Marketing metrics are a valuable tool for your business. They allow you to gain valuable insights into customer satisfaction, their behaviours and allow you to gauge your business’s performance. They are big hitters and can be used to drive your business forward to achieve your objectives and goals. Failing to measure the success (or failure) of your marketing efforts can significantly impact on your business’s success and longevity.

Marketing metrics are measurable values that reveal the success of your carefully created campaigns. By deepening your understanding of your campaign’s success, you can calculate the return on investment so that you can base future decisions on facts and figures rather than gut instincts. They are relevant across a variety of channels, social media, websites and healthcare market research, but give the same advantages to your business.

Typically marketing metrics track the following objectives:

• Product awareness

• Brand awareness

• Traffic to your website and social media platforms

• Conversion rate

• Sales

• Engagement

Marketers are faced with an enormous amount of data, and care should be taken to ensure that the right metrics are tracked. Just because something can be tracked, doesn’t mean that it should! You need to measure metrics that bring value and not just vanity metrics. Once you have defined what you want the data to achieve, you can select the metrics to meet your objectives.

You need to be strict about the metrics that you are going to analyse and evaluate. To bring value to your business, you need to ensure that your metrics satisfy the following criteria:

• Easy to understand

The metrics that you measure should be easy to understand. There is no point in collating data that is too complicated. The data should be presented in a way that it informs and helps decisions to be made.

• Easy to reproduce

For metrics to be relevant to your business, you need to be able to reproduce and replicate the data regularly to gain comparable insights. It can be tricky to implement if you are getting information from different departments within an organisation.

• Relevant and actionable

Only include data that is relevant to your objectives because convoluted data confuses. Identify what actions need to be undertaken and implement the changes.

So, why do marketing metrics matter?

Marketing is not static

Marketing is not a rigid process that you need to perform. It’s unpredictable. Metrics allow you to be agile in your response to any changes that you observe so that you can keep ahead of the game and minimise any negative impact that may be on the horizon.

Metrics allow you to be dynamic.

Metrics give you insights

Metrics give you valuable insights into how you can grow your business. You can assess which customers are more profitable so that you can focus on appealing to them allowing you to nurture the relationship. Conversely, metrics give you the opportunity to cast your attention to areas of your strategy that are underperforming so you can tweak your marketing strategy to provoke positive action.

Metrics promote growth.

Metrics identify trends

If you spend time monitoring and evaluating your marketing metrics, you will be able to spot trends emerging. Having the ability to recognise trends as they gain momentum gives you the prospect to be gain the competitive edge and exploit the trend to your advantage.

Metrics can help you to become the market leader.

Metrics are a valuable tool for measuring the success of your marketing campaign and driving revenue forward. Be selective in what you measure and have a plan of action to respond to the signals that you receive.