In marketing, one of the most important decisions that all companies must make is which marketing measures they will track in order to demonstrate marketing return on investment (ROI). There are dozens of different measures that could potentially drive success, from conversion rates to click through rates to social media engagement. Not articlulating what are the key marketing ROI measure that your company will track will cause difficulties in managing overall marketing spend, yet it is impractical to review everything that is measured.
At first, it may seem like the answer is to measure everything, but marketing experts like Seth Godin have long cautioned that the easiest metrics to move are not always the right metrics to measure. You need to consider efficiency versus effectiveness; it may be easiest to measure, for example, how many visits your website gets, but if increasing the number of visits isn’t increase the number of sales, then measuring it won’t benefit the company’s overall mission.
So choosing the right metrics to measure is a crucial piece of making sure that marketing is driving a business forward. Since we know that the bottom line is what drives successful busines, it is important that we measure and report on metrics that affect profit. Marketing metrics that matter are ones that provide information to help business owners and sales teams understand how marketing is driving business, building the brand, and impacting the bottom line.
To truly understand the value of marketing for business, the metrics that are used, need to demonstrate how marketing affects the bottom line, how it is moving the needle to bring in leads, and therefore, more sales, to the company. Filtering your metrics and what is reported on is crucial. It is important to review metrics that deliver information that is most important for business growth.
Determining the overall value of markeitng to a compan, by gaining a better understanding of what the ROI is on marketing investments, will help provide a clear picture and enable smart, informed business decisions for on-going marketing spend.
Identifying which marketing metrics most clearly articulates return on investment is crucial to enabling informed decisions when reviewing the impact of marketing activities. Understanding how and what to measure in order to produce metrics that indicate bottom-line impact is incredibly valuable in the running of a healthy business.
When it comes to marketing metrics that matter, companies should be reporting on data that deals with the total cost of marketing, salaries, overheads, revenue and customer acquisition costs. Over the next few weeks, this blog series will walk you through the six critical marketing metrics that really matter to your business bottom line.