Strengthen marketing’s position as a value creator, and fuel strategic decisions with the right marketing metrics.
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Measure Your Marketing Performance:
A Step-by-Step Guide
Deliver the marketing metrics that best showcase marketing’s effectiveness
CMOs are expected to lead the way to revenue growth in their organization. But in an uncertain economy, many CMOs are expected to achieve more with less.
This eBook uncovers three strategies to quantify and communicate how marketing drives demand, including:
Proving marketing’s value to critical stakeholders
Evaluating your marketing budget
Knowing when and how to revisit your strategic plan for optimum effectiveness
3 keys to an optimized, effective marketing measurement program
Through purposeful planning and prioritization, winning CMOs build a firm foundation for collecting and reporting the marketing metrics that matter most to the business.
- Measurement Proficiency
- Measurement Reporting
- Measurable Key Results
Accelerate your team’s marketing measurement capabilities
Improving your team’s marketing measurement capabilities can be a long and challenging journey. Two best practices can help teams at any level of ability achieve quick wins and rise up the measurement proficiency ladder.
Quick win No. 1: Use metrics purposefully.
Rather than add more of the same kinds of marketing metrics you already have, start using new metrics that serve different purposes — and use every metric intentionally, according to its purpose.
It’s helpful to think of marketing metrics in terms of the purposes they serve on the journey to your goal. Our research surfaced five distinct purposes for metrics:
Content output metrics measure how many messages the team developed and delivered (e.g., the number of social posts, press releases or videos created for a project).
Content performance metrics measure how effective that content was with audiences (e.g., the number of likes/shares, views/open rate or even earned media).
Think/feel metrics measure how many people think or feel differently (or to what degree they think or feel differently) because of the messages the team delivered (e.g., audience awareness rates, positive/negative sentiment or percentage attitude change).
Behavioral metrics measure how many people are doing what you need them to do to achieve your business goal (e.g., how many registered, cascaded messages or are self-serving).
Business metrics measure the things the business cares about most (e.g., number of sales, percentage of employees in compliance or retention rates).
Quick win No. 2: Integrate measurement at all project stages.
The most advanced marketing functions collect, utilize and report data in varied, intentional ways across all stages of communications projects. We call this approach “360-degree measurement” to capture its cyclical nature.
There are three stages of marketing measurement. The inputs, outputs, objectives and primary stakeholders are different at each stage.
In formative measurement, a project manager who is planning a new project reviews the summative reports of similar completed projects as needed to inform the new plan.
The new project then launches and communications begin going out, ushering the team into the process measurement stage. Here, the data that the project manager defined as necessary in the project plan is collected, reported and regularly reviewed to diagnose problems, adjust tactics and ensure success.
At completion of the project, summative measurement summarizes, at a high level, the marketing KPIs and metrics by which senior leaders (both marketing and business) will evaluate the project’s success.
When a similar project is planned in the future, the new project’s manager can access the saved reports for use in the formative measurement stage of the new project — hence “360-degree measurement.”
Reap the benefits of marketing measurement investments with the right reporting
Most marketing teams put great effort into measurement reporting without reaping the full benefits of their investment. Excessive data, reported to the wrong audiences at the wrong times, is often the problem. But there is a solution: When segmenting and generating reports, adapt to your audience.
Listen for outputs
Group all stakeholders, from the C-suite to lines of business leaders to project leaders, into the reporting clusters you think make sense. For each distinct reporting audience you identify, ask them:
What do they want in a report? Ask what data types, cadence and delivery format they prefer. Once the conversation is over, examine the preferences critically. Some may not be feasible. Others may not be necessary, as the next two questions will reveal.
What do they actually use? If you’re already delivering reports, find out what marketing metrics they use and what they skip over. If you’re not delivering any reports yet, focus on the first and third questions in this list, and revisit this question after you’ve delivered the first few reports.
What do they do with it? For every metric the stakeholder says they use, ask what they use it for. Consider eliminating a few of the metrics the stakeholder couldn’t identify a use for. For stakeholders who don’t currently receive marketing measurement reports, ask what they would do with data if they had it. Deprioritize the metrics they don’t readily ask for.
Listen for inputs
Marketing relies on others to supply it with data, including internal business partners and external vendors. Take the time to ensure you’re using these resources efficiently.
With business partners who control valuable data, ask if they have what your reporting audiences need. Can you access the data yourself or would they need to deliver data to you? If the latter, how often could they deliver? Can they customize a report? And so on.
With vendors and agencies, check whether all the marketing metrics they track for you are really serving your needs. If a data provider’s reports aren’t being utilized fully, is it because they aren’t delivered in a user-friendly way or because the data itself isn’t useful? Tell your data provider what you need to see a return on this investment. And don’t hesitate to interview other providers to find better, cheaper options.
Once you’ve listened both for outputs and inputs, put the two together:
How many distinct report audiences do you have?
How many marketing measurement reports must you generate to cover all their needs?
What should be in each report?
What are the sources of that data?
How often should you generate each report?
How should you deliver each report?
If you don’t have the resources to generate all these reports right now, prioritize audiences and their needs. Very often, a larger report can be broken up into smaller reports that satisfy different stakeholders.
Use objectives and key results (OKRs) to link marketing performance to business goals
As shifting enterprise priorities have expanded marketing’s scope and accountability, CMOs are at a crossroads. In 2022, 71% of CMOs were reevaluating the role that marketing needs to play in their organization to achieve the long-term enterprise vision. Yet more than half of CMOs agree that short-term execution pressures keep the marketing function from focusing on long-term, strategic goals. These short-term pressures include:
Lack of organizational alignment. Marketing’s expanded scope has made it necessary to work cross-functionally, which increases operational complexity. Yet there is no mechanism for cross-functional alignment on the critical enterprise objectives that marketing must support.
Multiple competing priorities. Marketers must balance the workload and priorities stemming from the needs and expectations of their internal stakeholders alongside self-identified initiatives that drive business value.
It’s no wonder CMOs are investing nearly one-third of their budget in the pursuit of operational excellence. But despite their best efforts at formal strategic planning and goal setting for their teams, CMOs still struggle to cascade business strategy and translate marketing performance to impact on enterprise business objectives.
OKR programs can improve strategic marketing measurement
OKR is a flexible goal-setting framework used to convert enterprise objectives and priorities into concrete and measurable operational results. OKRs are set through a transparent, collaborative process that aligns the efforts of teams and individuals toward driving strategic results.
OKRs as a concept are very straightforward:
- Objectives are a statement of what you will achieve. They should be significant, concrete, action-oriented and inspirational.
- Key results are a statement of how you will achieve your objectives. They should be specific, time-bound, aggressive yet realistic, measurable and verifiable.
You can apply OKRs to measure marketing effectiveness based on milestones that are quantifiable and can be frequently reviewed and objectively graded.
An OKR program enables teams to adjust to volatility and complexity while staying focused on the outcomes the enterprise needs to achieve.
OKRs also improve strategic planning by helping you:
Make long-term strategic goals actionable by breaking them down into specific objectives and measurable key results
Test and calibrate your strategies by learning from the actions you take to progress toward them
Focus cross-functional teams on what’s important by agreeing on priority and accountability
Improve strategic thinking by challenging business-as-usual mindsets
Drive exceptional execution by keeping everyone working toward a common goal
To establish OKRs, ensure you have a clear line of sight to enterprise objectives. Or, if this is not possible, take any form of enterprise, cross-functional or marketing performance goals, priorities or initiatives as a starting point for an OKR process.
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FAQ on strategic marketing measurement
What are some of the most common marketing metrics?
Some of the most common marketing metrics are KPIs — specific, numerical marketing metrics that measure progress toward a defined goal within marketing channels. Examples of KPIs include: unique website visitors, cost per lead, form conversion rate, marketing qualified leads generated, marketing-generated sales qualified leads, cost per sales qualified lead, closing rate, customer retention and marketing ROI.
What are some common challenges with marketing measurement, and how can they be overcome?
One very common challenge is poor data organization. The effect of poorly organized data creates a draw on resources, as teams are tasked with delivering reports, insights, optimizations and activations. Fixing, joining and acquiring data are time-consuming for marketing analytics teams under the best of circumstances. The effort required to work with less-than-perfect foundations of measurement is enormous.
Marketing measurement — especially for advanced techniques such as multitouch attribution, marketing mix modeling and machine learning — requires consistency and completeness of data over long periods of time to produce actionable insight. This can’t be achieved accidentally or organically. Harnessing quality marketing data over time requires design, planning and organization.
Why is marketing measurement important?
Marketing measurement is critical for analyzing, optimizing and proving the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing efforts. By collecting marketing data and analyzing it in the context of KPIs, marketing gets a clear picture of what’s working well and what needs to improve.