Knowing your marketing metrics and numbers, is so important when it comes to being able to unlock growth, brand value and innovative approaches to how to drive your business forward.
We work extensively with brands on helping their marketing teams to identify where they currently are, where they need to be, and how much they should be measuring.
Here’s some of the critical metrics you need to be aware of, from our founder, Victoria.
1. Measure what you need to, to drive your success (and not just because you can)
The window for measurement is arguably closing thanks to changes from device manufacturers making all that lovely Google Analytics data increasingly harder to measure, and auto-blocking cookies.
Spelling panic for the Programmatic marketers, but for the majority of us, is just an adjustment that needs to be taken into account.
People forget the world BEFORE (and those of us old enough to remember just about do)
Let’s be honest setting tracking up on every button of your website feeds a need to have more and more data, but how much decisive action have you taken off the back of the number of clicks your ‘Share to Linkedin’ button has?
Consider what metrics are critical to defining your business success, and track those, don’t get waylaid on vanity metrics that take up time and focus away from the business.
2. Is your target audience inclusive enough to see the growth you want?
I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had with startup founders who are committed to a huge amount of growth, but actually when asked about who their target audience is it’s “Yoga loving vegan women aged 25-27 with a high income, live in central London and own a dog” - try that massive growth with a - max - audience size of three figures.
Are you also including unconscious bias to limit your audience in some way? It happens more than you think you might be applying it.
3. Or is it too big for your tiny budget
“Anyone could be our customer’
That may be the case, but chances are, with that six-figure fund raise you haven’t planned to plough it into a single campaign (as you’ve got salaries to pay and tech to build), so let’s focus a little bit.
Remember the difference between ANDs and ORs in audience targeting with the usual suspect ad platforms.
Planning a campaign that’s SO mass media to anyone and everyone means you end up getting lost.
4. Numbers of followers on social are the number one distraction technique for marketing and leadership teams everywhere
So you have 100,000 followers on social.
Amazing!
Are they in your market though? And how engaged are they really?
For example, a Fitness studio has 100,000 followers on Instagram, but for each of their instagram lives, they generally max out at 1,000 people, live and engaged on the platform. That’s 1% of potential customers that actively join in with a live class, which is fundamental to the brand’s survival and creates a case for monetising classes digitally.
You make business cases based on the 1,000 people who may not be able to make it to your physical location but have grown to love the brand and are basically saying ‘take my money’! To those may take part in a live class in real life but mix it up with a digital subscription. Not to the 99,000 others that make up the nice neat number when people visit your page.
5. Downloads don’t come for free (generally)
Do you know your CPI (cost per install) and CPA (cost per acquisition)?
So you’re building an app.
And you think, like every entrepreneur, it’s going to be the next HUGE thing.
Awesome! That’s great.
But being a big thing takes time and generally, money, or like some of the biggest ones out there, something rarified enough to capture the public mood at the right time (and even some of those - like Uber - have massive marketing costs and remain not profitable).
Setting realistic targets around achievable conversions from Impressions > Downloads > Active users, all against a marketing budget, and then overlaid against CLTV targets will help you to build a picture of how you can grow, sustainably, profitably, and repeatedly.
6. Discounting is more dangerous than spending your marketing budget on a channel that doesn’t perform.
Hooking your customers on discounts gives you short term gains, but serves to feed a customer base with low engagement, short term lifespans and ultimately, is likely to make your efforts unprofitable.
Discounting is the low key margin killer that often isn’t borne out until a few months down the road, when you’re left looking at your sales figures, healthy customer numbers but your bottom line can’t get out of the red.
Understanding what a ‘safe’ level of discount is per customer can be a really powerful tool to use when you need to drive some sales, but heading into a spiral can be very difficult to recover from.
7. Get stuck into understanding what your customers are doing
‘We think’ and ‘We believe’ aren’t good enough these days for your customer insights. Look at your data. Your customers vote with their feet and their credit cards.
Resist the urge to survey them at every moment (the ‘how was your purchase email’ 4 weeks after you bought some doorknobs is more likely to stop them coming back than to elicit any sort of response other than ‘fine’).
Contextualise the purchase in their lives. Do they need emails from you every day if you sell furniture for over £1000? Do they need to write a review for a tester pot of paint?
Build out and collate your churn signals early, and those that go on to become your VIP customers. What hurdles do they have to cross to become one or the other?
Your first party data is so important for your metrics of success - don’t get caught up on what ‘industry standard’ vs your data is saying, if it’s moving in the right direction for you, keep going. If it isn’t, reset, test, rethink, and go!
8. And last on this list, but by no means least, your brand metrics
Brand trackers if your brand is mature enough and broad enough are of course fabulous - I personally love what the team at Proquo AI do, and no they didn’t incentivise me to say that! Especially for challenger brands in established markets.
What if you’re building a brand new market? Well then things become a little muddier. Understanding however the build of brand searches, your ‘direct’ traffic if you choose to track that and general build of your brand reach, is always good, these too if you can’t quite spring for rolling brand tracking just yet.
Even better? When you start receiving sales calls from people offering to help with your marketing/sales/SEO. That’s a sign you’re starting to make a name for yourself…!
If you want to discuss your numbers, or how we can help you get a handle on what your marketing team should be tracking, get in touch.
