Metrics: What to Measure this year?
A new year is a perfect opportunity to set new goals, but it is also the perfect opportunity to think about the metrics that you want (and need) to measure. If you are not tracking metrics, you will not be able to forecast for the year ahead, evaluate your current offerings and activities and make decisions based on data.
Sales: What to Measure?
Start with measuring your sales. Whether you sell a product or a service it is important that you measure your sales and conversions. For example, you might measure:
- Daily and Monthly Sales Trends – Keeping an eye on daily and Monthly sales can help you track conversions from your marketing activities such as ad campaigns, email promotions, and other regular activities that you are investing your time in.
- Monthly/Annual Recurring Revenue – if you sell to members on a recurring basis or have a membership model, keep track of this revenue separately from your one-off sales.
- Your Refunds and Cancellations – Measure your refunds and cancellations, so that you can address any issues in a proactive manner.
- Your conversions from Free to Paid – if you offer a free product or trial measure your conversions. This can help your forecast as well as help you identify what conversions techniques are working for you.
Marketing: What to Measure
Next measure your marketing activities. This will include any activities that you are carrying out to market your product or services such as any ad campaigns, email promotions, social media marketing and other PR campaigns.
- Click-through rate (CTR) – Click through rate measures the number of clicks or submissions a call-to-action receives. Whether on your website, through an email, social media post or ad, measuring the click through rate of CTAs offers you an understanding of what messages successfully convert your audience, and which channels these messages excel on.
- Leads per channel/activity – Measure how many leads are generated per channel/activity can help you work out where to focus your efforts and what is working well. If a channel isn’t working particularly well – knowing this can help you identify why.
- Return on investment – keep track of the ROI for your marketing campaigns. Look at metrics such as cost per lead, cost per sale etc.
Networking: What to Measure
If you are using networking as one of your visibility strategies it is likely that you are using networking to generate referrals and leads. Therefore is it important to measure both the networking activities that you are going (time invested etc) and the leads that you are generating from attending networking events.
By way of example, you might measure by Networking Group:
- Number of Activities
- Amount of Time Spent
- Number of Referrals (Both given and received)
- Number of Sales
- Total Value of Sales
Tailor what you measure to suit your needs. What you measure will depend on your networking activities (and your networking goals).
If you have any “key” networking activities such as attending a conference or presenting a talk at an event set aside separate goals and measurements for these.
Blogging: What to Measure?
Finally, measure your writing and content marketing. On your blog or company website it is important to measure the following:
- Your Visitors – measure how many people are visiting your website. In particular, look at how many people are reading individual blog posts/articles – this can help you work out what your audience wants to read and inform your content strategy going forward.
- Your Leads – as well as your leads from other marketing activities, measure the leads you get from your blog posts/website.
- Your Subscribers – looking at how many people subscribe to your blog provides an indicator of the quality and consistency of your content.
- Social Media Shares – Social media can be a key driver of short-term traffic. Look at the historic shares for your blog posts to determine which types get the most short-term traffic from social media.
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