Measuring your marketing is the key to optimising your business processes, marketing campaigns and lead generation.

Ultimately, marketing is a sales lead generation operation. It aims to bring as many potential customers to your sales operation as efficiently as possible. An effective marketing strategy is when potential customers reach the sales point ready to buy with little convincing.

Regularly monitoring and reviewing your marketing activities against Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will ensure they achieve the desired outcomes. Ideally, you should review your marketing plan every three months.

Here are some of the common KPIs you should measure:

Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on Investment measures a campaign’s sales revenue for every pound spent. So, for example, if you spend £1,000 on a campaign that generated $5,000 in sales, your ROI is $4,000 or 400%.

This is the best KPI to measure the effectiveness of all marketing campaigns because it also measures the quality of leads these campaigns generate.

Cost per Lead

Cost per lead measures how much you spent against the number of leads you obtained. This measurement factors out the sales process, and it doesn’t measure the quality of leads. However, it can be a useful tool for measuring how much active response a campaign received.
For example, if you spend £1,000 on a campaign and receive 10 leads, that is a cost of $100 per lead.

Conversion Rate

As you might measure a websites conversion rate, it’s important to understand how many impressions you need to acquire each lead. For example, to obtain 10 leads, you may need at least 1,000 people to see your campaign. This would give you a 1% conversion rate.

How to measure success

Today, it can be relatively easy to determine what marketing activity has led to a sale. Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRMs) can track customers’ behaviour and identify what information they saw before a sale.

If you’ve created your marketing plan based on the previous seven steps of our How to market your small business series, you should understand your marketing objectives.

You should regularly review your marketing to ensure you’re working to your core business objectives. Leaving your analysis until the end won’t give you the time to course-correct, build on what is working and change what isn’t.

How ETC can help

If you need help measuring your marketing activities or understanding which of your campaigns are performing best, please get in touch.

If you are new to ETC, why not contact us for a free business review? We’ll spend two hours with you, giving you professional coaching and will leave you with actions for immediate implementation.