Marketing Metrics and Analytics

Marketing metrics and analytics play a crucial role in the success of any marketing campaign. By measuring and evaluating key performance indicators, businesses can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of their marketing strategies, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions.

This article will delve into the various marketing metrics and analysis techniques that can be used to evaluate the performance of a marketing campaign, including web analytics, social media metrics, and customer engagement metrics.

Additionally, the report will explore the importance of selecting the right metrics for your business and how to effectively analyse and interpret the data. The report will also cover best practices for implementing a robust marketing metrics and analysis program. With this information, businesses can better understand the impact of their marketing efforts and make informed decisions to drive growth and success.

The main benefits of marketing metrics and analysis include

1. Improved decision-making: Marketing metrics and analysis provide valuable data that can be used to make data-driven decisions about your marketing strategy. This can help to optimise your efforts, increase efficiency, and ultimately drive better results.
2. Increased ROI: By regularly monitoring and analysing key performance indicators, businesses can identify areas where they are over- or under-performing and make adjustments accordingly. This can help to improve the return on investment of your marketing efforts.
3. Increased efficiency: By using marketing metrics and analysis, businesses can track which tactics are working and which are not. This allows them to focus their efforts on the tactics that are most effective, resulting in more efficient use of resources.
4. Identification of opportunities: Marketing metrics and analysis can reveal new opportunities for growth, such as new customer segments or untapped markets.
5. Better customer understanding: By analysing customer engagement metrics, businesses can gain a better understanding of their target audience, which can help to inform future marketing efforts and improve customer satisfaction.
6. Improved communication: Marketing metrics and analysis can provide clear, measurable data that can be used to communicate the impact of marketing efforts to stakeholders and justify budget allocation.
7. Continuous improvement: Regular tracking and analysis of marketing metrics allows businesses to continuously improve their marketing efforts over time.

Questions to Guide Your Marketing Metrics and Analytics

1. What are your specific objectives for marketing investment and how will you connect your investments to incremental revenue and profit? Note: we are seeing marketing as an investment are you viewing marketing as a pure cost (and inconvenience)
2. What impact would a 10% change in your marketing budget (up or down) have on your profits and margins over the next year? The next three years? Five years? Some recent thinking is that unless we are strategically thinking ten years ahead we are simply reacting to known factors
3. Compared to relevant benchmarks (historical, competitive, marketplace), how effective are you at converting marketing investment into revenue and profit growth? Such a great question as many businesses have no idea how effective their marketing is, especially as they get sold on the latest emperors new clothes marketing silver bullet
4. Which are appropriate targets for improving revenue leverage (defined as £ Pounds of profit over £ Pounds of marketing and sales spend) over the next few years? Which initiatives will get you there?
5. What questions do you still need to answer with regard to your knowledge of the return on marketing investments? What are you going to do to answer them?

Marketing Metrics and Analytics

Do you know what profits a 10% increase in your marketing budget would generate?

According to the Lenskold Group’s Marketing ROI Study, the most common answer to this question is “I Don’t Know.” Forty-four percent (44%) of qualified marketers have no idea what a 10% budget increase could do for their companies.

Now unfortunately many SME businesses don’t have a specialist / dedicated marketing person let alone a professional qualified marketing person. Someone of equivalent standing who can sit alongside Finance, Operations, Production even Sales

If you fit into this 44%, you will experience difficulty protecting your budget. In fact, you’ll likely find yourself asking the question the other way around: “What will happen now that my budget has been decreased by 10%?” A situation that is far more likely in this post pandemic environment.

You can’t expect your organization to place value on something you’re unable to quantify. This article will help you do just that and we cover some key questions like:

• What are the most important marketing metrics for you to use?
• How can I measure my various marketing activities’ impact on revenue and profit?
• How can I best communicate marketing results within the business – whether that means the MD, the management team or the board?
• Which personnel, procedural, and cultural changes need to occur within the organisation so I can implement marketing measurement?

Marketing Metrics and Measurement Demonstrates Accountability & Builds Respect

Seventy-six percent (76%) of B2B marketing professionals agree or strongly agree that their “ability to track marketing ROI gives marketing more respect.” Source: Forrester Research

Marketing suffers from a crisis of credibility. Typically, people outside the marketing department perceive that marketing exists solely to support sales. Even worse when it is seen as an arts and crafts function that churns out coloured brochures and leaflets or spends time chasing likes and retweets on social media platforms. Perhaps the worst case scenario is when marketing isn’t even allowed to talk to customers!! That’s another subject though as many businesses aren’t that keen in talking to customers.

Either way, while marketing is seen as “glorified crayoning” it will not be able to command the respect it deserves.

What can marketers do so they are seen as part of a machine that drives revenue and profits? How can marketers take more control over the revenue process, build the respect of their organizational peers, and earn a seat at the revenue table?

Use metrics that matter to the MD, CEO and board.

It’s no secret that typically MD’s & CEOs don’t care about the open rate of your last email campaign or your last press release’s number of views.

In today’s uber difficult and competitive economy, MD’s and CEOs care about growing revenue and profits:

• How much faster are we growing now versus last quarter? Last year?
• How much profit was made last quarter versus this quarter?
• How much revenue and profit do you forecast for the next quarter?
• Why are you confident in the above answers?

Soft metrics like organic search rankings, website traffic, brand awareness, GRP, impressions, contact form completions and reach are important – but only to the extent that they quantifiably connect to hard metrics like pipeline, revenue, and profit. Now we know many companies who employ marketing people who deliberately don’t even measure these soft rankings. WHY – because many agencies don’t want you to be able to track their effectiveness!

Of course, marketers must track and measure the impact of all key marketing activities, both hard and soft. But keep all but the most critical metrics internal to marketing. By speaking the same quantitative language as the MD’s FD’s and CEOs marketing will better communicate marketing’s value and impact to the business.

Know the results and impact of each marketing investment

If you can’t confidently identify which parts of your marketing truly deliver financial returns, marketing’s impact and influence will continue to be limited across your company.

We have got to be realistic with monitoring and analysing. That sale that “suddenly” appears could well be down to years of emails, exhibitions, articles etc. For many B2B businesses the gestation period from initial “thought” to actual “purchase” can take many years. Therefore whilst activities may not show immediate return, knowing the customer journey can showcase knowledge of real marketing performance.

Recognising the above not knowing marketing’s performance will not only reduce marketing’s influence and credibility; it can also prevent your business from making the right strategic investments to improve results over time.

Forecast results, not spending

Forecasting is perhaps the single most important thing marketers can do to change the perception that marketing is a cost centre.

In the same way that you can’t drive quickly if you rely only on your rear-view mirror, you can’t be an effective marketer if you only report what has happened in the past.

The best marketers forecast the results they expect in the future – and quantify their forecasts in terms of enquiries leads, pipeline, and revenue.

Now there are some critical elements that I must add to this

• Forecasting results is not the same as guaranteeing results. This might seem obvious but I have met a number of MD’s and CEO’s whose gambit is “this <marketing> is expensive what returns will you guarantee?”
• Now this starts to get tricky when you generate an enquiry but at the point of making the sale the customer experiences
  • that the cost of the product / service is significantly higher than competitors with no additional benefits or value
  • that the product or service isn’t available in the timeframe that’s needed
  • Poor communication as part of the sales process i.e. the design team are so busy its taking us 8 to 10 weeks to get a proposal out
  • that your actual product or service isn’t very good when I start to look at in detail before committing to actual spend

When you talk about marketing spending, other Directors and Managers think of costs and profit loss. When you talk about future “possible” results, they think of revenue and growth.

To formulate accurate forecasts, Sales, Marketing and production must sit together at the revenue table.

Make justifiable business cases for marketing spending

With its forecast in place, marketing must then make a hard business case for the resources it needs to deliver the results it has promised.

This requires knowing what it will take – in Money, Time, and Effort – to acquire new qualified leads and nurture those leads until they are ready to talk with sales.

By using this type of rigorous methodology “marketing” are able to frame their budgets in terms of investments, not costs, and are better able to justify and defend their budgets.