they are spending time on, and use this information to help build a profile in terms of what it is that they want. Free (or low cost) Analytics tools such as Google Analytics are becoming very sophisticated about customer behavior and website patterns, no business should be in the dark about their website traffic patterns and sales attribution.
Take some time to consider the percentage of visitors that you convert to a leads, or even better to a sale. Ensure that your website is set up to grab visitor’s attention. Consider using opt-in forms, offering free resources and publishing usable content as part of your digital marketing strategy to engage people coming to your website. And, be sure to use and properly set up basic analytics and conversion metrics to gain invaluable insights and patterns about your visitors.
Some important metrics to track include:
- Sessions
- Visitors
- Pages Visited Per Session
- Average Session Duration
- Bounce Rate (percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce”) rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site)
- Goal Conversions (forms submits, download requests, sales, etc.)
Analyze Social Media Performance KPIs
More than ever before, your social media marketing strategy is going to play a critical role in converting leads. Some social media platforms are better than others at this and some work better for different business types. You may need to be active across a number of platforms or maybe just one is enough. Either way, it’s important to realize the value of each. They all have very good insights about your audiences and their engagement. Are you leveraging the insights they offer for free?
Having a large number of followers is not the answer, instead, you should focus on building engagement. An engaged audience is much more valuable to your marketing strategy and will allow you to build campaigns that will be more effective. You can measure your engagement by tracking:
- Clicks
- Likes
- Shares or retweets
- Comments
- Brand mentions
- Number of visits to your profile
Email Marketing KPIs
There’s no denying that email marketing is still one of the most powerful tools to any marketer. Once you have an email address for a customer, you can contact them directly, instead of having to try to stand out from all the noise on social media or other mediums.
73% of B2B marketers say email marketing is essential to growing their business.In particular, you should analyse these metrics:
- Open rate: The percentage of emails opened.
- Click through Rate (CTR): The percentage of recipients who click on a URL in your email.
- Unsubscribe rate: This may include contacts that have been removed by your email tool due to lack of engagement
- Conversion rate: The percentage of recipients who respond to your call-to-action in an email marketing campaign or promotion.
These stats will allow you to paint a very useful image of how your email marketing efforts are performing.
How to Set Measurable Objectives and Improve Your Marketing Strategy
Using these marketing KPIs to grow your business is crucial to your success. To do this, you will need to establish measurable goals and these will be different depending on your goals. When establishing goals it’s important to define clearly what it is you want to achieve. Be specific, be concise and try to focus on a single goal.
With one goal in mind, you’ll achieve more in a shorter amount of time. If you have multiple marketing goals, the best approach is to create separate campaigns for each one. Once you have the data from your marketing KPI’s and your goals in place you can create an improved marketing strategy that will be effective in achieving those goals. After you define your goals and measures, be sure to create accountability for someone on your team (or you) to create a dashboard and to make sure you consistently have accurate numbers. Make sure people on your team are helping you deliver numbers they are responsible for in a timely manner and you take action to keep moving forward.
Identifying strategic marketing performance KPIs is not an easy process and keeping focus on the metrics that matter to move the needle for growth is even harder. If you have any questions about this or any other strategic marketing concerns, we are happy to help. We are a call or an email away.
