A key part of any marketing strategy is tracking metrics. Without tracking metrics, you will never know what works (or doesn’t work) and how you need to pivot your strategy to achieve the most success for your business. Tracking metrics can be overwhelming due to the amount of data available to track but figuring out what is most important can help simplify the process. Here are four steps to help you develop and track your key marketing metrics.
1. What Are Your Brand Goals?
To determine your brand goals, you will first need a marketing strategy in place. We suggest creating an annual inbound marketing strategy to help you develop your overall marketing goals. You can then use this strategy to further break down the brand and campaign goals you came up with. For example, if a brand goal you came up with was to create more video content each month, whenever you have a new initiative suggested, assess how it will fit into your video strategy. If it doesn’t seem like a fit for your video strategy you can look at adding it to your other content strategies. Maybe it fits better as a podcast or a blog.
Once your brand goals are outlined and you have a method for assessing new initiatives and if they fit into your strategy or not, you can then focus on your campaign goals.
2. What Are Your Campaign Goals?
Your campaign goals are what will help you accomplish your brand goals. Once you have determined that your goal is to use more video content each month, developing and tracking the metrics around the video campaign will help you determine if the brand goal and/or campaign goal is succeeding or not. Some campaign goals may include:
- Creating/posting one video per week for the month of March to help increase sales of a specific product
- Creating/posting one informational video per week for the month of August to increase website traffic
- Creating/posting one video per week for the month of November with a call to action to increase email newsletter subscriptions
These are just a few of many examples that can be used for your campaign goals. Now that brand and campaign goals have been determined let’s learn how to measure your goals.
3. Measuring Your Marketing KPIs
Goals are great but without measuring them you will never know how successful they are. Marketing KPIs, or key performance indicators, are metrics tied directly to accomplishing your goals. Metrics for your video strategy may include:
- How many video views each video has
- How long each video was watched
- How many website visits have you received directly from YouTube
- How many new email subscribers you got
KPIs are only as complicated as you make them. Simplify your KPIs and customize them to your goals to make tracking them and achieving them more attainable.
4. Using Your Metrics
Now that you have measured your marketing KPIs you can see what is working and what isn’t working. If you notice that your website traffic isn’t where you want it to be this can be an indicator to review your campaign goals. Maybe you need to change the content or length of the videos you have been creating. Additionally, if your videos are two minutes long and are being watched all the way through, this is an indicator that you have hit your sweet spot with how long you make your videos.