When you’re growing a brand, a customer base and a business, marketing will likely be one of your biggest spend items. You want to understand your buyer’s high-priority needs, then tie your product’s unique features to solve their most important problems. When you do that, you’re able to demonstrate to the buyer why they should buy from you. It’s a very clear intersection of what the buyer’s needs are and what your product or service can do. That’s where marketing lives.
It is an important spend area — and it will drive revenue — so you’ll want to measure it continually to determine whether you’re spending wisely and whether the efforts are generating new business.
Think about marketing as a funnel, which leads from the top end of a big, wide opening, all the way down to the narrow bottom. At every stage, as the funnel gets narrower, the marketing team is moving leads into a final sale of some sort. It could move on to a sales team if you are a B2B business, or it may just go straight to a sale if you’re more of a B2C business.
Most importantly, you want to measure is the rate of conversion — from one stage at the top of the funnel, through to each stage below it — from start to end.
You’ll also want to measure how many new leads are coming in at the start of your funnel, because if that number is falling, then at the very least, your end sales are only going to be a fraction of that number. Then, when you’re looking at conversion, you’ll want to compare it to the cost to convert through the various funnel stages. This lets you look not only at the success of the marketing function in bringing in quality leads and converting them, but also how efficiently marketing dollars are being used to do that.
Keep in mind, when it comes to marketing, there are various channels that are used — you might have marketing dinners, trade shows, webinars, paid social media. When you think about the conversion into a closed sale and the effectiveness of resources, do that by channel, so you can also decide which channels are being more effective. For example, look at your social media for how much you’re spending vs. how many impressions you’re getting.
Look, also, at longer term metrics around the customer, which should also be considered marketing-related metrics. Examples of this are customer lifetime value (CLV), which measures the worth of your customers over their entire relationship with you, and retention rate. These numbers help measure the health of both your marketing department and your overall business.
All the metrics I’ve mentioned here are focused on the marketing function, itself. You’ll want to supplement these with measurements on any specific channels you’re spending on.
If you need help with any of these marketing metrics, or you need to know about additional ones you might want to consider, call me. I’m happy to help.