Sometimes brands embrace new marketing campaigns as a Hail Mary effort to increase revenues. While new campaigns are always exciting, a lack of measurement and accountability means your marketing efforts can actually hurt you — and you probably won’t realize it until it’s too late. 

As a growing business, you have to see revenues increase, or you’ll perish. So you have to ask yourself whether your marketing, in its current state, is helping you grow. 

The only way to know for sure is to track your metrics. Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are essential metrics that help you understand where your budget and resources are best spent.

But not just any data points will do. Ninety-five percent of marketing professionals agree that KPIs need to tie into your broad business goals. By zeroing in on a brand’s vision to understand the target market, product positioning and more, you’ll arrive at a structured approach to marketing with built-in accountability. 

While many brands track KPIs themselves, roadblocks often get in the way of real improvements. If you’re tracking your data, you have the power to overcome these obstacles. Understand how your brand can reverse these three marketing missteps to finally understand marketing success. 

1. You don’t measure meaningful data

Seventy-six percent of marketers make decisions based on analytics. But what if your data is flawed? What if it isn’t telling the whole story? 

For example, high acquisition costs and low client lifetime value are critical to your brand’s success. However, most marketing departments focus on KPIs that are easy to track but don’t affect the bottom line, like social media engagement or email open rates. 

The Solution

Marketers have to attribute their efforts directly to the bottom line with data that matters — otherwise, you can’t prove what’s moving the needle. 

For proper marketing attribution, you need to track metrics that drive sales. This data is a better predictor of your marketing efforts than other KPIs. Instead of social media likes or website traffic, track metrics such as: 

• Marketing leads
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS)
• Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)
• Percentage WIG (Widely Important Goal) achieved

Keep in mind that metrics aren’t one size fits all. Your tactical metrics and lead generation metrics will differ significantly from other businesses. That’s especially true if you have a brand with multiple locations, like a restaurant or medical practice, and you want to compare performance between locations. 

In addition to customized metrics specific to your business, a fractional chief marketing officer (CMO) will also help you optimize revenue growth, ROAS and more. 

2. Your product or service doesn’t stand out

Sometimes the issue isn’t with your marketing. Brands sometimes have deeper problems with:

• Product-market fit
• The competitive landscape
• Audience expectations

It’s difficult to measure marketing success if there’s a mismatch between your solution and the market. If your product doesn’t stand out, you’re facing an uphill battle that will put your marketing resources to the test. 

The solution

Your business is complex. That’s why a fractional CMO is the best solution for marketing woes: they address your problems holistically to get results across the business, not just in marketing. 

yorCMO identifies inefficiencies with a proven process that includes:

• Analyzing your current metrics
• Studying your competitors
• Analyzing how your product is positioned to customers 
• An audit of current marketing spend, tactics, and results
• Interviewing buyers and channel partners

You may need to fix underlying business issues before measuring your true marketing success. See more results from your marketing campaign with an expert CMO who identifies more opportunities for business-wide improvements. 

3. You’re valuing vanity metrics

Are you focusing too much on vanity metrics? These fluffy KPIs are easier to track, but when it comes to ROI, they’re DOA — dead on arrival. 

It’s difficult to attribute revenue to marketing efforts, so many marketing teams track vanity metrics to demonstrate their progress. This includes metrics like: 

• Likes
• Shares
• Comments
• Followers
• Email open rates
• Video views
• Website traffic
• Bounce rates
• Time on site

These data points have some value, but they don’t give you a solid understanding of how marketing affects your earnings. 

We recently optimized Google Ads for a client and dramatically increased their quality and number of leads. However, the client was hung up on their decreasing website traffic numbers. They were too focused on vanity metrics: these numbers made the client feel like they were making progress, but the KPIs actually did little for the business. By investing in a fractional CMO, the client moved past vanity metrics with unbiased, professional support that focused their efforts for success. 

The solution

The solution to vanity metrics is shifting your attention to KPIs that matter. Growth-focused companies should focus on revenue-centric metrics to understand the actual value of their marketing. This includes metrics like: 

• ROAS
• Percentage WIG
• Customer lifetime value
• Items per order
• Renewal rate
• Uninstalls
• Trial conversion rates
• Sentiment analysis
• Referral program growth

These actionable metrics show the productivity of your marketing team and the profitability of your investment in marketing. When in doubt, a fractional CMO can offer an expert outside opinion of which metrics would be most effective for your business. 

The bottom line

ROI is a critical but elusive piece of the puzzle for marketers. The truth is that the right KPIs and metrics will make it easier to measure your marketing success so you invest your resources in what matters most. Find what works for your brand. Start by avoiding these three common missteps and optimizing your marketing efforts to drive real growth. 

Fractional support is the best way to tap into the expertise of a CMO while optimizing your marketing resources. Thanks to their varied experience and proven processes, fractional CMOs deliver more for less. Get unbiased, professional help from C-suite marketers who are invested in your success: try yorCMO now.

It’s About You, Not Us

Keep it simple – you have other important things to do.  Book a free chat with us and we’ll discuss your needs and business goals. Wherever you’re going in your business, we can help!

Book a free 30-minute consultation today to see if our model is the right fit for your business.

Info@yorCMO.com
402.807.5414

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