When navigating marketing options, there’s a lot that gets you in the weeds or leads you astray. It’s a wide discipline with a host of various techniques, each of which can promise different things. However, it’s important to be able to stick to your business objectives throughout.
For that reason, you want to learn more about the specific metrics that you should be tracking and paying attention to across the different marketing channels you engage in. Here, we’ll look at some of the most important and why they matter. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that, depending on your aims, you may weigh some metrics as more or less valuable than others.
Brand Visibility And Reach
Perhaps the easiest metric to understand is the type that tracks how effectively your brand is being seen across the different channels you use.
Visibility is crucial for growing and new businesses, and you can track this through impressions, social media reach, website traffic, and share of voice traffic to get a better understanding of how often your brand appears in front of your potential customers and, just as importantly, how they’re happening upon it.
Reach alone isn’t going to guarantee sales, so you may need to combine it with the next two categories we look at, but for those who are focusing on building brand recognition and positioning, it can be vital.
Customer Engagement And Interaction
It’s one thing to be seen by a customer; it’s a different ball park when you’re able to incite them to interact with your brand. Engagement and interaction can be measured differently across different marketing methods.
Average session duration and pages per visit are good indicators of website engagement, for instance, while comments, likes, and shares are valuable on social media platforms. Engagement is a good indicator of what really resonates with your customers, showing when you’re hitting on topics and thoughts relevant and emotionally connecting to them.
Being able to generate engagement is also one of the most effective ways of expanding your reach organically.
Lead Generation And Conversion
If the main aim of your marketing is to generate revenue and build your customer base, then elements such as visibility and customer engagement aren’t enough. In fact, focusing on them too much can be distracting. Working with lead-focused marketing teams and methods, it’s all about attracting and nurturing potential customers as a main priority.
Aside from focusing on what directly speaks to their needs and incentivizes their journey down the marketing funnel, you need to look at tracking where leads come from, be it organic search, paid ads, social media, referrals, or otherwise, so you know where to double down.
Customer Retention And Loyalty
Getting customers is important, but being able to keep them can be what keeps your company alive. Retention metrics include things like repeat purchase rate and customer lifetime value, indicating that customers are satisfied with your products and services and willing to come back for more.
Often, this is dictated by elements such as an easy checkout experience, positive customer support interactions, and loyalty campaigns to reward your most reliable customers.
Website Performance And User Experience
If your website is a big part of your marketing strategy, then you need to look under the hood to see how it’s performing. Metrics such as page load times and mobile device responsiveness aren’t specifically indicators of audience interaction, but definitely do affect it.
Looking closer, bounce rate, average time on page, and conversion funnel drop-offs are a much clearer indicator of how well your site is working as a marketing tool.
Return On Investment
This is a metric that can apply across all manner of channels. If you’re paying for ads, SEO results, influencer campaigns, or otherwise, you want to make sure that your efforts are actually resulting in profits. There is no perfect way to showcase how much return any individual marketing effort gets, but you can calculate the ROI of your campaign by comparing revenue growth to the cost of executing a marketing campaign in the same time frame. There are other indicators that flesh this out into a more nuanced picture, such as cost per acquisition and lifetime value, as well.
Hopefully, we’ve shown why it’s not just worth knowing the logic working beneath your metrics, but that which is most important to you depends on which goals you want to prioritize. This can ensure a better understanding of your marketing campaign’s strengths and better working relationships with marketing teams you hire.
