The importance of continuously evaluating your marketing performance

Evaluating and optimizing your marketing efforts in an iterative cycle has proven to boost brand recognition and engagement as well as company performance further down the marketing funnel. This has been critical to marketing and growth success for many years now. And with an economic downturn and even predicted recession hanging over businesses like a dark cloud, the (rightfully) refound focus on capital efficiency enforces the need to evaluate and optimize. In this blog, we will dive further into why you should start measuring and evaluating your marketing kpi’s and what you can do, today.

Why measure performance? 

Marketing performance metrics (or marketing kpi’s) are useful for both marketing professionals and non-marketing executives. They help measure how marketing spending contributes to the bottom line and how marketing complements other initiatives in the organization, such as sales and customer service.

There are several reasons why a company should track its KPIs:

• To understand whether the business is making money: If you’re not measuring this metric, you don’t know if your customers are willing to spend money on your product or service. This means that if you aren’t getting any revenue from your efforts, it might be time for some rethinking about how you approach your business goals.
• To improve customer engagement: Customer engagement is one of the most important aspects of a successful business because it helps keep customers coming back again and again. When customers feel like they can trust what they’re buying from your company then they will want to come back again for more purchases in future months/years.

Other key insights that make evaluating your data-driven marketing performance so important include insight into your progress towards your annual goals, insight into what areas of your marketing mix might need modification and insight into whether company goods, services, and ideas meet your customer’s and stakeholder’s needs.

What can you do?

All marketing efforts aim to increase sales and create value for your business. Leveraging data improves accuracy in targeting customers, which helps you achieve these aims more quickly and cost-effectively.

The pirate metrics are the perfect starting point if you don’t know where to get started. The Pirate Funnel is a framework that divides your marketing efforts into bite size pieces and shows you where your attention is needed most. 

The pirate funnel was created by Dave McClure and consists of Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention and Referral. Together: AAARRR. Hence the name: pirate funnel. From top to bottom, it looks like this:

• Awareness: How many people are you reaching?
• Acquisition: How many people are visiting your website?
• Activation: How many people are taking the first important step? (For example signing up, installing your app or posting comments)
• Revenue: How many paying customers do you have?
• Retention: How many people are returning customers?
• Referral: How many of your customers have referred others to your business?

The Pirate Funnel was first used by growth hackers, but provides value for every marketer because it  lets you find the weakest point in your business to focus on. All customers go through these 6 steps and by filling in this framework, you’ll find the gaps within your business.

To find the gap within your business, analyze how many people you have reached (Awareness). Then look at the percentage of people that made it to the next step (Acquisition). Follow this process for all the following steps. The step with the lowest ‘survival’ rate is the one you should focus on first.

Measuring effectiveness, just do it

The way you measure the effectiveness of your marketing programs will depend on many factors including your business goals, marketplace dynamics and available resources for analysis. You may choose to measure each program individually or use a composite measurement method that combines key metrics from each program into one scorecard. 

Regardless of how you choose to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, it’s important that you do so consistently over time so that comparisons can be made between different periods or between different groups within your organization (i.e., sales vs. customer service).

About Eyk

Eyk is the new way to power your marketing insights. 

Manually preparing your data is time consuming and unreliable and therefore blocks marketers from adding true value to the business. 

With the Eyk platform you can automate the infrastructure by extracting, loading and transforming components of your data flow. By doing so, you can spend more time driving value from your data analytics.

With Eyk you can:

• Deploy pre-built models to join data across sources
• Automatically push data from marketing tools to dashboards
• Monitor your data pipelines for freshness and quality
• And get analyses inspiration through the data model library

Eyk is now in beta. Interested? Apply for our beta-program.

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