How to Focus on Actionable Marketing Metrics to Prove Your Value to Clients
As a marketer, you may be great at your job. You generate more traffic, create more leads, and help your clients increase sales. But like most marketers, it might be challenging to prove your value to your clients.
This problem is quite common, as 80% of CEOs are not ready to trust the efforts of their marketing teams. They think that marketers don’t speak the language of management and focus on irrelevant metrics that are far removed from profit and loss data. That means you need to help your client by focusing on marketing metrics that tell the real story and prove your efforts.
In this post, we’ll tell you how to focus on crucial marketing metrics that really matter, and help you prove your performance to your clients.
Align Marketing Metrics with Client Business Objectives
Let’s say you’re working with a dentist who has a few locations in the city. Now, the client’s goal is to get more appointments and also increase the sale of dental products. So which metrics should you focus on?
For Increasing Appointments
Let’s assume you have to set up a website and run some ads to target the local audience in the city. Now, customers can book appointments in various ways:
- Filling out a form on your website
- Clicking on ads
- Calling directly
To prove your value, you need to set up attribution for booked appointments for all channels. You can use digital tools to track online bookings and utilize call tracking to capture prospects arriving from the phone.
While reporting, you can show your clients the total number of booked appointments generated by your campaigns. You can also provide the cost of acquisition of each lead for more clarity into the client’s ROI. With call tracking solutions like CallGear, you can do this easily using our software and take advantage of call analytics!
For Increasing Dental Product Sales
Let’s assume you’ve created an email marketing campaign to boost the sale of dental products. You can, for example, send emails, including an offer for teeth whitening products to patients who have visited up to a year back.
So what metrics should you focus on?
Here, you can report the click-through and open rates of emails. You can also use call tracking to isolate calls that result in sales and prove your value to your clients.
Focus on High Converting Marketing Metrics
69% of B2C CEOs feel that marketers spend too much time focusing on parameters such as followers, likes and tweets. When this is the case, you can’t blame your client for not being able to appreciate your efforts. That’s why you should always help your clients realize and focus on metrics that really matter.
For example, finding out a user downloaded your eBook is great news. But that doesn’t really compare with people who fill out the contact form on your website to request a consultation. Even better are leads that arrive through inbound phone calls with inquiries about products or price.
When your clients are able to grasp the difference between each conversion type, they will also get a clear picture of the ROI you’re generating. So always pinpoint your most valuable conversions!
Qualified Leads are one of the Most Crucial Marketing Metrics
Many marketers measure the success of their campaigns based on the number of leads. But just measuring the number of leads is not enough. What you should focus on is qualified leads, or high-quality leads ripe for conversion.
With call tracking, you can determine the quality of each lead easily by doing the following:
- Listening to call recordings
- Assessing the quality of leads based on call duration (the longer the call, the higher the quality)
- Using call highlights or tracking calls by keywords
Even if you’re getting a low number of leads, they may be of higher quality or intent. So measuring lead quality is imperative to proving your efforts.
Customer Acquisition Cost: An Effective Marketing Metric
Customer acquisition cost is the cost of acquiring a new customer. This metric goes a long way to prove ROI to your client and show how effective your campaign is.
How should you calculate the customer acquisition cost?
Just make a total of your marketing expenses and divide it by the number of new customers acquired during a period. For example, if your marketing expenses are $1,000 and you acquired 10 customers in a week,your customer acquisition cost is $100.
Pro tip: Irrespective of the industry, clients always look to lower their customer acquisition cost.
Look for Anecdotal Proofs as Crucial Marketing Metrics
It’s not always numbers and figures that showcase the real result of your marketing efforts. For instance, how do you measure the influence your campaign or sales pitch has on customers?
The secret is to look into the conversations customers have with your client’s company. You can use CallGear to categorize calls by keywords or call highlights and measure the impact made on customers.
Don’t be afraid to take help of anecdotal proof points and create stories that show how your campaign created an impact and produced new customers. Here, we are not talking about fictional stories, but real conclusions based on concrete data. You are helping your clients connect the dots and get a clear picture of the work you’ve done for them.
If you have the right data, it becomes easy to create anecdotal proofs and connect them to performance.
Learn to Identify Actionable Marketing Metrics
You may already have some marketing metrics set up to assess the performance of your campaigns. But are those metrics really paying off?
To determine whether a metric is useful or not, ask yourself the following questions:
- Why am I using this metric?
- What does the metric measure?
- What does the metric reveal about marketing efforts?
- How does the metric align with my marketing objectives?
- What conclusions can I draw from this metric?
- What changes can this metric lead to?
Running your metrics through the above filters will enable you to differentiate between actionable and immeasurable marketing metrics. So you can proceed with actionable metrics and prove your value to your clients.
Wrapping Up: Measure Metrics that Matter
To measure metrics that matter, you first need to have a clear idea about how they relate to your marketing efforts. You should only choose the marketing metrics that are able to concretely prove your efforts. The business goals of your clients will help you out in selecting the metrics that really make a difference. From then on, you need to utilize the correct tools like call tracking and channel attribution to accurately measure your marketing efforts.