Measuring marketing effectiveness and performance are the keys to your brand’s success. As tempting as it might be to chalk up the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns to pure luck — bookended by witty headlines, captivating CTAs, strong visuals and magnetic content — you don’t want to do that.
Why?
Well, to start, measuring marketing performance tells you a good deal about the health of your brand — not measuring does the opposite.
Second, it puts unnecessary pressure on you and your team to magically market instead of nurturing a consistent, memorable brand experience.
And third, it also makes it incredibly difficult to internally self-market and get sales reps, channel partners and others to use the content you create.
Marketing is only as effective as the measurements you take and make. And the longer you hold off on measuring marketing effectiveness, the longer it will take you to get beyond the “Huh, Well That’s a Good Idea” phase and step into the “Well-Oiled Marketing Machine” segment of your brand potential.
So, if you’ve been using the “I-Don’t-Know-What-Exactly-I-Should-Measure-So-I’m-Just-Not-Going-To-Do-It” excuse, well, then this blog post is for you. Also, for what it’s worth, it’s totally okay if you didn’t know what exactly was worth measuring, because, one simply can not know everything.
Marketing effectiveness: Metrics you want to track
Measuring marketing performance is quite straightforward. To help you get the ball rolling, we’ve compiled a list of metrics you want to track and keep in mind as you concoct strategies, create content and more.
Marketing contribution to revenue — Can you tie your marketing team’s efforts to company revenue? To measure this, create and track key performance indicators, also known as KPIs. KPIs are a great way to manage your team, priorities and new projects. And more importantly, they provide insight into your team’s contributions.
Marketing contribution to pipeline — Can you tie your marketing team’s efforts to current leads or pipeline activity? Or are your leads trapped in Marketing Strategy Pipeline Purgatory, unable to move down the funnel? Be sure to track and evaluate funnel effectiveness, as well as lead growth and acceleration, as a means of identifying marketing health.
Customer lifetime value (CLV) — Do you know your customer lifetime value (also known as CLV)? As in, do you know how much net profit you can expect to gain from your customers? Your customer lifetime value provides solid insight into whether or not your marketing strategies are effective — and furthermore, it’s directly connected to your current customer experience. You can’t have a positive CLV without good customer experiences.
Unfamiliar with the term? Customer lifetime value is the net profit your company earns from a customer. To calculate CLV, take the average, annual profit contribution per customer and multiply it by the average years customers buy from you. Then, from this number, subtract your customer acquisition costs. And there you have your CLV.
If you’re not sure how to calculate your customer acquisition costs (CAC), don’t stress. Start reading the next section… ready, set — now!
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) — Do you know how much your customers cost you? Meaning, do you know how much it takes to get customers to purchase a product or service? Compiling the calculations is pretty simple. Take the total marketing spend on customer acquisition (also known as MCC) and divide it by total customers acquired (CA). The result is your customer acquisition cost.
ROI of creative services — Realistically speaking, do you know your current ROI of creative services? We’re talking about an ROI specifically on the content you and your team produce for sales reps, channel partners and so forth. Connecting the ROI of client creative services helps improve other ROI metrics and also strengthens marketing contribution to the pipeline (e.g., close rates, pipeline acceleration and so forth).
If you’re not sure, ask yourself and your team:
- How many folks (i.e., sales reps, channel partners, etc.,) use your internal design or creative services team?
- How much of your content is actually used by these people?
If your gut tells you that your ROI is pretty small, you’re not alone. Most organizations face similar challenges. For example:
- Most teams struggle with content adoption — 80% of companies feel like cross-functional team collaboration is ad hoc or non-existent.
- Creative time and energy is going to waste — 65% of content goes completely unused by sales reps.
To avoid the two statistics mentioned above, we suggest measuring marketing effectiveness through traditional brand equity measurements. Additionally, your organization could stand to benefit from periodic internal surveys or a brand templating tool.
Market share — How much of your market do you control? The numerical result of this is what you’d call “market share.” To calculate your market share, take the total amount of your company revenue during a specific time period, and then divide that by the industry revenue from the same time period.
Evaluating your current market share empowers you to see how you stack up against competitors and helps you leverage your unique selling points in emerging or even current markets. From there, your market share insights can be used throughout content creation and can be customized per target audience vertical.
Metrics that influence your market share are as follows:
- Brand awareness — Your brand is how people recognize you. To that end, are you telling a consistent brand story across all platforms? Keep in mind, in order to be recognizable, you need to be consistent across every touchpoint and on every piece of content that’s created. Rogue content or off-brand collateral hurts your image, reputation and conversion rate.
- Market appeal — You don’t have to be the most innovative in order to maintain market appeal. You do, however, need to be prepared to shift gears or update your appeal when needed. As fetch as it is to be unconventional and alternative, it’s worth staying in-step with the rest of your industry to prevent your brand from being perceived as outdated and irrelevant.
- Customer engagement and retention — Whether or not you show up and engage with your customers says a lot about your business. So, yes, your customers want you to engage with them. But, no, they may or may not want you to hit them over the head with a bazillion emails a day.
- Delightful content — This is a chicken and/or the egg scenario: you can’t really have one without the other. For the chicken — does your content delight your customers? Do they interact with it and enjoy it? It’s a yes or no question, really. And the egg — do you have enough resources in place to scale content creation? Furthermore, are you empowering your reps and channel partners to create personalized content?
Measuring marketing effectiveness for the long-term
It’s worth noting that while you can track these metrics all day, you need to maintain a holistic perspective on your marketing strategy. Should your numbers or measurements be low, take the time to evaluate your content and customer experience. Consistency between touchpoints and brand storytelling is a critical component in evaluating your brand health and marketing effectiveness. For many companies, achieving consistency is a struggle. If you find your organization is having difficulty iterating a consistent content story or is falling victim to rogue content, we’d recommend reading our ebook (The extra 1%: Delivering a memorable content experience) to learn more about scaling production relative to your customers’ expectations.
