Measuring Marketing Success across the Customers’ Journey

How would you know which product or service brings the most value?

With today's ever-increasing competition, it's essential to track and measure your data to make the most out of your marketing efforts and resources.

JG Summit Digital Transformation Office (DTO) shows us the importance of?marketing metrics, what indicators to look out for, and how to use the?marketing funnel or loop?to gain valuable insights and help brands improve campaign performance.

By the end of this guide, you'll understand how to track powerful marketing metrics to quantify the success of your company initiatives.?

But first, what is a marketing funnel?

The marketing funnel is a visual representation of the customer’s journey. It is a?series of stages that a customer goes through?when interacting with your brand.?

These are called "funnels" because it's like filling up a funnel-shaped container that helps to narrow down prospects as you go along.

This journey typically starts with awareness and ends with brand advocacy. If your campaign is successful enough, the process will then loop from the final stage back to awareness.

How can we apply this to our marketing campaigns? Here’s an example:

Let’s say you’re about to launch an app, and you need to track the success of your marketing efforts from the app’s release up to its user ratings and recommendations.

Here we’ll break down phases of the marketing funnel as we guide prospective customers from discovery and purchase to ratings and shares.

1. Awareness: You posted an ad online to let people know your app is live.

At the top of the funnel, people have no idea about your product. They haven't yet considered whether they want to buy from you. And just like a funnel’s wide top, it accommodates hundreds of thousands of people– even millions.

How would you know if your ad is performing? Here are some awareness metrics to follow:

• Impressions: How many times was the ad shown? Reach: How many unique accounts saw it??
• Cost per reach (CPR): How much did it cost to reach 1000 people??
• % Reach: How much of our target audience did we reach??

2) Consideration: User clicks the link from the ad to your app page.

As you move down the funnel, your market starts to shrink. You're now attracting people who have heard about you, visited your site, or signed up for your email subscription. The consideration phase is where you track potential interest and activity before getting to the main action.?

Some key metrics to track include:

• Clicks: How many times was the link clicked??
• Cost per click (CPC): How much did it cost to generate one click??
• Click-through rate (CTR): What’s our ratio of clicks to impressions??

3.) Action: User downloads & registers on the app.

This is the moment where your prospect becomes a user by building enough credibility for people to try out your product. In this phase, it's essential to track metrics that are related to converting your prospects to actual customers and a good starting point to measure return on investment (ROI).

How much does it cost you to get a new active user? How do you calculate your ROI?

Here are key metrics to look out for:

• Registrations: How many registrations did we generate??
• Cost per conversion or registered user: How much did it cost per registration??
• Conversion or registration rate: What is the ratio of registration to clicks on our ads??

4) Loyalty: User logs in & uses the app regularly.

Getting users to download the app, however, isn’t the end of the customer journey. Make sure that the user keeps using your product and becomes a repeat customer if you want to retain or exceed the total number of regular users on your app.

To track customer loyalty through repeated user actions, take note of the following:

• Weekly active users: How many registered users regularly use the app every week??
• Cost per new weekly active user: How much did it cost to acquire active users??
• % Weekly active user: What's the ratio of our Weekly Active Users vs Total Users??

5) Advocacy: User invites friends and followers with referral code & shares the app on social media

The advocacy phase is where your marketing efforts tie up. One effective litmus test of trust is user generated content (UGC) when users are so satisfied with your product that they refer or recommend it to other potential users. This method of marketing spreads fast through word of mouth that enables you to loop new, unique customers back into the awareness phase.

Here are some metrics to consider when tracking positive sharing or referral behavior:?

• New users applying referral codes: How many referrals did we get??
• Cost per referral: How much did it cost to get referrals??
• % of New users through referral codes: How effective is our referral program?

Congratulations! You just made your first successful marketing campaign. Remember, measuring marketing success tracks progress when nurturing our customer relationships from beginning to end of the customer journey.

Creating a Culture of Continuous Learning for Gokongwei Group Marketers

Although tracking marketing metrics seems like a daunting task, JG Summit DTO guides conglomerate colleagues in tackling digital marketing challenges.?

Through the Digital Marketing Community of Practice, JG Summit DTO helps its fellow marketing colleagues across Gokongwei Group to enhance their skills in implementing digital strategies such as measurement, benchmarking and metrics.?

For example, in one of the learning sessions for the Digital Marketing Community of Practice,?JG Summit DTO shared new insights on how to define marketing goals, set the right targets, and identify the true measures of success– especially in terms of cost and revenue. The session was about identifying the right metrics and campaign optimization tactics that will determine if an investment will result in a positive return.??

In this session, Gokongwei Group marketers were equipped with the right formulas and tips to calculate total digital marketing cost and on how to maximize digital ROI.?

JG Summit DTO uses these community learning sessions to expose colleagues to various metrics across the marketing loop for websites and apps in the non-ecommerce, ecommerce, and freemium space.??

Building learning?communities is one of JG Summit DTO's ways to build digital capability across the Gokongwei Group. By creating an environment that encourages collaboration, communication, and knowledge sharing, we are able to better position ourselves at the forefront of today's digital challenges.

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