How to Manage the Chaos of Marketing Metrics

How to Manage the Chaos of Marketing MetricsAs a company grows, it must adapt new engagement strategies to fill and sustain a pipeline that grows along with it. As a result of more complex engagement strategies and more diverse tactics, companies must manage an increasing ecosystem of marketing metrics to optimize methods, maintain ROI, and continue to generate new sales leads.

Think about all the marketing metrics your team tracks on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Among other data points, you may already keep your eye on:

  • Website traffic, often measured in Google Analytics or other dashboards, to gather insight about the baseline engagement with your online audience
  • Conversion rates, to determine the effectiveness of your sales and marketing tactics
  • Retention rates, to quantify the customer experience after initial onboarding
  • Intent data, which helps you target specific accounts that show buyer-ready signs
  • Cost per Lead, which likely varies among channels, to help measure marketing and sales ROI

Each of these metrics sets, along with the countless other points you measure, can be extremely difficult to rein in. All the tools, processes, spreadsheets, and systems likely generate data in multiple dashboards and formats that are incompatible with one another. This makes it difficult to efficiently assemble a view of all the marketing metrics that matter to get a handle on the big picture.

Isolated metrics limit your ability to gain insight and optimize your marketing campaigns. Take these steps to rein in the chaos and build a data ecosystem that leverages multiple systems to your team’s advantage.

  1. Inventory the data sets and sources you currently use, along with the vendors and partners you work with. Organize these sources and relationships into a table for easy access.
  2. Engage with your media and data partners to determine what types of data solutions are available to meet your teams’ needs. The marketing industry is constantly evolving, and the technology to support it evolves as well.
  3. Reach out to counterparts in other marketing teams for best practices. Learn how they use their data and what the results have been — through conferences and industry events, social media, or trade blogs.
  4. Take a good look at your marketing processes and identify areas of improvement based on best practices and resources you found.
  5. Aggregate all the information you gathered — data priorities, available resources, best practices, and process improvements — to create a blueprint for your data ecosystem, including the metrics you need to track and the resources you need to organize the information.
  6. Test your ecosystem by using your resources and generating data to refine and optimize your systems, resources, and processes for a more comprehensive view of your marketing metrics.

Marketing metrics, when managed inefficiently, just create another task for busy marketers. By getting a handle on your data and funneling it into a coherent and comprehensive snapshot, you can more accurately pinpoint the marketing strategies that work well and improve the ones that don’t.