The days of measuring marketing effectiveness solely by the number of leads generated are long gone. It’s not only about conversions. It’s not just about closing that first sale. Marketing effectiveness is measured by how well an organisations marketing strategy increases its revenue while decreasing the cost of consumer acquisition. If you are looking for true success with marketing your business, measurement is a step you can’t afford to skip.
There is so much value in having access to specific data and insights to improve on your organisation’s future. There is no excuse for flying blind and everything your marketing team does should be intelligent. Every decision made should be informed by data and the results of each action you take should be bookmarked for future reference.
When it comes to measuring results marketers have trouble identifying exactly what should be measured. Do you investigate the analytics of your website data, or worry more about the result like conversion, downloads, and leads? When it comes to measuring marketing effectiveness there are only a few things to keep in mind as listed below:
Marketing contribution to revenue
This overall percentage of company revenue can be traced back to your marketing teams efforts? The higher the number, the more effective your initiatives. A lot goes into telling this story and it does not necessarily tell the whole story, as some areas of effectiveness may take longer to translate into revenue or overall, don’t benefit the organisation in a monetary way.
Pipeline growth and acceleration
Does your marketing activities grow and accelerate the pipeline. Your team’s ability to constantly fill the pipeline with incoming leads and keep those leads moving through the funnel is a crucial component for the overall effectiveness. It is important to pay attention to both growth and acceleration, as one without the other identifies something is not working as planned/or a re-focus needs to be done to keep the pipeline fully functional.
Conversion rates
Conversion rates; no matter how you look at them tell different stories. You could be measuring based on the channel or based on the buyer’s journey within the pipeline. In the case where the result is for further action, both above mentioned are pivotal in determining how well you’ve done.
Cost per lead, cost per opportunity
Your marketing teams efforts might get a lot of quality leads and do an even better jobs of converting those leads, but should the cost of getting leads be quite high, how effective are those efforts? If you’re achieving the desired results, is it the most effective? Are the leads worth the price? The answer to this could vary, and some organisations find that investing more upfront yields more quality leads and opportunities. Your goal is to find the bliss-point that balances cost and quality.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is especially important these days as buyers today do far more research on their own before ever reaching out to an organisation for more information. One way to frame the effectiveness of your brand awareness is to consider it in conjunction with your pipeline. It you have strong brand awareness, but your pipeline is lacking, you should ask what else you can do to fuel that awareness for more conversions.
It is important to identify a benchmark to measure and define your success. You should keep in mind that when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your marketing a comprehensive picture should be painted. This will include your marketing team’s ability to acquire new leads and conversions, and comparing the efforts put into activities like cost and awareness.