Why CEOs Need to See Their Marketing Metrics
I am sure you have financial metrics, operating metrics, and sales metrics. But does your company have marketing metrics?
Good marketing metrics need to make it onto your CEO dashboard. Marketing done WELL can generate fantastic results, brand awareness, and targeted communications via customized channels. Marketing done poorly will simply be a financial drain on your business. As a CEO, you need to know how your company's marketing efforts measure up.
Most businesses spend the majority of their marketing budget on creating awareness of their product or service. Digital marketing, broadcast marketing, and trade shows all generate awareness, but they come at a cost. Good metrics, at this very first stage in the marketing process, should focus on cost per engagement — How many people received your message and at what cost? In the awareness stage, cost analysis is essential to get the greatest exposure for your business at the right price.
If your awareness campaigns are working, you should be able to determine (and score) your leads — that includes all people even considering your product or service.
It’s important for CEOs to not only understand how many active leads your marketing department has, but also where they came from and why. Knowing what problems your product or service addresses and where people are looking for solutions to these problems will also help your marketing department deliver greater results in converting leads to sales.
Your actual sales numbers for a product are an easy metric to get your hands on. But determining your conversion rate from leads to sales is a little more challenging. Still, such data are needed to effectively evaluate your sales pipeline, as conversion rates tell you a lot about the effectiveness of both your marketing and your sales departments. If there is not a cohesive, team effort here, the results will have a negative impact on sales and can be the difference between achieving financial success — or not.
Remember: It’s much more efficient to keep an existing customer than to find a new one. In this awareness stage, marketing metrics will help you understand customer churn. Retention programs should be evaluated on their ability to keep and grow a customer. Measuring customer growth and turnover provides metrics that help you understand the customer experience and develop customer loyalty.
Let’s face facts — Customer advocacy is the “holy grail” of any marketing effort. { Tweet this! }
Getting your customers to bring you other customers is what every business strives for. Referral programs and user groups create opportunities for customers to evangelize your business. (Download our FREE eBook “Side Door Thinking” to see how three industry GIANTS — Dove, Melissa & Doug, and Harley-Davidson — connected with their customers to build loyalty and reap BIG REWARDS.)
Understanding the effectiveness of loyalty/referral programs and monitoring your company’s marketing metrics gives CEOs the best indication of the health of their entire organization.
If you want to discuss marketing metrics — or learn how to measure not only the first stage of customer engagement (awareness), but also the other four (to be revealed) — leave a comment below and keep an eye on our Cultivate blog. We’ll be covering the topic of using Growth Cycle Marketing to attract your ideal customers in the coming weeks.
Got a question in the meantime? Connect with me on LinkedIn.
