Marketing, without measurement, can be just another expense. With measurement however, it can become one of your best investments.
How do you measure your marketing? Do you use KPIs - Key Performance Indicators - to help you measure results of tactics, strategy and sales?
For example:
- Just publishing a newsletter (tactic) is important. If you don’t execute your marketing, you don’t even get into the funnel.
- But making sure you distribute the newsletter to the exact people you need to influence and include the correct call to action (strategy) is very important.
- And then measuring who actually took the steps you set up to add customers (sales) can help you tweek the content or the list or the offer to help you improve your sales numbers.
Beyond measuring visitor site traffic, you might be measuring a variety of indicators year-over-year, including:
The total number of…
- fans/members
- positive customer mentions
- mentions
- page views
- contributors
- back links
Or increased…
- Conversion
- Revenue
- Average order value
And decreased…
- Returns
- Call volume
- Postage costs
I find that looking at the KPIs in a flow chart like this one from E commerce KPI’s from Smart Insights can be helpful:
What KPIs do you regularly track? Do you monitor them quarterly or once a year?
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Chris - Great points here! KPIs are one piece of the puzzle though - primary research among members of the target audience often clarifies the “why” questions posed by KPI results.