The last step of your marketing makeover is determining if you are actually improving your marketing results. Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing is how you ensure your efforts remain cost effective and offer the greatest ROI.
As we mentioned above, a narrower focus makes understanding what to measure more obvious, while also cutting out much of the clutter and noise.
Setting SMART Goals
Starting out you’ll want to look at both long-term and short-term measures. Begin with setting SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound.
Use a minimal approach when you’re first beginning your marketing makeover.
Some sample goals might be: generating 10 new leads each month, growing your email contact list by 10 percent each quarter, setting up an email auto-responder by the end of the first quarter and sending to 100 percent of your new contacts, or increasing your website traffic by 50% by the end of the year.
Your marketing goals should support the overall goals of your business. It makes little sense to set a business goal like increasing revenue by 25% and then creating marketing goals that don’t support the achievement of the business goal.
Download this tool: Smart Goals Worksheet
You will want to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns in achieving these goals. Setting the right measures you’ll use to achieve them is important.
Use KPIs and CSFs to Keep You On Track
The measurement process includes determining the key performance indicator (KPI) to describe the goal, as well as the critical success factors (CSF) you engage in to achieve the KPI.
What is the difference?
KPI’s are the larger targets and milestones associated with the goals you have set. CSFs are the things that help you reach the KPIs.
Let’s use the website traffic goal reference above as our example. KPIs for that goal might include getting your business listed on page one of Google for your industry and city, to write and post four pieces of relevant content that would help your search engine rank and updating your website to include product and location specific pages.
CSFs for those KPIs might include setting aside one (1) hour per week to write your content, setting up your Google Analytics account to measure and analyze your website traffic, and analyzing keyword ranking for your industry and city at least once per month.
The measurement process should be structured, so there is a clear path from the actions you take (CSFs) to the indicators of progress (KPIs) that support your marketing goals.
Decide on the proper tempo and cadence for each measure, such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Finally, determine who is accountable. This means answering the question of who cares whether you reach your goal or not.
What Are Your Measures?
This is the perfect opportunity for a brainstorming session. List everything you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. Then, choose your top three marketing goals. From there, you can identify the measures (KPIs and CSFs) that will bring the desired outcome.
Download this tool: KPI Worksheet
Measuring what matters will help you get the marketing results you want.