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Mistake #10

No Metrics Or Benchmarks

You probably have a couple of metrics or benchmarks to gauge the health of your small company. Some business owners assume that it’s another one of those excess strategies which you can choose to accept or reject based on how your company’s doing. Many CEO’s have forgotten to focus on them.

There are three reasons why you need to have critical metrics:

1 They give insight into what’s working and what’s not

2 Metrics let you know how much you should be spending to acquire a customer

3 The more you study and use them, the better your ROI will become.

Why You Need Key Metrics

What are marketing metrics? They are a set of numbers that let you gauge the health of your marketing. Key metrics are also used to measure the other parts of your company (e.g., cash flow, profit, and loss, debt, etc.). However, I recommend a small set of numbers exclusively for marketing.

In my book, 5Unstuck, I refer to these numbers as vital signs. Think of them as your “patient chart.” You’re the doctor, and you want a few indicators that show the health of your marketing.

The concept of key performance indicators was created to help you wade through mountains of data and save you time.

Here’s an example of why you need them: Let’s say you’re spending $500 per month in pay-per-click advertising and another $500 on social media advertising. Which channel is the most effective at generating leads and customers? Should you shift monies from one channel to the other? You can answer these questions if you know your cost per lead (CPL) and cost per customer (CPC).

What Metrics Should You Track?

There’s a concept called a “balanced scorecard,” which means that your metrics should be balanced to cover all aspects of your company. I like to apply this concept to marketing. I’ve come up with four categories of metrics to assess the health of small business marketing:

 Pipeline and sales metrics – These could be the cost per lead (CPL), cost per customer (CPC), number of leads in the pipeline, conversion rate, number of prospects added to the pipeline, etc.

 Customer metrics – Examples are customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer retention rate (aka churn rate), lifetime value of a customer (LTV), net promoter score (NPS), etc.

 Channel metrics – These will vary based on which channels you’re employing. For email marketing, your parameters could be click-through rates, open rates, conversion rates, list growth, etc. Each platform in social media has metrics that show which posts are performing the best.

 Website metrics – Your website is the hub of your marketing. KPI’s for website traffic, traffic sources, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc. are good to know. It’s also reasonably easy to do with 6Google Analytics.

After you’ve picked your key metrics, analyze your findings every quarter. Look for trends that either exceed or lag your goals. Also, revisit your benchmarks periodically and recalibrate.

5 Kenyon Blunt, Unstuck, Tulsa, Yorkshire Publishing, 2015.

6 https://analytics.google.com