One of the frustrations I hear from businesses about marketing is that they don’t know what to make of their marketing results; they don’t know what to expect or if they’re doing well. They are paying for marketing and they wonder if they “should be doing better.”
The question is: how should they know? They’re not marketing experts. They don’t know what to expect.
If your organization is paying for marketing, you should have certain results – or Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) – built into your marketing plan. Every marketing person or agency who works for you should set your expectation as to what they will do for you and the results that you can expect from your marketing.
Here are some examples of KPI’s you should get, or ask for, if you’re not receiving them now:
- KPI’s from the marketing itself – to see how the campaign is doing.
Every marketing platform that you use, from Facebook and Instagram to emails (such as Constant Contact and Mail Chimp), has its own KPI’s. For social media, it ranges from Reach (the number of people who viewed your post, or opened your email) to Engagement (the number of people who reacted to your post by liking, swiping up, or clicking-through a link, etc.)
The question I hear about these types of results is, “How do I know if these results are good?” To answer this, it’s important to look at them in comparison to how other similar campaigns have done.
For example, if you send out a newsletter and, on average, 15% of your email list opens the email, then you know what to expect. Is this a good number or a bad number? It depends on your email list itself. Did the people on this list ASK you to send them your Newsletter? If the answer is yes, they specifically signed up for your Newsletter, then 15% isn’t a great Open Rate at all – it should be closer to 20% or even higher.
However, if you got their name some other way and you got their implied consent only (they didn’t specifically sign up for your Newsletter), then this rate might be quite good. This is a question you need to ask your marketing expert. Most important, however, is that you’re looking at these numbers for each campaign.
- KPI’s showing increased traffic to your website or people to your location.
To me, the more important measurement of your marketing success is if it moves people to actually do something. That is, does it get people to visit your website? Or stop in to your location? Does someone pick up the phone and call you to ask you a question – or to ask for pricing?
While most marketing agencies and teams focus on the KPI’s of the marketing itself, in #1 above, I focus more on these metrics. Why? Because it tells you whether or not your marketing is effective in moving your business forward.
Good marketing, for example, should make people want to know more about you or your products and services. It should drive traffic to your website – to a landing page, for example – or get people to come by your location. And that’s what you, as a business owner, want, right? This is what you expect from your marketing.
These KPI’s are: website traffic, hits to a landing page, phone calls, and foot traffic. If these increase more than from before the marketing, you know the marketing is a success. It’s rather easy (if you know, before you started, what your measurements were – we call these baseline measurements).
These types of results won’t tell you everything, however. For example, if these KPI’s increase but you don’t sell more of your products or services, there could be other issues going on. These might range from your sales follow-up (are you contacting people right away?) to pricing to seasonality of your business.
Not sure if you’re getting the marketing results that you should be? Contact me by email or give me a call and let’s talk about it!
