Marketing & Business Metrics
As many companies reevaluate how to keep their business afloat amidst a global pandemic, marketing, and advertising departments are once again being asked to do more with less. For some, digital marketing in a pre-pandemic, cluttered ad world, was already quite overwhelming. It’s harder than ever to cut through the noise and get your product, service, or my expertise, a destination, in front of the eyes of the consumer in the most relevant way. Today’s marketing machine requires carefully thought out strategies, like never before.
In the days before digital marketing, companies would spend a significant amount of money on marketing campaigns, including television, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, etc., all trying to get their message and brand out in front of the consumer. Determining what worked, was guesswork.
With today’s marketing measurement tools, teams have real-time data that can show how effectively, or not, a marketing strategy is performing. This digital-first capability makes it possible for each campaign executed, email deployed, social post shared, story pitched, etc. to come back with a mountain of data at your fingertips. Knowing what to measure and what the different marketing metrics are revealing, allows you to direct closer attention to the aspects of your business that need it.
Engagement Vanity Metrics Make you Feel Good
Be it content, social media, paid campaigns or inbound campaigns, the most used metrics to measure digital media marketing tactics are engagement metrics, also known as vanity metrics. With the pressing demand to produce results, these metrics are easily shared and usually in favorable numbers. And while these metrics make you feel good about your tactics, I hate to break it to you, they don’t necessarily grow your business and, there is a right and wrong way to use them. Simply said, video likes, website traffic, delivery rates, or open rates on an email do not necessarily translate to sales and revenue. Vanity metrics are easily obtained, and all platforms provide data on impressions, likes, shares, comments, followers, email opens, etc. But, when it’s time to justify how they improve your business or report the return on investment and marketing dollars, it becomes difficult because vanity metrics don’t measure the performance of a marketing campaign or business goals as a whole. Don’t get me wrong, vanity metrics still have value in measuring non-transactional marketing goals and allowing for optimizations in ongoing campaigns, and, depending on what channel you’re analyzing, the value those metrics bring to your business will be different. These are not metrics to measure business performance. They are KPI’s, a key performance indicator, within a step, within a consumer journey, but not the end-all. Think of it as a first glance before digging deeper into even more metrics that matter.
Business Metrics Show Increases In Revenue
Marketing effectiveness can be gauged by how well it increases revenue while keeping the cost of customer acquisition low, or decreasing that acquisition cost over time while increasing the customer lifetime value. How to precisely evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns does get more complex as the need to answer questions such as measuring return on investment (ROI) or return on ad spend (ROAS) comes into play. Overall, marketing will achieve different goals for any business. It can impact revenue with results of an immediate campaign in the short term, but, over time, grow brand equity and customer relationships long term. What that means for your marketing strategies and tactics is that you need to ensure effectiveness is tied back to both short term and long term goals for your overall business. You also need to know the difference between a better metric for your business goals vs analyzing your engagement vanity metrics and turning those into more actionable insights.
Are you tracking the right metrics for your business?
Until Next Time ~ Ayri
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