Substance and Style

    Choose Meaningful KPIs

    ·

    KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), are metrics used to measure marketing success. It’s important to choose KPIs that are meaningful to your own business, industry, and sales process. Here’s how:

    1. Define meaningful broad goals. What matters most to you? Presumably, increasing revenue is your priority. Increasing brand awareness and generating leads are broad goals that support that priority. Think about how you acquire customers. What do you need them to do so that your goals are met? Focus on that customer behavior (signing a contract, making a purchase, subscribing to a service, etc.) when setting broad goals. This will make it easier to identify the steps potential customers take along the way so you can create an effective marketing funnel. 
    1. Choose smaller goals that support your broad goals. What customer or client behaviors actually impact your bottom line? These may include things like visiting your website, following you on social media, or subscribing to your email list. Everyone’s customers will have different behaviors that indicate the likelihood of them making a purchase. Set your goals around the ones that matter most in your specific industry.  For example, if you’re selling products through an online shop, growing your international social media following may make your business a success. That same growth will be meaningless to a local restaurant whose only revenue is local sales. Make sure you’re putting your effort where your actual customers will be. 
    1. Choose targets. Now that you know what you need your customers to do, use the SMART goal method to figure out what you’ll be measuring to gauge your success. SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) goals must be realistic. It might be great for your business if you got a million followers on TikTok by the end of the month, but if you’ve never posted there, that’s probably not attainable. However, it might be reasonable to double your following within 6 months. Again, what is SMART is different for everyone. You know your business best. If 10% of people who currently receive your newsletter click through to your website and 25% of those people make a purchase, you have at least four opportunities for increasing sales: increase the size of your subscriber list, increase the number of people who visit your website from your email, increase the number of site visitors who make a purchase, or increase revenue from each sale. Choosing to optimize one of the steps in this process will become a SMART goal (i.e. increase email subscribers by 30% within 3 months). 
    1. Choose benchmarks and timeframes. You want to make sure you’re on track every step of the way so you can make adjustments as needed. If you only measure at the end, you deprive yourself of the chance to course correct and increase success. In the above example, it wouldn’t hurt to look at your email subscribers every month to see if you are meeting a goal of a10% increase.

    Common KPIs

    Below are some of the most common metrics measured in marketing. Look through these to get ideas about what you can measure to make sure your marketing is on track. 

    General/Sales and Paid Advertising/Search: 

    • Overall Revenue Generated
    • Average Sale Amount
    • Monthly Sales Growth
    • ROI (Return on Investment)
    • ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
    • CPL (Cost Per Lead)
    • CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
    • CPC (Cost Per Click)
    • Number of engaged leads in sales funnel
    • Average order price
    • New recurring revenue
    • Customer lifetime value
    • Repeat purchaser rate

    Website: 

    • Overall traffic
    • Referral traffic/Visits by source
    • Bounce rate
    • Exit rate
    • Page views
    • New vs. returning visitors
    • Average session duration
    • Conversion rate
    • Subscribers
    • Forms filled out
    • Downloads
    • Position and ranking on SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
    • Content performance by type and subject

    Email: 

    • Open rate
    • Bounce rate
    • Click-through rate
    • Conversion rate
    • Content performance by type and subject

    Social Media : 

    • Impressions
    • Engagement (likes, shares, comments, mentions)
    • Reach,
    • Followers
    • Content performance by type and subject