3 Forms of Marketing Performance Metrics for Your Business

Understanding the Value of Your Advertising and Promotions with Marketing Performance Metrics  Marketing performance metrics provides your company with the ability to better understand the successes (or lack thereof) of the advertising and promotional efforts that your business has been making.  By properly utilizing marketing performance metrics, you will be able to measure the value and contribution of various techniques in order to create budgets, allocate resources, and make decisions regarding future marketing campaigns. That said, from the perspective of the marketing company, marketing performance metrics provide the opportunity to justify their own value and their role in the outcomes that are seen from a given marketing campaign or effort. These measurements are exceptionally important as they help a business to continually improve upon the performance and outcomes of their marketing efforts while creating a better return on investment for each marketing dollar that is spent.  Instead of simply continuing forward with what your business has always done, marketing performance metrics allow you to identify specifically what is working and what is not.  Make sure that your business understands marketing performance metrics and how they can be applied to your campaign in order to know its value.

Activity Based Marketing Metrics                     Among the most popularly used marketing performance metrics are those that are activity based.  They involve the counting, calculation, and reporting of numbers based on actions taken by customers or prospective customers, as a result of a marketing effort.  Among the easiest forms of marketing to which activity based marketing performance metrics can be applied are those on the internet.  This is because each of the behaviors of the customers can be tracked.  For example, counting the number of clicks received by a given link, or the number of downloads that have occurred on a webpage.  These are each types of activity based marketing performance metrics.  That said, marketing performance metrics that are activity based are more a matter of measuring customer behavior than actual business outcomes.  A more effective correlation can be achieved by measuring business outcomes such as customer value, market share, and product adoption.

Measuring Marketing Effectiveness

A more significant amount of marketing manager concentration should be placed on a marketing organization’s efficiency and efficacy as a whole.  Among the specific marketing performance metrics categories are those which involve the contribution the marketing has on the customer acquisition rate, the performance share, the rate of adoption of new products and services, the average value of each order, the improvement in the frequency of customer purchasing, the net advocacy and loyalty, the volume and share of business, the customer engagement, the margin, the market, and the rate of growth in comparison with the competition.

Measuring Marketing Operations: Marketing as a Business Process

Operations marketing performance metrics refers to the management of marketing operations as a business in and unto themselves. Collection and analysis of data from marketing functions is performed in terms of its business value.  It is typically accomplished by examining marketing investment vs. margin, total cost of marketing vs. lead profitability, as well as the conversion rates themselves. These analyses are helpful for the development of an understanding of the return on investment generated by the marketing.                                                                                                         By concentrating on these marketing performance metrics, marketers and businesses can have a clearer picture in terms of the efficiency of marketing with regards to the resources required to accomplish it.   The marketing operations goal is to improve that efficiency as well as to form a strong foundation for success by supporting the marketing with technology, processes, marketing performance metrics, and best practices.  This provides a company with the ability to operate its marketing as a type of separate business that is fully accountable.  This means that marketing operations will involve proper strategic planning, financial management, performance, and resource allocation, as well as skills management and assessment.  By using marketing performance metrics, you enable your organization to describe and measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing.  This way, you will not only know the value and contribution made by those efforts, but you will be capable of ensuring that your marketing campaign is accurately aligned with your business strategies, activities, and goals.  With them, the correct decisions can be made regarding the use of the resources of the business, such as funds, people, and facilities and performance can be measured in comparison with competitors.