For too long, marketers have been limited to assumptions and guess-work in measuring the effectiveness in their marketing campaigns.
But with the introduction of the internet and with the measurability that it provides, there’s a world of opportunity for marketers to measure and adapt faster than ever thought possible.
With that being said, sometimes the amount of accessible data can be more confusing than it is helpful. It’s easy to get lost in bounce rates, site drop-off points, and demographical data.
It’s important to not let the trees get in the way of seeing the forest.
We consistently rely on 3 must-have marketing metrics that help us stay laser-focused in our marketing. With these metrics, we set goals and pace ourselves against those goals at any given time.
The goal: optimize for marketing ROI
Start with clear metrics for goals
Goals are where it all starts. If you don’t put the time in at the beginning of your marketing campaigns to outline goals, you will have no way of knowing whether or not your campaign was ever effective. Gut feelings do not cut it in measuring success of your campaigns.
We recommend starting with your revenue goals in mind. Then ask yourself, “how many sales do I need to close to hit these goals for revenue?” Using your average close rate, you can start to work backwards and figure out the number of leads to generate to be successful.
Once you have established the goals that you want to hit, you will need to measure the following metrics to determine success. These are your key performance indicators (KPI’s)
1. Traffic
Knowing the exact number of unique visitors to your site, by source, is a good way to take the pulse of your website’s effectiveness. If you are looking to increase the number of leads that you are generating through your website, a great place to start is by driving more traffic. Use a tool like Google Analytics or HubSpot to measure your traffic and sources quickly and easily.
Buy traffic is only good if you can effectively convert those visitors into leads, which brings me to…
2. Leads
Leads are great for obvious reasons — they make your sales team happy, and boy do they make marketing look good.
Having clear numbers on not only how many leads marketing efforts generated, but also how they generated those leads will be enormous to showing a clear return on specific investments. These numbers will help you to determine where time and money have the most impact.
But ultimately, it’s important to know how qualified these leads actually are.
3. Sales
Without the data to show which leads closed and when, you can’t attach a value to the leads that you worked so hard to generate. It’s important to use a CRM that tracks leads from source to close.
That way, you can know how qualified your leads are and which marketing efforts generated the most revenue at the end of the day.
Don’t cast off without a destination
As Peter Drucker said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
This especially rings true of your company’s marketing. It is crucial to success that you set goals and measure your results along the way. Otherwise, you may just find yourself up a chocolate river without a popsicle stick.