One of the most important things a marketer can do is provide meaningful metrics that show how their work performed. Not only does it help you, as a marketer, see how your work is performing, it helps others, whether they are your clients, your executive leadership, your boss or your team, understand the impact of what you’re working on.
Without measurement, you’ll forever be throwing spaghetti against a wall without ever knowing what sticks. The marketing community agrees. I haven’t met a marketer yet who doesn’t think that measurement is important, but how and what to measure can be harder to nail down. Measuring the work you do in a meaningful way can be tricky. Because of this, sometimes marketers rely on vanity metrics like the number of likes on a Facebook post instead of meaningful metrics like how the likes on that post actually turned into dollar-producing business or qualified leads. Here’s how you can ditch the vanity metrics and deliver meaningful metrics moving forward:
Set goals for your marketing projects. – Your marketing goals should be directly tied to business goals. These goals will be what you measure against, so make sure they are meaningful, achievable, measurable and, maybe most importantly, you actually have access to the right tools to provide the data you need to measure against them.
Paint the picture. – When you are reporting, tell the story of the entire marketing journey. This allows you to incorporate how many opens and clicks those amazing marketing emails you wrote got along with the meaty metrics of how many people converted because of those emails.
Keep it high level. - This is especially important when reporting outside of marketing organizations. Ultimately, you want to tell the story of how marketing positively impacted the bottom line, so lead with this. Also, keep the marketing jargon to a minimum in your reporting.
Make sure you know the full story. – If there were outside influences and variables that can be attributed to the success (or failure) of a marketing campaign, be sure to share those. A good indicator of outside influences and variables at play is when you observe outliers in the data that you can’t explain with your marketing efforts.
Be honest. – Don’t inflate results or piece together a story that is loosely based on a few select data points. You’re better than that, and your ethical standards (or lack of them) reflect on the entire industry. Not to mention, dishonesty always catches up with you.