By Mallory Green, Harland Clarke Digital
The measurable nature of digital channels offers a number of benefits to organizations looking to plan, assess and refine their marketing strategy. From identifying trends in customer behaviors to examining the ROI of marketing spend, metrics hold the key to answering the important questions facing your business.
While each metric has some kind of significance in your evaluation process, your team must decide what factors contribute to the growth of your company and identify what key performance indicators (KPIs) help you measure those factors. To determine your KPIs, your team must answer the question, “What are we trying to achieve with our marketing strategy?” These need to be legitimate, measurable goals that are important to your business. From there, you can decide which metrics help you measure those goals and mark those as your KPIs.
These goals can be both short term, like consumption of a specific blog post, white paper, case study etc., and long term like building brand awareness. Once you’ve identified your goals, decide what analytics or KPIs will help you determine if benchmarks are being attained.
Once your KPIs are labeled, you can start creating marketing initiatives to help achieve success. What are you doing to encourage customer engagement? Once you have strategies in place, make sure to test and fine-tune your ideas. Incorporate small A/B or multivariate testing strategies to ensure your efforts are providing acceptable results for your team and establish a cause and effect chart to track what combination of variables performed the best or the worst. By tracking these insights, you and your team can determine the best way to optimize the results you have gathered.
Because of the abundance of available data, it can be difficult to decide what metrics can help you achieve success. The key is to identify what matters to your business and determine what KPIs can help you reach your goals.
Harland Clarke Digital® provides managed email services for several Xerox marketing programs. This content is shared with permission. Any views expressed reflect the opinion of the original author(s).
