Marketing operations KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, refer to numerical data that help you monitor your company’s progress toward certain business goals. KPIs are essential for tracking business marketing operations, or planning and monitoring specific strategies to market your business.
So, while planning for marketing gears your company for successful branding, client outreach, growth, and other benefits, KPI metrics are the numerical proof that a given campaign is actually working. Fail to keep track of these KPIs and you can find yourself investing in marketing operations with a poor – or even negative – return on investment.
6 Marketing Operations KPIs You Should be Tracking
There are 6 KPIs that every business should use to track marketing operations. Get data from these sources to evaluate your strategy, adapt, and make data-driven marketing decisions.
1. Sales Revenue
This is one of the basics, but can’t be discounted. This KPI is plain, solid proof that marketing operations are turning into cold, hard money. Sales teams should be monitoring this performance indicator to essentially grade their sales activities.
How profitable are your clients, and which sales strategies seem to be the most successful? Also, how are your marketing tactics affecting these figures? Do you see dramatic changes or growth? Which marketing campaigns have likely contributed to this revenue growth?
2. Leads
Leads are the digital version of window shopping. Leads are relevant eyes on your website, potential sales opportunities, potential referrals, and brand awareness. Note that tracking leads to your site consists of two different, but related, KPIs.
Marketing qualified leads, or MQLs, are people who have shown interest in your brand. These leads seem more likely than the public at large to continue down the sales funnel and become clients.
Sales-qualified leads, meanwhile, have browsed your products/services and exhibited behavior worthy of a direct sales follow-up. These leads have been closely evaluated by your marketing and sales teams and are highly likely to make a deal.
3. COCA
Cost of customer acquisition is another essential KPI. How much money are you spending to find another business that may be interested in your products or services, then funnel them through the pipeline to close a deal? This KPI is a simple look at how much you’re spending to bring in new clientele. For example, if you spend $100,000 in marketing in a given period and secured 100 new clients in that timeframe, your cost of customer acquisition is $1,000.
How does this cost relate to your sales revenue? Remember that KPIs offer more valuable data when compared with one another.
4. LTV
What is the Lifetime Value of a Customer? How beneficial is it to stay in contact with an existing client and follow up with them regularly? This KPI averages out the amount of sales these existing clients will bring in during their lifetime.
In a B2B sense, “lifetime” refers more to how long your product lasts or how often clients will need to make an additional purchase vs. the average person’s lifespan. The more often a client makes additional deals with you, the higher their LTV is likely to be.
5. Website Traffic
Finally, this KPI reviews the amount of traffic to your website. This figure is much broader than “Leads” above, because it refers to every single visitor to your page, including those who aren’t necessarily qualified leads.
Nonetheless, your marketing operations depend on gauging website traffic figures from a variety of inbound marketing channels, learning more about who these people are, and determining specific data about visitors. Where are these visitors from, and what could they want from your website? Website traffic KPIs offer important figures about the success of your pages, including the number of views, the length of every session, and how engaged the public seems to be with your website as a whole.
Social media engagement and tracking follower numbers is another clean and reliable way to monitor website traffic. By analyzing how social media engagement correlates with website visits, you can identify the effectiveness of your social campaigns in driving traffic. Tracking metrics like click-through rates (CTR) on social posts and ads, as well as the number of visitors arriving via social channels, gives insight into the role social media plays in attracting users to your website.
6. Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)
Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) is a critical metric for evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. This metric allows businesses to assess the financial return generated from marketing activities relative to the investment made. To effectively calculate marketing ROI, it’s essential to consider various factors such as the revenue generated, costs incurred, and the overall impact of marketing strategies on sales.
Channel ROI is another important consideration, as it breaks down the performance of different marketing channels. By analyzing channel ROI, you can identify which platforms are yielding the best returns and which may need adjustments. This insight is invaluable for optimizing your marketing budget and resources.
Tying it All Together
It’s no secret that audience segmentation can enhance your marketing strategy. By tailoring your efforts to target high-potential customer segments, you can improve engagement and conversion rates. Implementing demand generation programs specifically designed for these segments helps create a stronger pipeline of qualified leads.
Using an efficiency metric to measure the success of your marketing initiatives can further sharpen your focus. This might include metrics like cost per lead and cost per customer acquisition. For instance, if your cost per customer acquisition is too high relative to the revenue generated from those customers, it may indicate a need for re-evaluating your marketing strategy.
To ensure that your marketing efforts are aligning with your goals, it’s also beneficial to establish your ideal customer profile. This profile helps you identify the characteristics of your most valuable customers, guiding your marketing initiatives toward attracting similar prospects.
By monitoring metrics such as MQLs (marketing qualified leads), you can measure the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts. Tracking these indicators provides a clear picture of how well your marketing strategies are converting potential customers into leads, which is essential for understanding overall marketing ROI.
Marketing Ops at VSSL
To learn more about tracking the marketing operations KPIs of your business or to put your marketing strategy into skilled hands, get in touch with VSSL today. We can craft successful strategies to help you reach your business goals.