Learning Marketing Metrics

Learning marketing metrics can be easy if you keep it simple. This page will curate content to help you with learning marketing metrics that will set-up growing your business.

Why is Learning Marketing Metrics Important?

Marketing activities and investment are the lifeblood of any organization. The team must have a crystal clear understanding of the markets where the company competes, who their customer is within chosen segments, what that customer considers value and the results that customer expects. 

Learning marketing metrics that support these ideas is critical for marketing success in the bedrock definition we must all have: Profit contribution. In many small organizations, marketing is an afterthought or managed by a person who has neither training nor interest in learning marketing metrics.

I wrote a blog post about attribution after attending the Ad-Tech Meeting in NYC a while back.

What do I Need to Know to Begin Learning Marketing Metrics?

No doctor would ever treat a patient without understanding vitals and doing a diagnosis. Why, then, do so many doctor’s practices hire a local agency to “do marketing” without knowing what they’re going to do?

As usual, I’ll recommend a book to get you started, and you may always come back to this site as the content continues to expand. A book that I recommend is, “Marketing Value Metrics” by Professor Malcolm McDonald et al. He’s one of my marketing heroes right there with Philip Kotler.

Most importantly, though is that you begin with knowing what you are doing today and the return on investment you are getting. Yes, that’s even if your favorite nephew is “doing your marketing.” Specifically, how’s your website? That’s like hygiene today, for those of you who think it's not a big deal if your site copyright date says “2014.”

What Might Happen if I Pay Attention to the Wrong Metrics, and How Will I Know?

I’m not sure it’s possible to pay attention to the wrong things when it comes to learning marketing metrics. Because you see, what you pay attention to gets improved or eliminated. In either case, that’s what you're trying to do.

Specifically, I believe these are the first marketing metrics you should study:

1. The dollars you spend on marketing as a percentage of your total revenue.
2. The lifetime value of a customer to your business.
3. The number of new leads coming in from the marketing you are doing.
4. The percentage of the time those leads convert to opportunities, and those convert to new customers.
5. An estimate of the size of the market for your products and services (Addressable Market). Is it growing, or shrinking? What is your share of that market? Is it growing or shrinking?

The above is enough to get you started, and I’ll flesh out how to do each of these in subsequent blog posts - so stop back often or sign-up for the newsletter!

Measuring is What Creates Marketing Success

When you pay attention to how the above marketing metrics are performing in your business, you’re on your way to growth! When learning marketing metrics, keep an open mind, and be willing to shift strategies and tactics as you gather information about what might be working and what isn’t. 

And, have fun!

Learning marketing metrics is an activity where you should always seek to stay engaged. Admittedly, there are new tools introduced often that claim to make it easier and herald that if you don’t use the shiny new object, you’ll be left behind. With this site, I am to help you avoid all of that by keeping on top of what’s new out there for you.