5 Data-Driven Metrics for Measurable Marketing

Nail your KPIs and mine them for valuable insight into your marketing strategy

Data has become a backbone to marketing strategies over the last few years. Brands, agencies and technology companies have uncovered priceless gems of insight about their customers, competitors and overall marketplace by reviewing first- and third-party data.

Marketers share two common interests: to execute the most effective marketing strategy and reach their intended audience efficiently. The ultimate measure of ensuring marketing effectiveness is to first establish marketing objectives and then review post campaign activities to determine return on investment.

Here are five metrics to watch and some sample key performance indicators (KPIs) to use when measuring your marketing campaigns. This process helps us understand the questions we should ask ourselves in order to get to the right KPIs, as well as how those KPIs provide invaluable insight to your marketing strategy.

1. Customer

Do we offer a seamless customer journey? Customers are the lifeline of business—it is pertinent throughout each sales transaction to ensure customer satisfaction. Measuring Net Promoter Score gives companies direct feedback on the customer experience.

Additionally, it will help companies determine what they need to focus on to course correct any customer journey issues. Separately, businesses can find out the likelihood of a current customer’s ability to recommend your brand.

2. Sales

A sales goal must be determined when establishing the marketing objectives of a campaign. One KPI that helps measure sales goals is goal completion. With goal completion, companies can track their sales cycle and determine which activities in that cycle aligned with bottom line sales goals. Companies should keep a pulse on where their sales are in an effort to determine whether they should tweak marketing campaigns to help with any pushes to meet sales goals.

3. Marketing Efficiency

Are you spending your dollars on marketing channels that yield the highest level of awareness from your target audience? As a marketing analyst, a core problem that I solve for brands is to ensure their marketing dollars work for them. Referral traffic tells the marketer—through data—how a visitor landed on their website and helps them identify where more dollars should be invested to increase traffic on the site.

For example, say your company is running display ads and social media ads. You notice more people are locating your company through Facebook, but you see a higher share of purchasing customers coming through display ads. The insight here is to reduce spending in other social media channels that aren’t working for you and focus on investing a heavier share of your dollars in the media channels (in this example Facebook and display) that give your company a higher return on the marketing investment.

4. Market Share

What is your business position in the marketplace? How is your company fairing against competitors? The ideal takeaway from this metric is to understand your share of voice in your specific industry in terms of brand awareness. Alexa defines share of voice as “a gauge of how visible the brand is in a specific medium among a specific audience.” The narrative your brand is looking to determine with this KPI is how often consumers within your targeted demographic are mentioning your brand. This metric shows your brand is achieving higher brand awareness.

An additional way to look at market share is the size of revenue your company receives within the context of the overall industry. The goal would be to see your company gain more of a lead compared to your brand competitors.

5. Brand Health

How do customers feel about your products and services? Brand health is essentially a temperature check on the reputation of your brand, product and customer service in the marketplace. Social listening is one of the top KPIs that gives valuable insight into brand health.

Trackmaven’s definition of social listening “is the process of monitoring digital conversations to understand what customers are saying about a brand and industry online.” Social media contains valuable consumer data such as critiques on products, info on consumer brand choices and even complaints. That said, social media serves as a repository of customer needs for brands to take back and implement applicable solutions.

Remember: When executing a marketing strategy, first establish marketing objectives and determine what the company looks to gain from a marketing campaign, so as to ensure the marketing strategy is concentrated and investment dollars are spent wisely. Finally, create a measurement plan to help track how marketing goals are met over time.