Marketing Metrics That Matter
I credit the operations leaders I’ve worked with in the past for the concentration I place on metrics and Key Performing Indicators (KPIs). I value data because it really tells a story. It tells the story of performance, of interest, and more.
Today we'll talk about what metrics matter, where to find them, and what to do with the data you receive.
Personally, I find a lot of value in simplicity. I find a lot of comfort in standard work and in repeatable, scalable processes. On days when I really don’t want to show up, my processes and systems are the thing that makes it easier to do what I know that my higher self would do. One of the things that we do for our clients is to analyze their monthly metrics and we have a very robust process for this that we’ve improved upon over the years. Let me explain…
We offer a “done for you” marketing service. Our clients are service-based small business owners. We polish and publish their owned media and we create all of their social media and email marketing content. We create print marketing material in some cases and we create and monitor digital ads. For our monthly clients we create and publish all of their digital marketing content.
They feed us their thought leadership and we make it look good on the internet. It’s awesome. They love it. We love it.
Now, as part of their service, we monitor all of the content we publish. We look at how well their email newsletters performed. We look at how well their social media posts preformed. We look at how well their owned media preformed. We look at how well their opt-ins are performing. We track their digital ads. Anything my team and I touch we track it. One thing we don’t monitor is website traffic, but for you, this is absolutely something you should track. We don’t do web development or website maintenance so we don’t monitor Google analytics or website metrics, like bounce rate and click maps or what have you, but it’s definitely something I’d recommend. A good web developer can give guidance on this.
Before we move on and talk about the particular metrics to monitor, I want to define the term “how well it preformed.” I think that can mean a lot of things for a lot of people so I want you to know what I mean when I say it.
Our clients marketing efforts are directly tied to their goals.
When they come to us they want to grow their client roster. After having a strategy session with us, they know what the right activities will be in order to achieve that. When they hire us to do their marketing for them, it means that they now have time to be doing the work that only they can do: Networking, for example. My clients make it a point to reach out to people directly, to nurture their referral partners and ask their existing clients for referrals. This is good business and no matter where you’re at in business, a seasoned pro or a brand new entrepreneur, this is a fundamental component of good business. It’s work that can only be done by YOU.
Examples of goals our clients have: Getting more speaking gigs, being a guest on a specific number podcasts this year, increasing revenue by X%, being invited to an exclusive mastermind, scaling their business, growing their email list by X%, sell X number of digital courses.
We build their marketing strategy based on their goals and we know that different marketing tactics deliver different types of wins. Also, it depends on how fast you want to grow. If you want to double your email list in one month, you’re probably going to put some digital ads in place to increase your visibility or your REACH.
So we know that our marketing efforts are paying off when we have an increase brand awareness, an increase in qualified leads, closing discover calls quicker and with ease, or another way to say that is that the shortening the sales cycle. That last one is my favorite. I’ve had this experience where I’ll get on a discovery call with a potential client and they say something like, "I was just wondering when I can get on your calendar for a strategy session." They don’t ask for any information. They don’t have any questions. They’re ready to buy, like, on the spot. It’s an incredibly good feeling to know that you’ve provided them with all the information they need to make a decision that feels right for them. My clients have this experience too and it’s a direct result of consistently producing educational and inspirational marketing content.
So here’s a list of metrics that you should pay attention to:
Social media metrics would be page views, reach, impressions, followers, and the most important in my opinion are the four engagement metrics: likes, shares, saves, and comments. Remember that this is not a comprehensive list of all the social media metrics that are out there and available to you. This is a list of metrics that matter the most because they help us understand the behavior of the people who are consuming the content. Let’s define what these metrics are and why they matter:
Page Views: This means the total number of views on your company page. Page views is referred to for Facebook and LinkedIn primarily. A comparable metric on Twitter and Instagram would be profile visits. The purpose here is to see how visible your accounts are and if they’re being sought out.
Reach: The total number of unique accounts or individuals that see your post . The number of people who saw your post at least once because it organically popped up in their feed.
Impressions: The number of times your post was seen. How many times people were exposed to your posts. If I saw your one post 3 times, that would be three counts for impressions and one count for reach. Make sense?
Followers: Monitoring your followers is a best practice. People will often say “it doesn’t matter how many followers you have,” and while I agree to an extent, it is an important metric to monitor. The point is that you want the RIGHT followers. For example, on Instagram, I regularly audit my followers and remove bots or fake accounts. LinkedIn is a little bit different and Facebook groups are certainly different. If you see a steady positive trendline of new connection requests that fit the type of referral partner or client you are looking for then you’re in the green. If your Facebook group is attracting new members, again trending upward, then that’s great. Whether you have ten followers or 10,000 it doesn’t really matter. You do want to grow your audience/followers so monitoring the number of followers is an important metric to pay attention to.
Engagement: Tells us what’s resonating with people. What matters to people. You may find that photos of yourself on Instagram are the best performing posts. Behind the scenes posts are often also great posts on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. LinkedIn and Twitter are a bit different. Your task here is to look through your previous posts on the social media platforms you’re on and see what posts earned the most engagement. That will help you decide what to post about in the future. Likes, comments, shares, saves are examples of engagement metrics.
Ok, so let’s move on to email marketing metrics: Email marketing metrics to pay attention to are open rate, click rate, bounce rate, number of opt-in downloads, or new subscribers.
Open rate refers to the number of times your email was opened. Someone can open your email multiple times and you’ll have access to that data as well. This type of data is gold. I can organize my clients’ open rates by highest to lowest and can see a list of email subscribers where one person is opening up their email newsletter sometimes like over 30 times! I have sent that list to my clients recommending that they reach out directly to the people who open up their email list a lot. They’re usually hot leads. You’re shooting for a high open rate.
Mailchimp offers benchmarking data by industry which is helpful to see how you stack up compared to specific industry standards. You can improve your open rate by writing more compelling subject lines. You can take it one step further by trying A/B testing which allows you to send the same email newsletter but will send that newsletter with one subject line to one group and send the newsletter with an alternative subject line to another group and you can see which one performed better. It’s a fun little test which can be very profitable. I think A/B testing is a fascinating social experiment, personally. Just goes to show that the words we choose matter.
Click rate is a great metric because it will tell us who clicked on what in the email. Perhaps you have offered links to your blog posts, to your social media channels, to an interesting article, or two other free content you offer. Perhaps you invited someone to schedule a discovery call with you. Your click rate will tell you who clicked on what and how many times. This is similar to social media engagement metrics because it tells you what’s most interesting to people. In your next newsletter you can offer similar content perhaps. If you’re testing the viability of a new offer or lead magnet, this is one way to gauge the interest.
Bounce rate is the number of people who didn’t get your email because the email server didn’t accept it. This could be because the email server thinks it’s spam, but it could be because there is something wrong with the email address so double check and make sure you have a low to zero bounce rate and that your email is being delivered.
Next let’s talk about subscribers. Ideally, you’ve prioritized growing your email list because it’s a great way to earn market share and generate new leads so growing your list would be important in this case. In episode 6 I share The Case for Prioritizing Email Marketing in your marketing strategy and in episode 2 I shared that email marketing is a must if you want to get out of the rat-race of social media.
Regardless, email marketing should have a place in everyone’s strategy right now, and earning new subscribers is a metric to pay attention to. If you have a opt-in like a free guide or something like that, monitor the number of downloads each month.
Here’s a tip for you … You can increase the number of downloads by taking out some digital ads like FB or Google.
The more of the RIGHT people that see the opt-in, the more downloads you’ll get. I have a few clients with digital courses and when we’re in launch mode, we will take out very targeted ads to build the list during the pre-launch period which has been a really successful strategy in getting more course sales.
Again, you’re just looking for a positive trendline. Even if you have one new subscriber a month, you’re moving in the right direction. The growth rate of your business is completely within your control. No matter how fast or slow you grow it’s totally up to you. This is where digital ads may be helpful. If you want to experiment, try promoting one of your opt-ins by using a Facebook ad. You can target a very specific audience and you don’t need to spend a ton of money. If you have an extra $100 see what happens when you run an ad. If you’ve targeted your audience to match your ideal client and no one downloaded your opt-in but lots of people saw it, that is the kind of data that tells us we may need to re-think the content of the lead magnet. It can tell you that you need to do some market research or perhaps interview a few people in your niche to get some feedback on what kind of freebie they’d prefer.
The last thing I want to touch on here is website traffic. Monitoring the number of monthly visitors, understanding your best sources of traffic (where those visitors come from), how much time the spend on your site, and also where they go on your site is important information. This isn’t something that my company monitors.
To summarize, we covered social media, email marketing, owned media, website and digital ad metrics that matter to the growth performance of your brand. Those metrics were page views, reach, impressions, followers, and the four engagement metrics: likes, shares, saves, and comments. Email marketing metrics to focus on are open rate, click rate, bounce rate, number of opt-in downloads, or new subscribers. Owned media metrics depends on the type of owned media you’re producing but often equates to the number of views or listens, and any engagement metrics that may apply. Website metrics that matter include number of visitors, the amount of time the spend on your site, pages they visit, and the sources that send visitors to your website.
Your one homework assignment is to choose one of your platforms and have a look at these metrics for the last month or so. Consider creating your own dashboard so you can monitor your progress month over month.
Data just tells us a story and how we use that data can help us to achieve our goals in the timeline in which we’d planned for.
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Thanks for being here,
Kelly Smith
