How do you know if your marketing efforts and operating strategies are helping your business? A boost in revenue and customers is a good indicator, but most businesses do more than one thing to bring business to their stores and keep it. How do you know which marketing effort is helping and which one is wasting money? To figure this out, we have what are called key performance indicators, or KPIs.
Information and data are the most important tools for finding marketing success. Without them, you can’t properly conceive what is useful marketing content or target your marketing efforts either. Data tells you what kind of products and services your target audience is interested in, and if your target isn’t interested in what you have to offer, data will help find one that is.
What Are Some Key Performance Indicators?
A quality KPI is an indicator within data where you can tell if the audience you’re targeting is interested in your product or service. Some KPIs are better than others, and some work in tandem with others to give business owners a full understanding of how their marketing is doing. We can explain what some KPIs are and how to follow them.
Sales Revenue
Sales revenue can feel like an obvious KPI. “Oh, are you losing money after spending so much on marketing for months on end? Your marketing tactics probably aren’t working.” It’s easy to make assumptions, but there is usually more going on underneath the surface.
The thing is, you need to spend money on marketing to eventually make money. More often than not, when you first start marketing, you’re going to get little results, if any. This means that you can’t use profit as an accurate measure of marketing success until you’ve put in a lot of marketing work.
Revenue is a much better KPI because it tracks how much money and sales your business is generating. If your marketing efforts increase, and a few days to a week later, you see your revenue rising, your marketing is working. Profit or ROI is almost always going to be in the negative when you’re just starting. It’s incredibly difficult to start a business and immediately start making a profit or start your marketing and get results.
Impressions and Clicks
Impressions are how often people see your ads and links, and clicks are the number of people who click on the ad. While they are two separate KPIs, they work best when taken into consideration together.
Through the number of marketing impressions and clicks you garner, you can see what aspect of your marketing needs improvement. If you have a lot of impressions on your ads or your website but not a lot of clicks and your sales revenue is going down, you may need to work on the quality of your marketing content. You’re getting the right keywords, but the content is not keeping them.
Vice versa, if you have a high click-thru rate–the percentage of people who click on your ad or website–but your overall impressions are low, you have good content and the wrong keywords. This KPI directly helps you understand and improve your marketing content so you can make it work.
Customer Retention
This KPI targets your business’s operating strategies more than its marketing. Marketing brings in new customers, but your operating strategies keep customers. Look through your receipts and your online users. You should be recording how many customers are new customers and how many are returning customers.
The divide between new and returning customers depends on how old your business is. The newer you are, the newer your audience will be, but after a while, your business should be 60 to 70% returning customers.
Returning customers spend more because they already trust you, they bring people to your business, and they build their sense of brand loyalty. When you notice that long after your business has opened that your customers are mainly new faces, you need to dial down on your marketing efforts and exponentially increase your efforts to make your current customers happy.
Other KPIs You Should Track During Your Marketing and Business Operations
There are dozens of KPIs you can and should track when marketing and operating. We highlighted a few already, but here are some more that can help you understand your marketing and operational data.
- Unique Pageviews: This is the number of different people visiting your website within a set time.
- Cost-per-click: This is the amount of money an ad platform charges you every time someone clicks on one of your ads. Ad platforms can be sites like Google, Bing, or Facebook. Different sites separate ads differently. For example, Google separates them by keyword instead of content.
- Marketing Return on Investment (ROI): This is the number of profits you collect during and immediately after a marketing campaign.
- Social Media Engagement: This is the number of people who like, respond, and repost your social media posts, campaigns, and promotions.
Contact ENX2 Marketing for Help Utilizing KPIs
Key performance indicators can help you optimize your business on every level, from your marketing to your in-store operations. The easiest way to fail your business is to not look for metrics you can understand to measure your success or lack thereof. In this digital world, we can’t hope old tactics alone, like spreading the word, posting flyers, and referrals will bring in business.
But these technological trackers aren’t the easiest thing for everyone to understand. If you need to spend your time running your business instead of tracking how it’s doing and rearranging your marketing, contact a team who can. ENX2 Marketing can keep track of your online marketing, website, and more to better inform you of what you should be doing.
With our team, you can do what you do best without sacrificing what your business needs. Contact ENX2 Marketing today.
