As a business owner, or marketing manager, you will undoubtedly have a wealth of metrics, data and statistics at your fingertips, the issue is often finding the time to review such information, and to do so iteratively.
In our recent ebook, you will have read some fantastic advice about the importance of measuring marketing and sales performance, as well as identifying the metrics and KPIs you absolutely should be monitoring.
Although it’s great to identify the metrics and KPIs you should be monitoring, it is only really useful to your business and marketing strategy if you constantly, actively review this data and proactively act upon your findings.
Compiling a marketing and sales report is a huge step for any organisation, one that surprisingly, SMEs all too easily put to the bottom of the pile of ‘to-dos’, typically blaming time and budget constraints.
But by addressing marketing and sales issues you can really ramp up your bottom line. For example, if you identify that social media isn’t working for you, drop it, and put that time and resource elsewhere to boost performance!
When should I measure performance?
This might seem like a ‘cop-out’ answer, but truly it is ‘whenever it’s necessary’. There are so many options where this answer suits, so we’re going to list them below, but if you are thinking about measuring performance, it’s a sign it must be done.
Ideally, marketing performance should be measured quarterly as standard, but there are reasons to measure more than this.
1. One-off campaigns
This applies to all one-off campaigns, such as specific content promotion, including PR campaigns, webinar launches, or email blasts relating to a specific campaign.
How to measure each of these depends very much on the content format and duration. By measuring each as they complete, or within two weeks (depending on format) of completion, you can add context to the results, as well as implementing a stronger campaign next time.
Just because your campaign was a one-off, it doesn’t mean the data is ‘wasted’, a lot of findings can be translated into other marketing and sales efforts. For example, if your sales team saw better responses from calls following an email, as opposed to a segment that didn’t receive your email blast, you know to prioritise email sends and ensure your email database is cleansed before sending.
2. Organisational changes
Often a marketing and sales performance review is absolutely necessary when personnel changes, or if your business goals and strategy has been amended, for whatever reason. When there are significant changes in your operations, processes, people or brand, it’s vital that performance is ‘snapshotted’, per se and reviewed more regularly than normal. Taking a snapshot of your business at this stage will help you to measure the impact of any business changes and better prepare for them going forward. A few things to consider whilst organisational change is ongoing:
- How were things performing (pre-change)?
- What is the change and what are the anticipated effects (positive and negative)?
- How are things performing monthly since this change?
- How have we performed from the previous to the current quarter as this change occurred?
3. Quarterly review
- Say it now: "I will conduct a quarterly marketing and sales performance audit."
- Say it louder: "I will conduct a quarterly marketing and sales performance audit."
If you aren’t already measuring your marketing and sales efforts on a quarterly basis, then what are you doing? It’s like planting a flower in the ground and hoping it will somehow, miraculously, grow, without nurturing it, without feeding and watering it and ensuring it has the climate it needs to grow big and healthy.
Marketing activities can initiate success and positive results without measuring, make no mistake, but you can’t truly know just how successful your activities are, without ensuring you’re measuring their implementation and performance. Take time every quarter to have an in-depth marketing and sales review with the following people present:
- Business owner/senior director
- Marketing manager
- Sales manager
Review all of the common marketing and sales metrics as well as custom performance indicators personalised to your organisation. Our ebook about effectively measuring marketing performance should help you to create an effective, comprehensive report. Make sure you plan ahead of time for this meeting, giving the relevant teams enough time to compile findings and come up with recommendations to present. You should also ensure that your second meeting is scheduled, with time to review the actionable tasks agreed in your first meeting.
Find more like this via Marketing Data.
