How to Select the Right Marketing KPIs

With 2016 firmly behind us, there’s no better time to take a look at how your company performed over the past year and where improvements can be made. To complete this critical task correctly, it’s important first to make sure that you’re tracking and analyzing the right metrics.

There are more key performance indicators in 2017 than ever before, so just choosing which ones to measure can be tricky. To assist you, here are five things you need to do to select the right marketing KPIs for your company.

01. Understand Your End Goals

The most important part of a marketing plan is determining your goals because every other decision trickles down from them. Your KPIs are no different. If you’re trying to develop and build your brand, unique visitors and audience share are good to look at. When you’re working to engage and expand an existing audience, you might look at social media metrics, bounce rate, or active customer percent (active on both your website and a marketing list). Finally, if you’re focused purely on driving sales, you’ll want to look at things like cost per acquisition, conversions, and average revenue per website visit.

Depending on what you’re trying to do, you’ll likely want to utilize a mix of these. Just make sure your end goals are closely tied to your measurements.

Customer acquisition is six times more costly than customer retention, making it much less cost-effective.

02. Don’t Overlook Retention

Most companies like to point at growth statistics to measure success, but unless you’re brand-new and have no existing customers, retention is just as important. Customer acquisition is six times more costly than customer retention, making it much less cost-effective. Make sure to pay attention carefully to KPIs such as customer retention and attrition rate to ensure that you’re doing everything you can to keep your current customers loyal.

03. Ensure KPIs are Quantifiable

It’s not unusual for companies to select KPIs that they really can’t measure, like ‘customer happiness’ or ‘growth.' It’s important to establish KPIs that can be immediately and accurately measured. If you have weaknesses in your data that doesn’t allow a KPI to be confidently measured, get rid of it until you’ve solved those problems.

04. Stay Within Your Capabilities

What you should ask yourself when creating a KPI is “if we determine this number is very successful or very unsuccessful, will we have the capacity to act on it?”. If the answer is no, it’s not worth measuring anyway. For every single KPI that you create and measure, have a solid idea of how to react to any trends you notice.

05. Keep it Simple

Less is always more. You don’t want to become the company that measures everything because it doesn’t give you the chance to focus specifically on anything. Instead, select the KPIs that have the strongest, most immediate impact on your business, and work on getting them locked down. Once you have them under control, you can consider expanding to some more ancillary KPIs.

In summary, finding the right marketing KPIs is just as critical to your company’s marketing success as any other task. By following the steps outlined above, you’ll be able to operate throughout 2017 resting easy that your analysis is bearing fruit. If you’re eager to improve your marketing results in an even more meaningful way, make sure to start the process by clicking here and reaching out to see how our team at Birch Knot can help.

This article was originally published on Birch Knot's blog, January 5, 2017 www.birchknot.com // Birch Knot Marketing Performance Services