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Marketing Performance Measurement Metrics, Examples and Methods

Marketing Performance Measurement Metrics, Examples and Methods

The 4 Step Successful Marketing Checklist

In order to remain successful in your marketing, you need to be able to adequately measure your ongoing performance and strategies. 1 out of every 5 marketers do not measure their marketing results at all while 87% of senior marketers who do not feel confident in their ability to make an impact in sale forecasting the results of their decisions.

Looking to the leaders in the industry of lead generation, 45% of these individuals measure just a single attribute of their campaign. This is followed by 21% of individuals that measure a single attribute across multiple programs and people. The rest of these marketers employ no tracking at all or use test and control groups to gain results. The need to monitor your marketing efforts is required so you can more intelligently analyze your success. By following this simple four step checklist, you will be able to immediately discover any achievements or failures within your current process.

1. Measuring Your Efforts

This initial step with measuring your marketing success starts with total accountability. 44% of marketers know what a 10% increase in their budget could offer their company. To gauge your own level of insight, ask yourself these five questions.

1. What are your specific objectives for investing in marketing and how will you determine the revenue and profits gained by such efforts?
2. What impact would a 10% change in budget do for you and how will it impact your profits and margins in the preceding years?
3. Looking at relevant benchmarks through historical, competitive, or marketplace related, how effective are you at converting any investments into actual revenue and profit growth?
4. What appropriate targets for improving revenue will be leveraged and what initiatives will help you to get there?
5. What questions do you still need to answer with regards to your knowledge and return on marketing investments?

2. Five Stages of Marketing Accountability

There are five stages marketers go through when looking at holding themselves accountable for their efforts. This will help you to understand the common problems and thoughts marketers face.

1. Denial
In this first stage, the marketer may deny the need for being held accountable for their results, making them isolated and disconnected from other departments.

2. Fear
When looking at the end result, poor and stellar performance can be revealed. This creates fear with the marketer with discovering the true bottom line to their efforts.

3. Confusion
The marketer may begin to accept the importance of measuring results, but is confused as to implementing such metrics and lacks a holistic understanding of how it impacts bottom line results.

4. Self-Promotion
To appear accountable, the marketing puts together easily measured metrics such as website page views, press release downloads, and search engine rankings. However, these still lack a direct connection to the bottom line profits and revenues.

5. Accountability
This is the last stage where the marketer is able to realize the connection between marketing to the revenue pipeline. They start to compile information and show their direct impact to company executives while achieving the respect of the entire organization.

3. Metrics Gone Wrong

Occasionally metrics may go wrong. This is due to the difficulty with determining which metrics are the most meaningful. With so many numbers being measured, it is easy to spend time measuring items of less importance. Here are some ways to save you time and minimize metrics going wrong.

Metrics that Create Vanity
These are considered metrics that make you feel good and sound impressive but actually lack any form of solid contribution to the company. Examples of vanity metrics are Facebook likes, retweets, and press release impressions.

Taking the Easy Way Out
Being able to directly measure the impact of revenue or profit can be a daunting task. Some marketers prefer to focus on tasks that are easier to quantify. This is okay for some, but you should never ignore tasks such as revenue metrics.

Focusing on Quantity, Not Quality
Less than half of all marketers focus on measuring lead quality and instead look at lead quantity. Ignoring the quality of the leads does not help you to determine the current effectiveness of your programs that may seem effective on the surface, but do not deliver profits.

Looking at Action, Not Results
The results of your marketing efforts reflect the costs incurred making this investment easy to measure. However, determining the actual results gain requires more in depth analysis into your sales and revenue versus current efforts made. This will help to preview the perception of wasting money on marketing costs that do not grow your business.

Thinking Efficiency, Not Effectiveness
A difference exists between effectiveness metrics and efficiency metrics. This looks at doing the right things compared to doing the wrong things well. An example of this is filling the seats up for an event, but all the wrong people attend for the show.

4. The Right Metrics

Knowing which metrics are the right ones to use will help you from using the bad metrics. These meaningful metrics can be divided into the three below categories.

Revenue Metrics
These metrics are primarily based on determining the aggregate impact on company revenue. To help determine business performance, look at lead generation versus your target and cycle time. You can diagnose investments, pipeline contribution, and the program return of investment. Leading indicators for this is your average selling price.

Marketing Program Performance Metrics
The metrics look at the incremental contribution of individual marketing programs you have in place. Performance is determined by the conversion rate versus a trend or benchmark. You can diagnose success based on response rates and control group with a leading indicator being the investment made to acquire a customer and marginal costs to service them.

Profit Per Customer
These metrics are based on the lifetime value of an incremental customer. Performance is measured by the size of the prospect database and marketing contribution that is forecasted. Diagnose the potential based on the expected contribution with leading indicators based off of retention rates, products per customer, and net promoter scores.

When following this checklist to develop your marketing measurement plan, keep in mind that it acts as a base guideline. You should choose no more than five metrics to measure at a time as any additional tasks can cloud your focus and lessen results. Success is the primary goal here and each metric over time should be fine tuned to improve your results.

About The Author
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