One of the biggest complaints I hear from business owners and marketers is not having the capability to show the value and impact of marketing efforts. Core to this problem is understanding how marketing is defined. Marketing is a science and because of that, not everything will work the way you want it to—results can be unexpected. Marketing requires making multiple assumptions, rapid iteration based on results of those assumptions and a thesis of results. Until the first step (and investment) has been taken, further optimization of actions will be delayed until you fully determine the next best step forward. Each product, service, app and brand caters to a different demographic at varying points in time. There is no marketing quick fix to boost sales and you should be skeptical if someone promises you something that “just works.”
Where do you start?
You MUST paint a picture of where you are and where you want to be. This should be done in a way that can be visualized and easy to edit as key metrics or KPIs change. The metric that matters most is the cost per sale or overall sales resulting from the support of marketing.
I use the word ‘support’ because it’s nearly impossible to determine where someone heard about your company originally or how they initially engaged. It could have been an ad on the radio, over conversation with a friend, in a product review or a podcast interview. You want to prove value by showing that marketing support helped to push sales to the end goal.
How can I create a visualization of my data?
Here’s the good news: I have a free spreadsheet template to help you with this. It has been created to give you a way to show how budgets and conversion percentages can change the cost of sales. I explain a little more about this in the video. You can download the Marketing KPI Visualizer Template here.
If you need help determining where to find data or how to build your marketing strategy using a metric analysis, we can help. This can involve anything from measuring your website traffic to helping you build content programs. You may also want to look into CRM tools such as Hatchbuck or HubSpot that can dramatically increase your ability to track results.