Essential Marketing Metrics for Your Small Business
Tracking marketing metrics is a key element of successfully managing your marketing process.
Of course tracking a bunch of numbers does nothing for your business (except consume resources – if you are not tracking the right marketing metrics.  Also, you need to act on your metrics – tracking data is pointless if it doesn’t lead to action.
Which Marketing Metrics are Right for Your Business
This of course depends on your business model, but let’s say your business relies on new leads (as well as existing ones) to generate sales.
The first thing I recommend you do is ask yourself – what a the three pieces of information to run my business (or marketing department).
I prefer to know what the quantity of new leads are, as well as the quality.  You can learn a lot by tracking those two things over time.
In marketing metric format, this could be represented as:
New Leads – the number of leads coming in per day (quantity of leads)
Cost per Lead – the specific cost associated with acquiring these leads (always track costs)
Conversion Rate – What percent of these leads translate into sales (quality of leads)
What Gets Measured Gets Managed
It’s true.  If you discipline yourself to track these metrics on a daily basis and evaluate the trends over time you will gain significant insight of your small business’ performance (month over month, year over year, etc.).
You can also place parameters around them once a baseline is established – for example if your marketing metrics vary +/- 5% over the previous month and take appropriate action.
This also allows you to better manage marketing expense and control cost as well as increase profitability.
Tracking essential marketing metrics can be done as simply as using a spread sheet or you can use a CRM system to help automate the process.  But keep the metric data visible!  You need to watch, review, analyze and take action upon what you are seeing.