How to Choose What Marketing KPIs Are Most Important To Your Business
Whether you're a sole proprietor starting out on your first business venture, or an established company with a large footprint in multiple states, determining and tracking your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is an important and necessary strategy for marketing in the modern business world. Simple calculations of profit and cashflow versus your marketing budget only paint a partial picture of the health of your marketing plan, so how can you determine what KPIs are most important to you and how you should track them? Here's a few steps to help you:
1. Clearly define your business objectives: Start by clarifying your overall business goals. What do you want to achieve through your marketing efforts? This could be increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, boosting sales, or improving customer retention.
2. Identify your target audience: Understand your target market and the specific segments you want to reach. This will help you tailor your marketing efforts and choose relevant KPIs. Consider demographics, geography, and other factors.
3. Determine specific marketing goals: Based on your business objectives and target audience, define measurable marketing goals. For example, increase website traffic by 20% in six months or generate 100 new leads per month. Keep your goals realistic and relevant, always!
4. Align goals with marketing strategy or channel: Identify the marketing channels you'll use to reach your goals. This could include digital advertising, social media, content marketing, email marketing, SEO, or others. Different channels may have different KPIs, so align your goals accordingly.
5. Choose relevant KPIs to those strategies and channels: Once you have your goals and marketing channels defined, select the KPIs that will help you track progress towards your goals. Here are some common KPIs based on different marketing objectives:
- Brand Awareness: Reach, impressions, social media followers, brand mentions.
- Website Traffic: Total visits, unique visitors, page views, referral sources.
- Lead Generation: Conversion rate, cost per lead, lead quality, lead-to-customer conversion rate.
- Sales: Revenue, average order value, customer lifetime value, conversion rate.
- Customer Retention: Customer churn rate, customer satisfaction score, repeat purchase rate.
- Social Media Engagement: Likes, shares, comments, engagement rate.
6. Set benchmarks and targets: Determine benchmarks or industry standards for each KPI. Research your industry to get an idea of typical performance levels. Set realistic targets based on your business's current performance and resources. Aim to improve these benchmarks over time.
7. Implement tracking and analytics: Implement the necessary tools to track and measure your KPIs. This may involve using web analytics software like Google Analytics, CRM systems, social media analytics, or marketing reporting platforms like SilverBack Advertising's Gorilla Gauge. Make sure you have the tools needed to collect relevant data.
8. Monitor and analyze your KPIs: Continuously monitor your KPIs and analyze the data to assess your marketing performance. Regularly review your progress against the targets you've set. Use the insights gained to make data-driven decisions and adjust your marketing strategies as needed.
Remember, your marketing KPIs should be tailored to your specific business and objectives. Regularly reviewing and refining your KPIs is crucial as your business evolves and grows. With advanced programmatic advertising platforms like SilverBack Advertising's Data Fusion, your KPIs can even be programmed in as the most-relevant and highest-priority conversions to track.
Get your marketing plan started with help from the experts at SilverBack Advertising!