If your vision of marketing is rooted in zany types sitting around coming up with catchy jingles or sketching logos, you’re not all wrong. And if you watched too much Mad Men, you might believe these moments are all directly fueled with scotch and bourbon.
It’s not that these things aren’t happening; it’s just that it’s important to watch the numbers too. And by numbers, we are talking about your marketing metrics.
They are the less-cinematic, but just-as-important partners to the creative side of marketing. When Don Draper debuts his Lucky Strike campaign, you don’t see the metrics. They don’t discuss that some of those nameless desk occupants you see in the background are planning to track the return on investment on the Lucky Strike ad campaign.
Here are a few of the key reasons you want to dive into the numbers for your marketing campaign:
Marketing Metrics Help You Reach Your Goals: There’s clear value in having some metrics set up to determine whether you’re on the right path to reach your goals.
The key is making sure your metrics align well with your goals and are easily measurable. For instance, if increasing brand awareness is a goal, you’ll want to include metrics like brand mentions, impressions and engagement metrics that measure new follows, shares, tags and likes.
If you are wanting to drive business growth through a focus on your email marketing, you’ll want to include metrics such as open rates, bounce rates, click-through rates and new subscribers.
Matching the metrics to your goal is one of the more challenging aspects of marketing, and may be the perfect part of your strategy to outsource to a marketing agency.
Metrics Keep You Objective: Maybe you’re producing a little video campaign that you find endlessly funny and endearing. It came out of a particularly long and fun brainstorming session, memorable for its pizza and caffeine-infused ideas.
But it’s not driving any engagement, it’s not being shared and people seem to not find it as funny as you do.
These kinds of campaigns can be hard to let go. You have an emotional investment, and unless you see the numbers your gut is going to mislead you into continuing a campaign that’s not delivering any results.
Marketing metrics are perfect for these scenarios because it gives you a definitive way to measure whether something is working.
Metrics Keep Your Team Pulling Together Towards the Same Goals: Marketing metrics help your team define what each member is focused on, the timeline for the campaigns or other activities and prevent people from getting bogged down in pet projects. It will help unite your team and provide agreement about what’s important and should be prioritized.
It Takes the Pulse: You’ve heard the cliché that what gets measured gets done. You will want to have metrics that are more detailed, such as growing a specific product line or increasing the time spent on a particular web page. But you can also employ broader metrics that help ensure your business is on the right track overall:
- Cost Per Lead (CPL) is a broader metric that helps determine whether you are earning a solid return on investment for your marketing efforts.
- Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate offers insights into how you move a lead through the conversion process with helpful content or customer agents willing to answer questions.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) provides you with a picture of how you’re doing with areas like upselling and engaging existing customers on social media or through email marketing.
You’re Prepared to Make Better Decisions: Marketing metrics provide invaluable information that equips you for decision-making. Have you ever had to justify your marketing budget to a board of directors? Not your most comfortable moment, unless you had the benefit of solid marketing metrics to back up your investment.
Metrics are powerful tools for demonstrating how your team’s efforts are leading to growth. You also prove your management skills when you can illustrate how a metric caused you to redirect some of your budget when you realized a campaign wasn’t delivering results or when a particular insight caused you to spend more on email marketing.
Metrics Aren’t Extra. Don’t be fooled into thinking that marketing metrics are an add-on for big companies or only worth it when it’s time to ask for a budget bump. Without a way to measure your activities, you’re essentially just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. It’s not scientific and it’s not likely to build your reputation as a solid marketing team.
But if metrics aren’t your thing, no worries. They are, without a doubt, our thing. We take a strategic approach to every campaign we embark on, confident that metrics will allow for constant refining along the way. Yes, we were as surprised as any other marketer to find out that math chased us to the rainbow, fluffy-cloud world of marketing fun, but it turns out it lets us measure just exactly how much fun we’re having. And it’s a lot, apparently. So contact us today and let’s talk about some numbers.