When it comes to overseeing your marketing team it pays to understand which metrics are most valuable to your company’s bottom line.
Some metrics are plainly for ‘vanity’ - yes it’s nice to reach 1,000 followers on Instagram but what are they generating in terms of tangible web traffic, leads, or sales queries?
That’s why we are encouraging all marketing managers, senior management personnel and company owners to take some time challenging your team about the metrics that benefit all involved in your company.
Why does it matter? Knowing which metrics can translate into clear benefits is crucial, not only from a sales and bottom-line perspective, but having your marketers inputs can be hugely empowering as they review the value of their deliverables and where they can best utilise their time and efforts.
Below are some examples of metrics that can have a positive impact on best understanding the value of marketing efforts, and how they translate into tangible results. However, we recommend you take the time to sit your marketing team down and discuss which metrics are crucial to your own business goals and challenges - the most personalised this is then the better your data will be!
01. Social Media Traffic
If social media is one of your marketing tools - it’s often the one most in-house marketing departments spend the most time, effort, ad spend on - then you should be looking at the bigger picture of how it’s driving traffic to your website. Although followers and engagement metrics are ‘nice to haves’ they may not be creating a ‘full picture’ of whether the time your team is spending on social media activity is truly beneficial. Instead, focus on:
- % of traffic coming from social media (collectively and individual platforms)
- Number of lead conversions from each social channel
- Number of customer conversions generated from each social channel
02. Mobile Performance
Typically we are seeing a consistent rise in the amount of traffic viewing websites on mobile - tablet and mobile phone devices. Because of this, we need to check that our websites are fit for purpose, and marketing is ideally placed to confirm this using Google Analytics to check that your website is viewable on all major devices and that all contact forms, lead generation CTAs and forms, are all working efficiently, as well as checking readability and load times. Some key metrics to watch out for include:
- Number of lead conversions from mobile devices
- Bounce rates from mobile devices - High bounce rate? Review the pages that are performing worse and check for responsive and loading issues.
- Popular mobile device usage - Are more of your visitors on Samsung or Apple? Design to suit!
03. Cost Per Lead
Harder to assign a cost to but very important for working out just how much it costs to acquire a customer through your existing marketing efforts. Ultimately, this task will provide invaluable insight into the effectiveness - and expense - of your team’s current efforts, as well as your wider marketing strategy. When pricing your average cost per lead, you should consider the following:
- Manpower
- Marketing distribution
- Advertising
- Technology and software
- General overheads
04. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Surprisingly, a lot of companies don’t necessarily consider the lifetime value of a customer as part of their sales and marketing strategy but you absolutely should. Why? Let us put it into perspective…
“Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25-95%. The success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%.” (Source: Outbound Engine)
If your marketing team is aware of the value of retaining clients they can work on lead nurturing campaigns that allow you to ‘check-in’ with existing, long-term, high-value clients. If their value is crucial to maintaining your business performance year-on-year why risk losing them for the sake of a comparatively small expense, that could just be a surprise hamper and 6-month or 12-month catch-up sessions?
Work out your CLV as follows:
Average sale per customer multiplied by Average number of times a customer buys per year multiplied by Average retention time in months or years for a typical customer
Remember to review your internal marketing and sales goals and strategy internally and pay close attention to other metrics that may have more value and resonance with your wider business objectives.
