It’s the marketing metrics that matter
What are Marketing Metrics?
Marketing metrics are a measurement tool used to evaluate and understand your campaign’s success. Specific marketing metrics are chosen and set prior to your campaign or activity launch and used to determine the effectiveness of your efforts; otherwise, how do you know what’s working and more importantly, what’s not?
Marketing metrics vary considerably depending on activity, purpose and channel, but ultimately their presence is to measure the efficacy of your actions towards your largely strategic goals as a business. Having awareness and understanding of where you sit with your marketing metrics will help you optimise current efforts and forward plan.
Why do marketing metrics matter?
Well as Management thinker Peter Drucker famously states, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” In simple terms marketing metrics matter to help you and your team know if you are getting better or worse. Are you moving closer towards your marketing goals, or further away? Marketing metrics are the tools you can use to help determine if you are seeing positive progress.
Whilst the digital space continues to evolve it is more important than ever to not lose track of your metrics. As platforms, products and ways of reaching your target audience expand, being targeted and tight in your approach and success metrics will help you develop your campaign movements towards progression and targeted success.
What are the benefits of setting marketing metrics?
If you aren’t convinced of why marketing metrics matter yet, then here are seven benefits of going that extra mile in determining and allocating measurements to your hospitality marketing efforts.
Targeted focus – when we try to be everything to everyone, we become nothing to anyone; this is the same with marketing metrics. When we try to measure and achieve too many things at once, we run the risk of not achieving any. When selecting metrics aligned with your campaign goals, hospitality business and target audience you will benefit from a focused approach, and thus ignore non-essential or distractive results that don’t add value.
Creates a competitive advantage – unfortunately not every hospitality business focuses on marketing metrics, however, this presents an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage in your market by knowing your numbers and continuously working towards improving them in a highly competitive industry.
Enhances Return on Investment (ROI) – this is not to say set your metrics and boom, your ROI has increased. This benefit comes from the awareness and recognition of your position in time, the ability to start controlling the input and output of your actions, and thus moving towards progressing your goals and in turn ROI.
Forecasting – when setting and learning from specific marketing metrics you have the opportunity and benefit of forecasting to help plan for future success. Whilst not all past figures are a reliable number, these measurements will help you understand how well you are tracking compared to expectations.
Cost savings – when we know where our efforts are giving us the greatest return, wouldn’t we continue to improve this area? And conversely, when we know a select marketing strategy isn’t working, would we continue to invest in this area and expect different results? This is the benefit of position knowledge – stop wasting your marketing budget on ideas you think are working (but are probably not!).
Identify new opportunities – business is busy, every day moves fast in hospitality, but if you don’t stop and assess where you’re at on a regular basis you may miss opportunities for expansion and progression. Setting marketing metrics can uncover prospects in your market and audience you may not have seen otherwise.
Empowers your team – think about it, when you have a clear goal in mind you know what you’re trying to achieve, what you need to get there, and how far away you are from the prize. It’s the same with your team, providing clear marketing metrics empowers your team with a purpose, direction and pathway towards collaborative success.
What are examples of Marketing Metrics?
Depending on your goals, channels and campaign purpose it is important to select marketing metrics that are aligned, clear and impactful. With an increasing number of new platforms becoming available to connect and engage with your audience, I encourage you to get targeted in your selection criteria and be smart in setting your goals.
Search traffic and website performance such as bounce rate, visitors, pages and conversions
Social reach and engagement such as shares, saves and followers
Digital marketing such as cost per acquisition (CPA), rankings and cost per click (CPC)
Email marketing such as subscribes, click-through rate (CTR) and unsubscribes
Reputation such as quality, NPS and reviews
Revenue including reoccurring and channel
Once you have determined your marketing goals and where your focus areas will be, set your marketing metrics to start measuring the success of your efforts. My recommendation is to be targeted in your selection to avoid being overwhelmed with your data and instead empowered with your insights.
We cover this and more in the Hospitality Marketing & Insights Program in Pillar Three where we accelerate your loyalty and metrics by leveraging data. I’ll help you see which marketing metrics matter (and how the rest of them is a waste of time). You’ll work on all things increasing brand loyalty and conversions, so you can finally grow your business at a sustainable pace.
Find out today how this program can help support the change you’re seeking.