Choosing the Right KPIs for Your Marketing Strategy

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Choosing the Right KPIs for Your Marketing Strategy

Marketing teams work hard to build engaging, persuasive campaigns in the hope leads are nurtured into customers — well, that's the short and sweet description, right?

In reality, the landscape is far more nuanced and interconnected. Modern marketing departments leverage an integrated approach, using diverse channels to communicate with their audiences based on a myriad of factors: industry, location, persona information, and more. For example, if you're a small retail shop, you may opt to utilize SMS marketing to send promotions to your contacts. Larger B2B corporations may find more traditional digital marketing, such as email marketing and blogging, more effective. The point is: it all depends on the makeup of your business and your potential buyers.

But while your marketing campaigns will be as unique as your brand's fingerprint, there's one universal thread weaving through the tapestry of successful marketing: ensuring your efforts are not just sufficient, but optimized to guide prospects through a seamless journey to purchase. So, how do you orchestrate this symphony of marketing touchpoints?

Just as you wouldn't bake a cake without a recipe and leave it to chance in the oven, you shouldn't let your integrated campaigns run on autopilot. Instead, adopt a data-driven approach to monitor and fine-tune your progress. The secret ingredient? Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. These metrics are your marketing dashboard, offering real-time insights to steer your strategy. To master this art of data-driven marketing, you need to understand:

What a KPI Is
What KPIs to Track
Which KPIs Matter the Most
Tools to Monitor Them
KPI Reporting
How to Act on KPIs

Here's a deep dive into KPIs to help you build a leading marketing strategy.

As noted, KPI stands for key performance indicators, which are measurements of progress toward an intended result. If that is too generic of a definition for you, consider a fitness goal. If you want to run a marathon in under four hours, you'll want to track how long it takes you to complete a mile, two miles, and so on. All of this monitoring culminates into a strategy behind how you'll conquer that 26.2 miles on race day.

Similarly, KPIs provide a calculated focus for your overall marketing and business efforts and can help you with operational improvement. They provide a holistic view of your overall performance and can help you become a more data-driven, integrated organization. A more concise look at how they help move your efforts forward:

KPIs provide objective evidence of progress.

Think back to that marathon. There's likely not a person on the planet who would go from never running a day in their life to attempting something that athletes spend months training for. That's because they have no reference points of their ability, unlike a seasoned runner, who has a substantiation in the form of past races. Likewise, if you've never promoted a gated piece of content before, you couldn't reasonably expect that your first attempt would get you featured on Mashable (or whatever your dream goal is). You'd need to work toward it and use a KPI, like the number of downloads of an individual piece of material, to indicate your progress.

They help measure specific tactics to inform better decision making.

If you want to generate 1,000 new leads by the end of Q1, you need a variety of campaigns. You're also going to need to deploy several tactics to encourage user engagement. For instance, your team may be email marketing whizzes, but you've never used personalization tokens in your subject line. These could either increase your open rate, which could speed up your lead-generating efforts. Naturally, if that were the case, it'd only be wise to keep utilizing ways to make all of your campaigns more personalized, correct? KPIs can help confirm or deny this theory.

Your KPIs can offer a comparison that shows performance over a set of time.

Say your marketing revenue has exponentially skyrocketed this year. After celebrating, you'll want to find out why. Consistently tracking different KPIs is a sure-fire method of seeing what went right one year as opposed to another. Then, you'll know what to emulate to ensure the following years are just as successful.

These metrics track efficiency, effectiveness, timeliness, quality, performance, and resource utilization.

This is a large bucket of other examples of what a KPI does, and we've briefly touched on some of them, but they're all critical to note. Timeliness, for example, may not seem important when you're crafting a campaign, but if you're trying to news jack something, the longer you wait, the less impact you'll have.

Section 02

Different KPIs to Track

Everything your business does makes an impression on a potential customer, whether it's your website and marketing content or your sales and service teams. That's why it's essential to take a data-driven integrated marketing approach and examine different KPIs across these verticals.

Content KPIs

Your content is everywhere, and it's a critical component linked to your marketing strategy. Analyzing and measuring it through a series of content KPIs is almost as important as creating it in the first place – because without looking back on it, how will you know if your latest blog was impactful or not? You can know for sure with KPIs like:

Page Views: The number of times your content is viewed, giving you a quick snapshot of its reach and popularity.
Time on Page: How long visitors spend engaging with your content, indicating its ability to captivate and inform.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page, revealing how well your content hooks readers.
Social Shares: The number of times your content is shared on social platforms, showcasing its resonance and shareability.
Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who take a desired action after consuming your content, demonstrating its effectiveness in driving results.
Backlinks: The number of external websites linking to your content, reflecting its authority and value in your industry.
Comments: The amount of user-generated discussions your content sparks, indicating audience engagement and interest.
Scroll Depth: How far down the page visitors scroll, showing whether your content maintains interest throughout.
Return Visitors: The number of people coming back for more, suggesting the long-term value and impact of your content.
Engagement metrics: Indicators of customer interest and interaction, such as click-through rates, time on site, social media engagement, and email open rates. These metrics can provide insights into the effectiveness of your content and messaging.
Content Attribution: A KPI that shows whether or not a piece of your content was the "first touch" someone had with your company in their customer journey.
Attrition Rate or Unsubscribes: The percentage or number of how many people are leaving your SMS or email newsletters.
Newsletter Sign-ups: The number of new subscribers gained from your content, demonstrating its ability to build a loyal audience.
Content Downloads: How often visitors download gated content, indicating the perceived value of your premium offerings.
Content Audit Score: A composite metric you can create, combining various KPIs to give each piece of content an overall effectiveness rating.

Website KPIs

Think of your website as a virtual salesperson. You want to captivate your online visitors, so they're persuaded to keep interacting with your brand. With these website KPIs, you can see whether your website is doing its "sales" job:

Overall Traffic: The total number of visits to your site, giving you a bird's-eye view of your online popularity.
Page Views: How many times your pages are viewed, indicating the depth of engagement with your content.
Unique Visitors: The number of individual users visiting your site, showing how well you're attracting new potential customers.
Organic Traffic: Visitors finding you through search engines, revealing how well your site is performing in the digital wild.
Time on Page: How long visitors spend on each page, showing whether your content is holding their attention.
Average Time on Site: The typical duration of a visit, indicating how engaging your overall site experience is.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave after viewing just one page, highlighting potential first impression issues.
Website Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, whether it's a purchase, sign-up, or download.
Visit-to-Sign-Up Rate: How many visitors take the plunge and create an account, showing your site's ability to build long-term relationships.
Visit-to-Lead Rate: The percentage of visitors who provide contact information, indicating your site's effectiveness in lead generation.
Average Order Value: The typical amount spent per transaction, revealing your site's ability to upsell and maximize customer value.
Cart Abandonment Rate: The percentage of users who add items to their cart but don't complete the purchase, highlighting potential friction points in your sales funnel.
Page Load Time: How quickly your pages appear, crucial for keeping impatient visitors engaged in our fast-paced digital world.
Mobile vs. Desktop Usage: The ratio of visitors using different devices, helping you optimize for the platforms your audience prefers.
User Flow: The paths visitors typically take through your site, showing you how well your virtual salesperson is guiding them.
Search Bar Usage: How often visitors use your site's search function, revealing potential gaps in your navigation or content structure.

Sales KPIs

Generally, your marketing department's end goal is to pass off qualified leads to your sales representatives, who will then work their magic and land them as closed deals. That suggests that tracking various sales KPIs is a fundamental piece of the marketing strategy puzzle – and it is! With these sales KPIs, you can see how your reps are performing:

Number of New Deals: The count of fresh contracts signed within a given time period, giving you a pulse on your team's deal-closing momentum.
Number of Leads Generated: How many potential customers are entering your sales funnel, showing the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts.
Revenue per Rep: The amount of money each salesperson is bringing in, helping you identify your top performers and those who might need a little coaching.
Conversion Rate: The percentage of leads that turn into paying customers, showing how effectively your reps are sealing the deal.
Average Deal Size: The typical value of each closed sale, indicating your team's ability to upsell and maximize revenue.
Sales Cycle Length: How long it takes to move a lead from first contact to closed deal, revealing your sales process efficiency.
Lead Response Time: How quickly your reps reach out to new leads, because in sales, timing is everything!Pipeline Value: The total potential revenue sitting in your sales funnel, giving you a glimpse into future performance.
Win Rate: The percentage of deals your team closes compared to the total number of proposals sent, showcasing your closing prowess.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): How much you're spending to land each new customer, helping you keep an eye on profitability.
Lead-to-Opportunity Ratio: The percentage of leads that become genuine sales opportunities, indicating the quality of leads your marketing team is serving up.
Sales Rep Productivity: The number of activities (calls, emails, meetings) each rep completes, because hustle often translates to results.
Quote-to-Close Ratio: How many of your quotes or proposals end up as closed deals, showing your team's ability to craft compelling offers.
Cross-Sell and Upsell Rate: The frequency at which your reps successfully sell additional products or upgrades, maximizing customer value.
Sales Target Attainment: How close your team is to hitting their goals, keeping everyone motivated and on track.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total revenue you can expect from a customer over their entire relationship with your company, helping you focus on long-term success.
MQL to SQL Ratio: This tracks how efficiently your marketing efforts generate leads that sales teams consider valuable — aligning marketing and sales efforts.

Customer Service KPIs

Research shows it's easier to upsell or cross-sell to an existing customer. Most – if not all – organizations want to increase their revenue, so it only makes sense to measure your customer service teams' performance consistently. One way to do this – and you guessed it – is through a series of KPIs linked explicitly to customer success. To keep delighting your customers, measure these:

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): The ultimate thumbs-up or thumbs-down from your customers, telling you if they're walking away happy.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely your customers are to sing your praises to others – because word-of-mouth is marketing gold!
First Contact Resolution Rate: The percentage of issues solved in one go, because who doesn't love a one-and-done solution?
Escalation Rate: How often issues need to be kicked upstairs to the big guns, giving you insight into your front-line team's problem-solving prowess.
Average Response Time: How quickly your team jumps into action when a customer reaches out, because in the age of instant gratification, speed matters.
Customer Effort Score (CES): How easy you're making it for customers to get what they need.
Customer Retention Rate: The percentage of customers sticking around, proving that your service is keeping them coming back for more.
Average Handle Time: How long it takes to resolve an issue, balancing efficiency with thoroughness.
Ticket Volume: The number of support requests coming in, giving you a sense of your team's workload and potential pain points in your product or service.
Customer Churn Rate: The flip side of retention – how many customers are waving goodbye, signaling it's time to up your game.
Upsell and Cross-sell Success Rate: How often your service team turns a support interaction into a sales opportunity.
Self-Service Usage: The percentage of customers finding answers on their own through your knowledge base or FAQ, freeing up your team for trickier issues.
Agent Utilization Rate: How busy your team is, helping you staff appropriately to keep service levels high without burning out your superstars.
Customer Feedback Implementation Rate: How often you're turning customer suggestions into actual improvements, showing you're not just listening, but acting.
Average Age of Query: How long issues typically remain unresolved, because a quick fix is a happy customer.
Conversion Rate from Service to Sales: How many service interactions lead to additional purchases, proving your service team can be revenue heroes too.

Every marketing team needs to consistently measure a variety of KPIs to fully discern what's happening within their department and how it influences the company as a whole. Without any type of KPIs and their associated objectives, you may waste time emailing your customers when SMS could have been a more dynamic option for you. With that said, the KPIs that matter most will depend on your particular situation because not all marketing strategies are created equally. However, you'll always want to know metrics like who's visiting your site, who's engaging with your content, and whether or not your customers are satisfied.

Section 03

Tools to Help Track KPIs

If you've been tracking your KPIs in a convoluted Excel spreadsheet, you don't have to. As digital marketing has evolved over the years, new platforms have emerged to make marketers' lives a little easier. These include extensive and helpful tools to monitor your KPIs. Some favorite ones:

HubSpot

HubSpot offers pre-built KPI dashboards that let you quickly check in with the elements of your marketing strategy so you can see where to make changes.

Databox

Databox pulls in your KPIs from different sources into one dashboard to measure and make improvements based on data insights.

HotJar, CrazyEgg

Services like HotJar and CrazyEgg offer reports that make monitoring your website user experience KPIs uncomplicated.

Moz

One of the most powerful SEO solutions, Moz offers clear and compelling SEO reports for your marketing strategy.

smartKPIs

smartKPIs, or the KPI Institute, offers training, advisory, and software on all things KPI so you can become a master of the trade.

Tableau

Tableau can connect to almost any database so you can take your KPI data and visualize it to help you better understand what's going on.

Google Analytics

Most people are familiar with Google Analytics, one of the most popular web analytics services on the market, because it offers high-quality, comprehensive reporting functionality.

Google Data Studio

This tool allows your team to easily collaborate and visualize your data from a wide variety of sources. Getting started is easy with their marketing templates.

Section 04

How to Build Custom KPI Reports

Creating a custom KPI report may sound like a pain — after all, we just mentioned several tools that offer out-of-the-box analytics — but because marketing is as unique as the back of your hand, it's worth considering. Numerous solutions exist that offer custom reporting capabilities for tailored KPI tracking, and Google Data Studio is a top contender. Why?

Female marketer

Google Data Studio aggregates data from multiple sources, like HubSpot, MailChimp, Google Analytics, and Ad Roll, and puts it all together. When you can quickly see everything in a single glance, you can recognize what's going on with your business so you can confidently make adjustments over time. For example, your dashboard could reveal your current keyword strategy is not increasing your rankings, or your website's pricing page isn't getting as many hits as usual.

To create visual reports showing the exact data you need to strengthen your marketing efforts, start by setting up a Data Studio account. All you need is a Google Account for this step. Because Data Studio automatically integrates with Google Drive, you'll be able to store and access anything you create from your Drive and the Data Studio Interface.

Before you start making charts with your KPIs, you need to connect Data Studio to various data sources where your metrics lie. In Data Studio, you'll see "data sources" as an option on the left-hand side, under reports. Once you connect these to your account, you can use it any time you like. A bonus? These connectors save you a ton of time exporting data. After you've connected all the KPIs sources you need, you can build a report by selecting various sources, drawing visualizations, connecting data to those visualizations, changing your dimensions, adding filters, and changing the graph styles to match the look you want.

Section 05

How to Act on Your KPIs

Your company's KPIs reflect factors that are critical to your marketing strategy's ultimate success. Without them, you can't measure your accomplishments. And without acting on them, you definitely can't see progress. But making improvements based on your KPIs is more than just a simple action. It involves a series of steps. Take these steps into account when it comes time to make appropriate adjustments based on your KPI data:

Step 1: Make sure your KPIs and associated objectives are documented somewhere your team has access to. Remember that KPIs need more than random numbers. If you want a bounce rate under 70% or organic traffic to increase by 30%, explain why.
Step 2: Ensure your KPIs are actionable by reviewing the above objectives, analyzing your current performance, setting short-term and long-term KPIs, and bringing in cross-departmental team members.
Step 3: Share your KPIs with your stakeholders (leadership, sales, marketing) to get approval and feedback.
Step 4: Review them weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly (the frequency will depend on the specific KPIs goal).
Step 5: Evolve or update them as your needs change. You may need to shift gears during a crisis or downturn in business, and your KPIs should mirror this.
Step 6: Fine-tune your campaigns as needed based on your KPI data. For instance, revisit your subject lines if your email open rate is suffering. If your bounce rate is high, your website could be loading slowly, and you may need to make updates on the backend.
Step 7: Always remember that KPIs are not static. It is recommended that you get rid of old KPIs in favor of ones that make more sense for your current business performance. This will only help your strategy!
Step 8: Celebrate wins and learn from misses. When you hit a KPI target, acknowledge the team's hard work. When you fall short, dig into the 'why' and use it as a learning opportunity.
Step 9: Benchmark against industry standards. While your KPIs should be tailored to your business, comparing them to industry averages can provide valuable context and highlight areas where you're outperforming or lagging behind the competition.

Remember, KPIs guide your strategy and illuminate your path to success. By following these steps, you're not just collecting data but transforming it into actionable insights that drive your business forward. So roll up your sleeves, dive into those metrics, and watch your performance soar.

Section 06

Why KPIs Matter For Business Growth

KPIs are more than just metrics – they're vital for driving business growth and enabling data-driven integrated marketing. Think of them as your company's compass, consistently guiding you towards your goals across all marketing channels. They're not the objectives themselves, but they ensure you're on the right path to achieving them in a cohesive, measurable way.

Imagine navigating your business without KPIs. You'd be like a ship without instruments, unable to gauge your progress or adjust your course across various marketing efforts. KPIs show you exactly how close (or far) you are from hitting your targets, allowing you to make informed decisions and strategic adjustments that align all your marketing activities.

Moreover, KPIs contribute to personal and professional development within your team. They help employees understand which tactics and tools are most effective in their roles, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and data-driven decision-making. This insight allows team members to refine their skills and become more proficient in their positions, whether they're working on social media, content marketing, or traditional advertising.

While accountability might seem daunting, KPIs actually serve to motivate your team. When positive KPI data reflects the importance of their work across integrated marketing campaigns, it can significantly boost morale. (Remember to acknowledge your team's hard work when those KPIs show improvement!)

In today's advanced digital landscape, a scattershot approach to marketing simply won't cut it. Without KPIs, you're essentially operating on guesswork. But with well-defined KPIs, you can craft a focused, data-driven integrated marketing strategy that adapts to real-world results and ensures consistency across all customer touchpoints.

By leveraging these insights, you're not just enhancing your marketing efforts – you're optimizing your entire business performance. With KPIs as your guide, you're well-equipped to navigate the complexities of the market, synchronize your marketing efforts, and drive your business toward sustainable growth through a truly integrated, data-driven approach.

Ready to learn how to act on your company's KPIs?

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