What are the essential marketing metrics?

For small businesses, my strongest recommendation when it comes to marketing measurement, is always to keep it simple!

The best place to start in deciding on your metrics is to look at the steps a prospect takes from being completely unaware of you or your brand, to becoming a customer, and then an active promoter of your business.

The Buyer Journey is the framework we use. Once you’re clear on how you guide customers through these steps and have documented that process, you can use that framework to determine your metrics.

Exactly what metrics you choose, will depend firstly on what steps there are in your ideal client’s buyer journey.

Here are some example metrics for each of the eight stages:

It can be tempting to want to measure everything. But you need to strike a balance between having enough data to make good decisions, and the time investment to gather your metrics.

When you’re just getting started with your measurement efforts, just choose 1-2 metrics per stage.

It’s better to measure a small number of very important metrics consistently, than to try to measure ‘all the things’.

Over time, you’ll get a feel for which actions create the biggest wins and returns for your business. You can then adjust accordingly, trimming or adding metrics as needed.

When deciding what to measure, ask yourself these questions:

Ease

How easy is it to gather this information? Who in my business can do this? How long will it take them to do it? It’s important to weigh up how difficult it is to gather a particular data point versus how valuable the information is. In some cases, if it’s very time consuming to capture a certain metric it might not be worth it.

Frequency

How regularly do I need to be looking at this metric? A very rough rule of thumb - If I ignored this for a month would it matter? If yes, then measure weekly. If I ignored this for a quarter would it matter? If yes, measure monthly. If I ignored this for 6 months, would it matter? If yes, measure quarterly.

Impact

Is this really important? Does this tell me something important about how prospects are moving through the buyer journey?

Again, keep it simple. Once you’ve decided 5-10 key metrics, set-up a simple spreadsheet.

Create a row for each of your metrics, sort them into groups of metrics you’ll track with the same frequency. ie All of your weekly metrics in a section together, monthly together, etc. Then categorise each one by journey stage.

Include in your tracker who is responsible for gathering that data and entering it into the spreadsheet and where they will get the data from.

Each time a new data point is added, the status for that metric should be updated. You can use a simple traffic light system, where Green is on target, Yellow is close to target, Red is short of target.

Also allow space for any notes related to that metric or actions that are planned or underway to address any issues.

A note for the nerds among us: It may be tempting to try and automate the data gathering process. I get it! I'm the Zapier queen and a total geek when it comes to automation.

But it's important to wait until you know you're measuring the right things before you invest the time needed to automate the process of tracking your results - and that can take some time to dial in.

PLUS, the process of manually checking and inputting results is a surprisingly powerful step for keeping your attention on your numbers. Try it and see.

Download this template that you can adapt to track your metrics.

If you have questions about how to use this or are still unsure on what you should be tracking, contact us.