Gone are the days when marketing was ruled by magazine and television ads. These days, it's all gone digital, and digital marketing means following the data. With so much competition in the online marketplace, marketers must constantly prove their success by delivering apparent efficiency and outcomes through KPIs.
KPIs are multifaceted, though, and marketers don't always know what to track. But fortunately, we do, and we're here to help. Here are 10 KPIs every chief marketing officer should be monitoring.
1. Lead Conversion Rate
Your lead conversion rate measures how many leads were able to be turned into a conversion. In laymen’s terms, this just means how many people made a purchase out of the entire interested population that visited your site to buy something. This is vital information because it shows how successful your recent marketing has been. After some time, you’ll be able to compile and analyze trends in sales and see where you can improve.
2. Return on Marketing Investment
Your return on investment is another important KPI because it shows whether your marketing is paying off. A positive return rate means that whatever changes you've made in marketing are creating more profit than it cost to launch the new campaign.
If you find a negative return rate, it means the campaign needs some adjusting because you're not making enough money back. Knowing this is prime data for when you're first testing out a few campaigns. A better rate of return is a clear indicator of which campaign will be more successful.
3. Traffic to Marketing Leads
Most websites will automatically track general traffic, but if you're not following up on what percentage of that traffic turns into a lead, you might be lead astray. Knowing how much traffic your website gets is one thing, but it isn't very insightful if you can't determine what percentage of that traffic is actually looking to make a purchase.
When you know your traffic to marketing lead rate, you'll have a better idea of how successful your website is. Say, for instance, you have high traffic but low lead conversion. This means that not many people are interested in purchasing after seeing what you have to offer. This is a red flag, indicating that something needs to change.
4. Cost Per Lead
Nothing is free in life, and that includes marketing and business. You have to put money in to get money out, but if you're putting more in than you're getting back, that's a problem. Just as your return on investment is a crucial bit of data, you'll want to break it down even further.
By tracking and analyzing your cost per lead, you’ll be better able to make goal-oriented marketing decisions. When you know the one-to-one relationship between how much you’re spending per lead, you can plan for how many leads you need to pull off a successful campaign.
5. Lifetime Customer Value
The ultimate goal of developing a brand is to build a base of loyal customers who stick with you over the years. With that in mind, you should be tracking and estimating the overall expected lifetime value your customers add to your business. This means measuring how much you've earned from each customer for all of their purchases, compared to the initial cost of bringing them into your brand.
6. Organic Traffic
Ruling the world of digital marketing means mastering search engine optimization. Without the right keyword density, your content will quickly fall into the recesses of Google and Bing, where they'll never be found again. How will you know if your site and its content have succumbed to such a fate if you aren't tracking organic traffic? Organic traffic is traffic generated solely through search engine queries instead of paid advertising. Track the sites that receive the most traffic organically, and you'll know what content your audience is interested in.
7. Blog Engagement
First and foremost, if you’re not blogging, you really ought to be. Blogs are the ultimate way to present your audience with relevant and up to date information in a fun format that doesn't heavily rely on blatant advertising. If you are blogging, though, how do you know if it's paying off? Are you monitoring traffic to your blog? Sure, some people may comment and respond but following how much engagement your blog receives is the only surefire way to gauge its success.
8. Retention and Attrition
For a couple of complicated-sounding words, retention and attrition are pretty straightforward. Don't let the simplicity fool you into thinking that they don't matter, though. To put it plainly, retention is the number of customers you managed to hold onto, whereas attrition is the number of customers you have lost. These numbers track which customers return to make new purchases compared to one-time customers and customers who have ended their subscriptions.
9. Sales Response Time
Time is everything, and if you hesitate, you can easily lose a lead. The longer your sales team waits to reach out to a new lead, the more likely they are to go on to one of your competitors. People like speedy responses because they want what they want when they want it. So, the question is, do you know how quickly your sales team is responding to leads? If not, you should be tracking sales response time. It will boost your lead retention and translate into more conversion.
10. Social Media Engagement
Like blogging, if you're not interacting with your audience via social media, you're missing out on a significant slice of the market. Social media lets you present fun and engaging content, as well as do some crisis management if a customer has a complaint. Look at it as an open line of communication with your costumers. With a social media account in place, though, you'll need to track how much engagement it gets. If it's not gaining enough traction, it might not be worth the investment.
How Can Anyone Manage So Much At Once?
We know that this all sounds like an impossible amount of data to track by yourself. Even with a team of professionals dedicated to collecting digital data, it would still be a Sisyphean task. Fortunately, that's where Enidan Marketing swoops in to save the day.
With our automated marketing solutions, we can help you develop an online platform that tracks this information for you so you can focus on the more hands-on side of the business. For information on how we can help, please reach out and let us know what we can do for you.
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