Marketing Metrics Madness

Above is one of 3 key metrics that I monitor to measure the success of my Sales 2B clients. It is the measure of the conversion rate of the number of messages we sent to members of our target audience to prospects who positively responded. (This is real data for my 9 active clients last week - I've identified them only by a client # to protect their identities). I then analyze those numbers versus prior weeks and the target (25% ) and the industry standard (5-15%). I look for core reasons and make adjustments going forward. I do this for my 3 key weekly metrics and 3 other Monthly metrics on a weekly basis.

Last time I did a check, there were 250,000 marketing professionals in my local market. That is a lot of folks. When most people think of "good" marketing people they think of creative graphic artists, amazing story-telling writers, artistic videographers, brilliant branders and ingenious marketing strategists. And those and many more categories make up the array of professional marketing people out there. Most of today's marketers are also digital marketers which means they work in the digital space of websites and social media, etc. A big percent of Today's marketers singularity write blogs, profile pages and articles for social media and websites. But regardless of their "creative strength" the most important marketing skill is business intelligence, BI or more simply metric or key statistics and the analytics that comes out of that data capture.

Most people don't ask about metrics and the analysis that indicate how well a campaign is going. In marketing, one word or image can mean a huge difference in the success rate of a campaign regardless whether that campaign is a video, a blog, lead generation activities, websites, articles, brand exercises, etc. The most important part of a marketer's job is to capture the data and do the analytics. Would you hire an accountant to pay your bills , deposit your money and not record the data and analyze it to know how well you are doing, if you are expenses are rising faster than your revenues to explore anomalies in your books? Then why would you hire a marketing professional or agency to create your brand or website and not track how well it's doing.

When you go to hire your next marketing professional or agency for your next campaign ask them about metrics? what are the key numbers to the success of this campaign? What are the target numbers we should match or succeed? Ask to see reports of past clients? what reports will you receive? If they don't know or can't answer or won't give you target numbers they can achieve, don't hire them.