You’re trying to improve your marketing strategy. What metrics should you focus on?

Brand awareness: Track website traffic, social media reach, and brand mentions. Engagement: Monitor website engagement metrics (time spent, click-throughs) and social media interactions (likes, shares). Leads/Sales: Track lead generation (form submissions, sign-ups) and conversion rates (leads to customers). Return on Investment (ROI): Analyze cost per lead/customer and compare it to revenue generated to assess campaign effectiveness.

When improving your marketing strategy, focus on metrics such as customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), return on investment (ROI), conversion rates, website traffic, engagement metrics (such as click-through rates and time spent on site), and social media metrics (such as likes, shares, and comments). These metrics provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and help in making data-driven decisions for optimization.

Understanding the traffic contribution of various paid and organic channels is very critical to prioritize effort required to fire a channel. One should always do an impact vs effort exercise to prioritize team's energies spent on a particular campaign. e.g. A high effort campaign (20 hours of team) on a channel which contributes to 5% of total traffic should be prioritized vs another campaign which takes 20 hours of team but contributes to only 1% of the total traffic. Not just amount of traffic, one should also do a conversion assessment to understand variation in conversion across different channels. Direct/Organic/Pull channels are likely to have higher conversion vs Paid/Push channels.

All of these metrics are important, and I think conversion rate is one of the most important. Yes, you have to know your CAC and LTV, but you have to have conversions to make money. Just make sure the conversions are optimized for the right type of customer so they are profitable conversions.

When trying to maximize conversions, reduce friction wherever you can and experiment. If your social ads are getting clicks and not converting on the landing page, try skipping the landing page altogether and using in-platform forms that often auto-populate information instead. Before launching your social ads, spend some time A/B testing different variations by swapping out text, images, and audiences. This will reduce ad spend and increase your conversions.

Conversion rate is as critical a metric as getting incremental traffic. Since the ultimate business metric is Sales or Orders, in order to increase business, one needs to either get higher amount of traffic or improve the conversion within the same funnel. Working on conversion is a joint goal between marketing and category teams. Its not just the quality of marketing collaterals which impact conversion, but other factors like pricing, delivery promise, product ratings and reviews also impact the conversion. If the conversion is poor vs benchmark products, teams should first fix the conversion and then dial back up the traffic channels.

Retaining an existing customer is 87% easier than acquiring a new one. For that, companies need to ensure that their current customers are satisfied with the products and services they receive. CLV carries the ability to scale, reduce and predict churn, and cut marketing costs by doing the most: Quantifies customer loyalty Boosts business profitability Determines customer segmentation Determines efficiency of marketing strategies I think it's the most important metric for many businesses (not all*) CLV can be calculated quickly, it is reliable for building customer loyalty programs and helps to compare the value of different customer segments. * It doesn't est CAC, and gives false impressions of retention rate stability.

An important metric to watch, which is a part of your customer acquisition cost, is your cost per lead. Whether through digital, physical, organic, or paid sources, your cost per lead will be a very good indicator of the quality of your marketing content, offer, and market fit. A low cost per lead and high conversion rate lead to increasing ROI. The better your content, offer, and market fit, the lower your cost per lead will be.