A marketer who is skilled at using data is a force to be reckoned with. Having data on your side – and the capability to use it – will help you make smart decisions, quick corrections, and find opportunities.
Unfortunately, most marketers get focused way too much on two metrics: traffic and leads. But this is only part of the picture. If you’ve found yourself stuck on these two metrics, you’re missing the big wide world of marketing metrics.
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Do you know the close rate of your leads? If you answered no, then you need to make an immediate change. This is an incredibly important marketing metric. It lets you know exactly how many of your leads are becoming sales.
Actually, it’s even simple to understand the metrics. If your close rate is high, then you’re doing a good job. If it’s low, then you may want to rethink your process of qualifying leads or who you’re marketing to.
This is a marketing metric which can be difficult to track. However, you need to make every effort to track this on a monthly basis. This will give you quality information, allowing you to adjust your marketing efforts to meet your needs.
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Most marketing departments have specific goals for their channels. These goals may be specific to a campaign or general in pushing a specific amount of traffic or conversions. Either way, if you’re needing to judge performance against goals, you need to track this metric.
For instance, let’s say you wanted to generate 100 leads from your social channels. With this metric, you can measure your progress against daily goals. It can even be graphed for an easy visual representation.
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Paid leads, of course, would be any lead you generate by spending money on (aside from salaries). This might look like social advertising, sponsored newsletters, Adwords campaigns, or traditional media ads.
On the other hand, organic leads are any leads generated without spending money (again, other than time). These look like blogging, SEO, social media, and email marketing.
So if you’re a marketing director using these methods of lead generation, you probably want to know how many leads are coming from one category or the other. You may also want to increase your organic lead generation over time.
Measuring how many leads are coming from each category allows you to understand what is currently working best. When comparing them, you can get a sense for how organic lead generation works for you.
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Growing the top of your funnel is an important part of the Sales Lifecycle. Remember, if people aren’t actually entering your sales funnel, all of your efforts are in vain. This is especially true if you’re generating inbound marketing leads.
Obviously if you’re trying to grow the top of your sales funnel, growing your newsletter subscriber list is an important task. Subscribers are highly engaged prospects and leads who are constantly reading your content and hopefully converting.
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This metric is your tool to measure both marketing qualified lead (MQL) conversion and content effectiveness. MQL conversion rate-per-offer is a very useful metric, but it is dependent on a few different things, including how you qualify MQLs, campaign targeting, and how well you’ve filled the top of your funnel.
However, let’s look at an example of this metric.
Let’s say you’re running 2 different campaigns. One campaign uses a whitepaper and a series of blogs as supporting content, and the other uses a webinar and a series of videos. If 20% of prospects became an MQL after downloading your whitepaper, but only 10% of prospects became an MQL from the webinar, you would say the whitepaper has a higher MQL conversion rate.
Metrics make the marketing world go round, and there are tons of different metrics and analytic measurements to look at outside of the ones on this list. Improving the marketing metrics you’re tracking will improve your ROI and the efficiency of your marketing as a whole.
