Tracking your key marketing metrics is essential to running an accountable, effective marketing program. If you’re not measuring your performance, how can you know you’re on the right track? But then, extending from this, you also need to know what the right metrics are, in alignment with your broader business goals.
Are you keeping tabs on the right stats? What are the right data points to measure for your business? These days, there’s a heap of performance that measures you can keep tabs on, but in this post, I want to outline some of the most important metrics you should be tracking – and how they’ll help you improve your overall performance.
1. Leads
Generating leads is one of the hardest and most important marketing tasks. Most of what marketing does is aimed at finding or producing leads – people that are potentially interested in your product and can be converted into paying customers.
Tracking leads is the first thing you should be doing. It’s vital to both track the total number of leads generated per month and leads generated by each marketing channel (social media marketing, social advertising, search advertising, content marketing, email marketing, etc).
2. Qualified leads
Measuring your ‘qualified leads’ is your next key step.
Qualified leads are leads that you’ve seen some level of engagement from – they’re no longer ‘potentially’ interested in your product, they’ve actually replied to your outreach, or engaged in any other way, and can now be transferred to your sales team.
3. Return on marketing investment (ROMI)
As is clear from its name, ROMI doesn’t differ a lot from the more well-known ‘return on investment’ (ROI) metric. But it focuses more specifically on marketing investment – the ROMI metric measures how much revenue a marketing campaign is generating compared to the cost of running that campaign.
ROMI is calculated using this formula:
ROMI = (income from marketing – cost of goods – marketing expenditures) / marketing expenditures) * 100.
4. Referrals
Businesses often neglect tracking referrals, but it’s an important consideration, especially in digital marketing.
There are a number of ways that you can track referrals. For brick and mortar stores, manual referral processes, using referral cards and coupons, for example, might be the easiest options. However, the most popular referral programs are usually run and tracked online.
5. Brand awareness
Brand awareness is, essentially, the extent to which consumers are familiar with a particular brand. It might be one of the most vague metrics on this list, as it’s hard to assess how many people have heard about the brand. But it can also be valuable, particularly when matched against competitor brands.
To assess brand awareness, marketers can first track the number of mentions their brand generates online, including in social media posts, blogs, etc. This can be tracked through various social media monitoring tools, including Mention, Hootsuire, BuzzSumo, Awario, etc.
6. Testimonials and reviews
Testimonials and reviews are also known as ‘word-of-mouth marketing’. Every business should encourage reviews and testimonials – they can make or break your sales when a potential customer searches for your brand online. And, of course, these are also worth measuring.
7. Cost of customer acquisition (CAC)
Cost of customer acquisition looks at how much it costs, on average, to convert a lead into a customer. It’s another metric, in addition to ROMI, that can help you avoid wasting money on marketing campaigns which simply don’t deliver.
8. Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value shows how much revenue each customer brings to your business, not just with every purchase, but throughout your whole relationship. CLV shows how many customers you need to break even, and to make profit.