With today’s technology, you can track almost every marketing activity to a T! But with so many stats and figures at your fingertips, it is easy to get lost in the data. This is often referred to as analysis paralysis, and it is more common than you think.
To get a better idea of what KPIs are truly important to measuring your small business’s growth, we asked 11 marketing professionals to share what metrics they pay the most attention to. Below, you’ll find the most important KPIs you can utilize on your company’s dashboards or communicate to upper management to demonstrate your success!
Social Media Metrics
Tracking how many people follow links from our social media posts back to our site is one of our most important metrics. Because we provide products and services to other business owners, we need to know that what we post and share is effectively bringing traffic back to our own site.
Vanessa Molica, The Lash Professional
Brand Mentions
“Prominence” is a known ranking factor for search engines like Google. Prominence refers to how well-known a business is. That’s why “brand mentions” – or the number of times our company name is searched each month – is one marketing growth metric that matters most to our small business. By monitoring brand mentions through Google Search Console, we are able to measure how prominent we are becoming, and how well we are doing as a collection of all of our marketing efforts.
Brett Farmiloe, Terkel
Email Performance
Email performance is an aspect of marketing growth that small businesses often overlook, but is crucial to the success of a business. It is important to track your email list, the rate of retention and the engagement with the email itself. By managing these numbers, you can gauge the success of your marketing campaign and the ways in which you can improve. It is a small thing, but the numbers are always telling of how your business is doing in terms of customer engagement.
Peter Babichenko, Sahara Case
Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score or NPS measures customer experience and can help predict business growth. Net Promoter Score can be calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. If 70% of respondents were promoters and 20% were detractors, your Net Promoter is a score of 50. Not only does NPS help us gauge customer satisfaction, but it can also provide a universal metric across all of our locations.
Randall Smalley, Cruise America
Utilize Data Software
Data is imperative to managing a company and its growth, that’s why we’ve built a whole software suite around data management! Utilize finalized data and projects as a reference to build new projects and re-use, repurpose files that have been already created. An archive with a searchable catalog and metadata schema supports you and saves time finding files.
Dr. Marc M. Batschkus, Archiware
Clicks and Calls from Google My Business
Local visibility matters most to each of our four denture clinics. When people search for a denture clinic on Google, they will see local results first. That’s why we track how many clicks and calls we receive each month from our Google My Business profile. We use Google’s Campaign Builder tool to append a URL with UTM codes. That way, we can differentiate the traffic our website receives from organic search results versus our Google My Business profile.
Henry Babichenko, DD, European Denture Center
Organic Search Volume
Because my company relies on SEO to generate our leads, Organic Search Volume is one of the most important metrics to us. Not only do we track overall organic traffic, but we also track organic pageviews for each of our primary service pages. Doing so gives us an indication of how many potential clients are looking for our services and coming to our site!
Nikitha Lokareddy, Markitors
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetime Value tells every marketer how much money a customer is worth. In turn, we can utilize this metric to influence customers to increase their value by making them spend more, buy more often, or quit buying from a competitor. Measure and track your Customer’s Lifetime Value.
Layton Cox, Marketing Consultant
Revenue Growth
Ultimately, sales is the most important metric for any business, large or small. It doesn’t matter how much brand awareness you have, it’s critical to push customers through the funnel effectively and efficiently. Simply put, any metrics that focus on revenue growth are important. If it isn’t bringing in business, don’t do it.
Kimberly Gordon, Brand Strategist & Marketing Consultant
Yearly Customer Growth
When it comes to measuring growth marketing, don’t over-complicate things. I like to look at revenue growth and customer/user increases on a Year-over-Year basis. It’s a great overall barometer for your growth marketing efforts. Comparing to the same period the year prior eliminates any timing or seasonality effects. Increases in customers and revenue are the most obvious directional indicators that your business is moving in the right direction.
Luke Grant, Principal Consultant
Website Conversion
The marketing growth metric that matters most to me is conversions on our website. If we get 1 million visitors, but no one converts to paying clients, then we are doing something wrong. I’d rather get 1,000 unique views and have 3 converts. Make sure to utilize UTM source tracking codes to make sure you know where traffic comes from; this way, you can check in every quarter of the ROI of each avenue of traffic!
Trevor Rappleye, Corporate Filming
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