However, this is not the only thing that you should keep your radar on. It is important that you know how effective your marketing efforts are and if there is anything to be improved in the way your marketing team performs. In this post, we have put together some basic metrics to help you properly test how well your marketing activities fit your business. Keep reading to know if your marketing team works well or is not effective at all.
Before You Start Monitoring
It is important to take a few steps before you start evaluating marketing team performance and effectiveness. This is what should be done on your end:
- Set SMART goals – The goals you set should be specific, time-limited, achievable, measurable, and meaningful to your business;
- Set KPIs for each goal – You should have specific metrics to measure how close/ far from achieving a goal you are. For example, it can be the number of new subscribers, successful deals, the total earnings of the company at the end of a specific period;
- Select tools for measuring KPI – Depending on the promotion channel, this can be Google Analytics, Sprout Social, Datapine, other analytical platforms, or free social networking accounts;
- Measure baselines – It is important to estimate progress and performance over time.
Having done all the above preparation steps, you can accurately assess how your marketing team is doing and whether a digital marketing manager delivers as expected.
What Indicators Should Be Considered?
There are a couple of things that you should closely monitor. The below indicators will help you evaluate how your company is doing and whether your teammates should deliver better
#1 – Traffic
These metrics will allow you to evaluate:
- The number of impressions;
- Coverage (relevant in social networks);
- The number of unique visitors (for sites);
- Average time spent on a page;
- The total number of content downloads (for websites and emails).
SEO optimization deserves special attention here. To evaluate its effectiveness, it is enough to drive a keyword into a search engine and analyze the place of your site or blog in the search results. Another success parameter is the number of inbound and referral links to your web page. This also determines the positions of your website.
#2 – Content Performance
It is important not only to record the net profit from sales but also to take into account the resources spent on content creation as such. Here, the content marketing ROI parameter is important. To calculate it, you need to perform the below:
- Summarize all the costs associated with content production and distribution of creative ideas. This includes fees for a content manager, photographer, or videographer, and payments for targeted / contextual advertising;
- Subtract the preliminary costs from net profit;
- Divide the resulting number by the number of preliminary costs and multiply the result by 100.
With the help of ROI, you can assess the rationality of the distribution of funds and tasks within the team. This will allow you to optimize the work on the production of content in time and identify promising digital marketing trends that will potentially work for your business. This can be any type of content – from multimedia clips made with an online screen recorder to publications posted on popular social media platforms, which is an effective approach to corporate blogging.
#3 – Basic KPIs
These are the metrics that digital professionals should rely on when assessing marketing team performance. By the way, these KPIs are a good basis for proper analysis of an ad campaign effectiveness:
- Conversion rate – this metric helps you see how many of your website visitors ended up ordering or buying something, depending on what you entered as a conversion goal in GA or any other service for marketing analytics;
- Click-through rate – If you need to know the percentage of people who saw your ad thanks to social media marketing and clicked on it, this is the metric for you.
Some other important performance indicators by which companies measure their marketing effectiveness:
- The progress of the marketing service in solving its problems and the implementation of the planned work;
- Effectiveness of planning marketing costs.
Indicators of changes in the value of sales may indicate that the digital marketing strategy selected by your marketing team is complex; it doesn’t correspond to the tasks and realities of the current stage of the marketing plan. Positive changes in customer satisfaction indicators are associated with:
- The growth of brand recognition and memorability;
- The growth in sales of promoted goods and brands;
- The influx of new buyers and retention of current consumers;
- Reducing the number of critical disruptions in the service of purchases and consumers;
Establishing marketing performance indicators is an important part of the analysis process, according to which companies plan their work, predict and evaluate the results. In other words, it allows you to use marketing to implement the business strategy and evaluate the role of a marketing plan in the company’s overall business strategy.
To measure the effectiveness of a marketing team, a business should decide on the marketing objectives and KPIs that it needs to track. For example, the goal of your marketing department might be to expand the presence and increase the visibility of a company’s brand on the Internet. A good KPI to measure the success of this campaign can be the number of links from topical sites to the official company’s web resource.
Final Say!
It is sometimes quite difficult to understand how your marketing team is doing and if there is anything to be changed in their work. Having clear KPIs and tracking parameters makes this task easier. KPIs allow you to understand what is happening with your marketing and which funnels are used improperly. Conversion rate, click-through rate, cost per click, cost per action, customer acquisition cost are some of the key metrics that you should track.
You can also dive deep into the business and work with advanced analytics. Return of advertisements, return on investment, marketing ROI, advertising to sales ratio, lifetime value, churn rate can also tell you a lot about the effectiveness of your marketing team. If you spend more than what you earn, then it is already a bad sign, and you should definitely react to it.
Studying content marketing metrics on a regular basis can help you identify unproductive digital marketing tools, topics, and channels. Focusing on the methods of promoting a business resource that works over and over again, it is possible to correct mistakes in time and correct further actions.
