Traditionally, marketers have tended to focus on clicks, unique visitors, leads and opportunities to measure campaigns and demonstrate their business impact.
While the marketing industry will never fully divert from these more traditional metrics, the competition is becoming tougher than ever before – with 589,008 new UK businesses setting up shop in 2017 alone. To truly stand out and drive a business forward in the modern day, marketers must think more strategically about how to focus their activities and what additional metrics to track.
With this in mind, here are the four most important questions marketers should seek to answer, if they want their campaigns to make a tangible business impact:
What captures your buyers’ interest?
While those in charge want their marketing teams to share their organisation’s amazing vision around new products, it’s not the products themselves that are of interest to potential buyers; it’s how they solve their – or their customers’ – issues.
As simple as it might sound, understanding this thought process is still one of the most important factors in getting buyers to a website. But how can you tell what the customer pain points are, without hypothesising? Put simply, it must be tested through advertising, landing pages, social media outreach and any other form of data collection possible.
It’s this initial insight around what drives a buyer to stop what they are doing and pay attention to your brand, which is critical to getting them to market. It doesn’t matter how small this pain point is either, by finding it and hitting it again and again across different mediums, you will capture buyers.
How fast are your customers seeing value?
Small hint: it needs to be quick. Boosted by technological advancements and increased expectations of customer experience, customers today expect immediate satisfaction. They need to understand the value your product brings to them and their business and, if they are to choose you, they want to see results, fast.
As humans, we don’t tend to be kind to software – we want it to work, we want it to work instantly and we want it to work well. As marketers we have to identify what that value looks like to our customers. Is it the first time they see specific results from the product? Or perhaps it’s a smooth set-up process? Once we know this we can track how fast each user is getting to their own valuable moment and help speed up the process where possible.
Are your customers actually engaged with your product?
This is where data collection around how customers are using your products is paramount, allowing you to determine between users vs. those who are truly engaged and using the product to positively impact business outcomes.
To find this, you need to ensure tracking and analysis is set up for the features and activities you believe are most important in defining how engaged a user is, and then harnessing this data to look for trends. Once you have identified these trends, you can start to understand how likely a customer is to either continue using your product, or leave. This gives us the opportunity to develop a strategy in order to turn unengaged customers into enthusiasts.
Are your customers advocates?
Once your customers are actively using your product or service, it’s time to turn them into an advocate. But how can you encourage and track this activity?
As in all other aspects of marketing, you need to be data-driven. This could be, for example, through tracking your Net Promotor Score (NPS) over time. NPS very quickly identifies whether or not a customer would advocate you to others and how much they like, or (hopefully not) dislike, your product. Ideally, this will be set up to run ongoing assessments on a bi-annual basis, allowing you to track how NPS is changing over time and to act accordingly if it starts reacting negatively.
There are other ways to track advocacy which can help focus marketing teams on the right activities, too. At Looker, for example, we are tracking how many times customers or partners mention us on their own social channels, blogs or at speaking events – this alone has inspired a whole host of ideas on how we can increase these conversations. We’re also creating an advocacy community, to give our most engaged customers more reasons to talk about us.
To sum up, there are a whole host of things marketers can do to track and understand whether or not their marketing techniques are working. To truly drive your business forward however, it is imperative you find those unique metrics, through data, which can help to ensure the efforts of the marketing team truly drive business value.
