You did it! You finally finished your marketing plan for next year. You know exactly how you’re going to turn heads and really get those sales going. Now you just have to activate and communicate the plan across hundreds, if not thousands, of people in your complex organization. But that’s okay because you set up your strategies around only those tactics you know will be adopted by the team.
The big question now is: how did you define success? How are you going to measure how well a strategy is doing? How can you tell if it’s working better than what you were doing before? The answer is to make marketing measurement the foundation of each strategy.
The following recommendations are based on EMM Group’s deep experience working for some of the world’s greatest marketing organizations:
Focus on one or two metrics. As you design out the business problem you are trying to solve, conduct the research, plan the activation and communicate to your teams, maintain your focus specifically on just one or two marketing performance metrics you are trying to impact.
Avoid adding new marketing performance metrics to measure. Too often, as a strategy unfolds, marketing groups uncover new metrics that need to be measured. These new metrics become cumbersome, add to salespeople’s responsibilities, and are often useless because they are not benchmarked. Instead, strategies should be solely focused on and tied to preexisting KPIs.
Use core metrics to track your impact on existing customers. If your strategy is built around keeping existing customers and growing your share with them, then you need to understand how your efforts impact NPS, attrition level, and account size in dollars for preexisting customers. Make these core metrics your aim throughout.
Use standard sales pipeline metrics to measure your impact on new business. For example, if you believe you haven’t been winning enough new business, work on creating your strategy to improve the qualified lead to close ratio.
Keep the big picture in focus. Understanding which metrics have the biggest impact on your business overall is critical. Next time you work on your strategy, really think about how it will affect those one or two things that matter most to your business.
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