How often and how much should you review and update your product marketing metrics and KPIs?

In a digitally transformed marketing world, numerous initiatives overlap and reciprocally support each other. Reviewing and updating benchmark metrics alongside KPIs will move your company forward. Proactive interaction with data will steer your efforts in the right direction. Neglect vanity metrics and focus on what matter. KPIs are not glued, reviewing and updating defined tiers is a healthy collaboration with your company initiatives in omnichannel. Be proactive - learn, optimize and improve.

Reviewing and updating your metrics and KPIs is akin to a physician's constant health checkups, it keeps your strategy robust and effective. It lets you steer your marketing initiatives based on data rather than guesswork. Moreover, it fuels continuous learning and innovation, fostering a culture of agility and resilience amid market disruptions. In the words of Peter Drucker, "What gets measured, gets managed." Hence, in marketing, regularly assessing your metrics and KPIs is pivotal not just for management, but for the success and growth of your business.

A long-term KPI is brand loyalty, or “brand love” as CMO of Microsoft Chris Capossela likes to call it. While this is a hard KPI to quantify in one metric, it’s not impossible when thinking about customer retention/return which should be considered as the long term effect that a good product delivers to the audience. Today’s consumers are “voting with wallets”, meaning they are considering a brand’s core values as part of the product offering. It is no longer enough to focus solely on a product’s innovation or feature. The product has to align to the brand’s mission, core value, and overall social stance in order to drive loyalty for the long term.

Work backwards from your profit line towards more superficial metrics. What channels, audiences, services, etc. are driving the highest profit or margin? Is there opportunity to grow that segment? Then take a step back. What metrics are your best leading indicators regarding profitability? Depending on your product, these metrics may vary. In recruitment marketing, we look at GP attributed across our recruitment ad channels. From there we can determine our ROAS per ad channel and rethink spend. More superficially for day-to-day decision making, we’re looking at total hires, cost per hire, total applicants, and cost per applicant. Focusing on candidate churn also allows us to maximize our spend across all channels.

The metrics you review and update are dependent on your goals. What are you looking to achieve and when are you looking to achieve it? You can update your metrics and KPIs if your goal changes or it’s clear that your metrics and KPIs are misaligned with your goal. Otherwise, stay consistent. Check your metrics and KPIs as often as they are statistically relevant to inform your decision making process. You can waste hours analyzing metrics that are too fresh and incomplete to offer any meaningful value. Start simple and build from there. Don’t try to optimize everything at once. Start with the metric that, once improved, will have the biggest impact on your profit and then work your way through the rest. The job will never end.

Marketing is all about trying new things and exploring. Once you’ve established the metrics that are most important to you, understand your baseline and set up some realistic goals. A/B test small components of your “tried and true” marketing efforts. How do the experiments compare to your usual tactics? If they have improved, consider updating them. Not every experiment will have a happy ending, but the ones that do could significantly optimize our overall performance! Test, optimize, re-test. Incremental changes can have exponential impacts down the line. Once you understand which metrics directly impact your profit and how to manipulate them, you’ll be well on your way to great marketing success!

Learn your targeted customers pain points then gear you initiatives towards solving those points, then adjust as necessary depending on your growth strategy. We check NPI on a quarterly basis, not cherry picking our customers. This provides valuable insight how to adjust to move forward.