Marketing changes every day, so marketers are always looking to either adapt to create successful marketing campaigns and strategies. At the root of every marketer’s adaptation is data and a lot of it. Data is everywhere, and any good marketer needs to be tracking everything relevant to their business. However, tracking only performance metrics is only half the battle. To stay ahead of the curve, you’ll need to look outside of the traditional metrics for context to your success.
Below, we’ll cover how to track success in more ways than just metrics.
Defining success in your marketing efforts
The first step for any fractional CMO when working with a new client should be to understand the objectives and goals of your client’s business. Are their goals oriented toward sales? Impressions? Traffic? These goals will determine where your efforts go; then, it’ll give you an idea of what defines success for your efforts. Essentially, your marketing strategy should drive the goal you need to measure. You want your marketing strategy and the positioning of the business to complement the other.
Keeping the consumer's perspective in mind
The next question you should ask yourself is, “how does this affect the end customer?” The customer perspective is vital for creating campaigns and strategies that are successful. Now more than ever, personable marketing makes a significant impact on how customers perceive your business or brand, so you’ll need to tailor your marketing, channels, and campaigns accordingly.
While it’s essential to track consumer metrics and performance metrics, don’t overlook brand metrics. The goal of these metrics is to track the attributes of your brand; this is increasingly more important as your campaigns and ads become more personalized for the end customer. These metrics, like brand preference and brand loyalty, will show you how to improve the customer’s experience with your brand and give you the insight to improve your marketing.
Using non-marketing data
An outside perspective, or rather a complementary perspective, is very beneficial to have when looking at the success of a campaign with context. This is important because, on paper, the campaign may have performed well, but in actuality, due to context from another factor, it actually didn’t. Context is key to understanding the results of your campaigns to know if they were effective. A combination of qualitative and quantitative data will go a long way to creating context and insight.
Deciding on metrics to measure marketing impact
While the focus of this page is to direct you toward tangential information to help you measure your marketing strategies, it’s important not to neglect metrics that are relevant to your business. Your strategy more than likely encompasses a variety of channels, so it can be tricky to know which is most important to track. Primarily, regardless of your client’s business, consumer-centric metrics and performance metrics are a must. Typically you’ll want to follow repeat purchase rates, customer lifetime value, and much more to get a grasp on how your customers actually interact with your business.
As per performance metrics, the following section covers the main metrics you should consider.
Traditional metrics
If you’re just getting started as a fractional CMO, the best place to start is by creating a CMO Dashboard to aggregate all of your data. The metrics you track for your marketing strategy are ultimately determined by the goals of the business, the type of business, and the channels you use. We recommend the following metrics as a starting point to build upon:
- Revenue by Source
- Sales
- Market Share
- Return on Investments (ROI)
- Conversion Rates
- Organic Search Results
- Cost Per Click (CPC)
- Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS)
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Cost per Lead (CPL)
Fractional CMO services to measure marketing success
As a Fractional CMO, your goal should always be to solve bigger problems for your clients, and data is the best way to ensure you have the insight necessary to do so. At CMOx, we offer fractional CMO services designed to deliver valuable and necessary CMO services at a fraction of the cost of a full-time CMO.
To learn more about our CMO services or how we can help you get started as a fractional CMO, contact us for a free consultation at (219) 804-0797 or fill out a contact request form here.
