Marketing Results: How to Efficiently Measure And Communicate Them

Marketing can be scary – you’re expected to come up with ideas to impress people you’ve never met and sell them your product or service? 

Fortunately, there are ways to ensure your success, so you know all your planning, sweat, and tears will pay off. And when you keep track of metrics, you can show everyone around you just how well your strategies have paid off.

The marketing world has gone through many changes over the past few years. We’ve gone from determining success on brand image to using more detailed metrics. 

Keeping track of and communicating your marketing results is essential to understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

We’ll be looking at the importance of closely monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) and how to put that into data that your team leaders and higher-ups will understand and appreciate.

Importance of Tracking Marketing KPIs

Although it can be nice to see your brand or company’s name in print, there is no way to track how well that works for your business’ success. Real marketing calls for specific numbers and specific ways to measure those numbers.

Marketing can be rather unpredictable, and the way people respond to and see your brand is entirely subjective. If you use metrics, you have a more objective source of information.

These metrics can paint a clearer image of how well your marketing strategies are working, if at all. You’ll also learn more about what approaches aren’t doing you any favors.

KPIs are the best way to keep an eye on the performance of all your marketing efforts.

Additional resources in our Marketing Performance Resource Hub

Key Marketing Metrics to Track

Certain metrics will be more insightful and give you more accurate reflections of your marketing efforts. Let’s take a look at what these metrics are.

Pipeline Growth

Pipeline growth is a way to get a good idea of where potential clients/customers – also called prospects – are in the sales process.

When you measure this metric, you can identify if people are stalling on certain deals or which marketing activities find the most success.

To assess your sales pipeline, you will have to look at all your new qualified leads and new opportunities per week. You have to know if people are ready and willing to make a purchase.

After this, you’ll have to know how many of those people are willing to go forward in the sales funnel. 

For this, there is no one-size-fits-all formula. It will be different from one person to the next. It is also different from one company to the next.

You also measure pipeline growth in recently closed deals, reasons for losing deals, average sales cycle, and how quickly leads move through the sales pipeline.

Get your Lead Performance KPIs cheat sheet now!

Conversion Rates

Conversion rates are the percentage of visitors to your company’s website that complete a specific goal. The goal is predefined by you to measure your KPIs. 

For example, you can measure how many site visitors buy a certain product or sign up for your newsletter. Good email marketing practice will help you keep track of your emails and the effectiveness of this portion of your campaign.

You should also consider adding website popups to your site – they help you generate leads and drive sales.

To determine your conversion rate, you look at the number of total goal achievements divided by the total number of visitors you had. 

It is highly recommended that you use Google Analytics to keep track of your site’s conversion rates. With the Goals feature, you can set up the goals that must be tracked.

Bounce Rates

Another critical metric that you need to track is your website’s bounce rates. This information will show you when visitors have left your site without any further interaction. 

Basically, they ‘bounced’ before doing anything meaningful.

Google Analytics will measure interaction by someone who visited one additional page of your site. The rate that is indicated in your overview report is the total site-wide bounce rate that was recorded.

Bounce rates are calculated by taking the total number of bounces and dividing it by the number of visits a page had. In general, the industry you’re in, your country, and even the devices that users view your site on can affect your bounce rates.

Getting customer service right is vital in keeping your visitors happy when they spend time on your site. If your strengths lie in marketing and not customer service, you can consider call center software such as CallHippo to keep your customers satisfied.

Unique Visitors

The unique visitors that your site gets are a reflection of your audience size. If your website is ranking well in Google search results, you will reach more of your target audience. 

Unique visitors are the total number of people who visited your site at a particular time. It is not the same as visits because that data includes first-time visitors and return visitors.

If your marketing strategies help you get your brand in front of more eyes, you will receive more unique visitors. Creating awesome landing pages will help you attract more visitors, so it’s important that you invest in good landing page software for a professional site.

Again, Google Analytics will help you determine how many unique visitors your site has been getting.

Page Views

This is a more defined metric as page views are measured page by page on your site. You will be able to see how well a given page is attracting views compared to other pages.

You need to create great content on attractive web pages to get as many views as possible. Marketers tend to be too busy to create their pages themselves so animated, static website templates are a great way to achieve your goals in the shortest amount of time possible.

Just make sure that you can access the relevant page view data when you need to. For measuring this data, you will once again find that Google Analytics is very helpful.

Cost Per Lead

When you set in motion ad campaigns, you will eventually need to know how much you spent on getting new clients.

You will also need to know which channels of advertising brought you the most customers. You have to determine how much you have spent to acquire every new customer that your advertising CRM has brought in.

When you know this number, you will ensure that your marketing strategies have been effective and efficient.

Use your financial data to track your cost per lead. You must have all your activity detailed in statistics. Divide the amount you have used on advertisements by the number of new leads you’ve gained.

Marketing: Revenue Ratio

Marketing is what helps a business earn profit and remain running. There is no clear answer to how much marketing a specific business needs to make good money. 

Some companies need to spend more while others only have to spend a fraction of their budget. 

When you calculate the ratio between your marketing and revenue, you will know how efficiently you are using marketing spending to get sales revenue.

Calculating the ratio is not as tricky as it might sound. All you have to do is calculate your total revenue from sales. Then, divide your total marketing spending by this number. Do not include any expenditure that is not from sales activity. 

For example, interest in savings cannot be counted towards sales activity. You should include costs such as advertising, marketing materials (this includes your website, flyers made from flyer templates, brochures), your sales staff, etc.

Search Engine Traffic

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is much more than just a hot buzzword that marketers use. It is an effective and important way of ensuring that your company can find and reach your target audience.

Search engine traffic is the amount of attention you get from having content and marketing strategies that are SEO-inspired.

Search engines help you to connect with prospective buyers or clients. When someone searches for a problem that you offer the solution to, you reach your audience without even doing anything. 

When you keep in mind that more than 80% of people search online for products or services, you see SEO’s value.

To track your search engine traffic, you should use Google Analytics. Who better to tell you how your content is doing than the search engine that is ranking it?

Using Google Analytics analysis, you can find out if your website is exciting and unique enough to get noticed by Google and your audience. With this information, you can improve your marketing campaigns to be more effective.
If you don’t have the necessary skills or feel that you’d rather use professional SEO services, there are many SEO consulting services that won’t ask you a fortune for a helping hand.

Tips to Communicate Marketing Results

Now that you know how to measure your KPIs efficiently, it is time to learn just how to put that data in easy-to-understand language. You want your sales team to know exactly what’s going on, so your communication is vital.

There are several ways you can do this, and we’ll examine the best options at your disposal.

#1. Create A Report 

You should write a detailed report that thoroughly discusses all your marketing efforts and the metrics you’re using to keep track of them.

You should be answering questions such as whether or not your advertisements are getting the kind of attention you hoped for and how many people you’re reaching. Discuss your pipeline growth numbers and how your initial marketing has performed in establishing where leads are in the sales funnel.

Your report should discuss in detail what your conversion rates look like. It should also have all the relevant statistics and numbers on unique visitors, bounce rates, page views, and your other KPIs.

The report should also include information about your market size, your competitors, and any changes you want to propose.

#2. Use Images To Add Context

To add a little punch to your report, we recommend that you add images for context. If you are talking about statistics, you should have graphs to represent your data visually.

The human brain can process images better than the written word, and infographics are a great way to share information in a more condensed manner.

#3. Add Comments and Notes

To add more value to your report, you should add notes and comments. This will also help you make sure that you don’t forget any crucial points or remarks.

Comments will make it easier for whoever reads the report to relate to the information as well.

Include any ideas you have for improvement on specific data and how to hope to implement them.

Your sales team must be on the same page as you, and your notes and comments will aid in better communication and understanding.
There’s no shame in needing help with your team sometimes, and using a solid automation tool will make things a lot easier for everyone involved.

#4. Send Reports On a Timely Basis

For the best results, it is recommended that you create and send many detailed reports.

Do this regularly to have accurate and up-to-date data about your KPIs and all other relevant information. You can use a reporting tool to automate the distribution of your reports and data visualizations. Set a schedule to send your KPI report to your team and your boss every week or right before your meeting.

This will help keep better track of your marketing efforts and their effectiveness. That way, you will have a better idea of how to proceed with your marketing in the future.

Grow Your Marketing

Marketing is about a lot more than creating catchy slogans and engaging advertising campaigns. You need to know your audience, talk to them, and learn how best to reach them.

It is also essential to know how to keep a close eye on how your marketing efforts are performing. That is why you have to know all about measuring your marketing results. 

When you do, you will also have a better idea of how to communicate these results in a way that makes sense to everyone in your team. Combined with effective employee management, you will be able to make the most of all your marketing strategies and efforts.

After all, how can you know how to fix something if you don’t have an idea of what’s wrong or missing in the first place?

If you note everything that we’ve discussed in this guide, you shouldn’t have any trouble measuring your marketing results. Now, go out there and be the best marketer you know you can be!

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About the author

Mark Quadros is a SaaS content marketer that helps brands create and distribute rad content. On a similar note, Mark loves content and contributes to several authoritative blogs like HubSpot Sales, CoSchedule, Foundr, etc. Connect with him via LinkedIn.