So you’ve got all the enthusiasm in the world because you’re about to launch your first (or 100th) marketing campaign. You love what you do and you love to see results. But are you good at measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns with the right marketing metrics?
Choosing the right metrics to monitor marketing and sales performance is one of the most important ways to improve results, but only 29% of marketers look at ROI metrics to evaluate email effectiveness, according to DMA.
The key to effective campaign execution means managing results that have been derived from various testing efforts, and then executing on those campaigns that have shown the best results. The marketing objective is to impact ROI and revenue growth, and by testing high-risk marketing campaigns on small targeted groups before executing on a big scale, it becomes possible to extract data and invest in activities that make the most strategic sense.
Marketing Metrics: The Conversion Rate
Marketing campaign effectiveness is measured by the single most important marketing metric – the conversion rate. The conversion rate itself is measured by the percentage of total leads that convert at each stage of the marketing funnel and sales pipeline. The conversion rate is a key marketing metric because it allows marketing to understand the overall effectiveness of specific campaign efforts while allowing marketing to gather key insights in an effort to pinpoint which sales pipeline stages aren’t yielding the kind of results we want to see.
According to Ascend2, 57% of B2B marketers say conversion rate is the most useful metric for analyzing landing page performance. By focusing on the conversion rate, marketers are able to define the buying process for consumers by creating a roadmap that works to get buyers from one funnel stage to another until they have become customers. While prospects are shopping around to select the perfect vendor, marketers, in turn, are focusing on improving performance by measuring conversion rates to strengthen performance.
Defining Brand Metrics
The branding process also holds key marketing metrics as they pertain to various branding efforts and the direct alignment of these efforts to company goals. Best-in-Class performing companies manage the effectiveness of their brand initiatives from funnel-based insights as they are gathered from various brand awareness campaigns that have somehow impacted consumer behavior at each sales pipeline stage.
By breaking down target audiences and segmenting them, marketers are able to better manage branding efforts by creating more intricate and high-impact strategies to target prospects and customers in the sales pipeline.
Managing the Right Marketing Metrics
By using the customer lifecycle to assess and understand what perceptions and behaviors derive at each stage for specifically targeted consumers, we are better able to learn what kind of needs first-time consumers are looking to meet versus those who are at later stages of the funnel. It is important to break away from traditional thinking on how to manage the performance of our campaigns as they pertain to specific marketing metrics that we’ve gained from various testing efforts. By putting the right metrics in place, we are able to be more effective at measuring and managing brand performance. As long as we are continuously connecting these results to company objectives, we not only improve accountability between marketing and sales but we also have a better understanding of future direction in campaign execution.
Do you have the right processes in place to measure your efforts? Perhaps it’s time to ask yourself whether or not you have the right tools in place to see that your campaigns are optimized.
