Marketing involves a lot of ambiguous activities, and hence might just be the most misunderstood function in the business! Do you feel my pain?
As marketers, we are always struggling to find metrics beyond the superficial vanity ones (likes, shares and traffic) to show for our efforts. In addition, constant experimentation and monitoring is also needed to continuously improve. So how do you do this? In this webinar, Rahul Thomas Mathew, Product Marketing Manager at Jifflenow, answers these exact questions and talks about the key marketing metrics that you need to focus on and their importance. In case you missed it, don’t you worry. We’ve got you covered.
And, here are the questions that came in during the session.
Key Marketing Metrics [Webinar Questions]
Q1. What are the average timelines to review each channel’s effectiveness, to have good efficiency or productivity?
Ideally, you need to constantly track what is happening. In case you are a startup, then everything is new for you and you wouldn’t know what to concentrate on. Therefore, set monthly goals, targets and see how that’s performing. You will need to give yourself a year’s time to see the results of your efforts. Because it would be difficult to see solid results right from the inception.
So, setting a time frame of 6-12 months would help you analyze your results better and set goals accordingly. But that does not mean that you should not keep pushing or making efforts while you wait. Keep posting and investing efforts in each channel at least once a week, to see results.
Q2. What are the key indicators for B2C closure rates?
If this is in terms of social media, the indicators would be hard to surmise. This is mainly due to the fact that they differ for every business.
You need to evaluate who your audience is and where they spend their time. If they spend more time on Twitter, then that should be the focus of your campaigns and you need to set higher goals for Twitter than, say, Facebook.
To engage your customers, make sure that you have targeted content on those channels, which will incentivize them to come on board with you. Now, you can start setting goals for these platforms and see how that works out.
The indicators for your performance would keep evolving over time, and hence it is important to not get complacent. Keep changing your goals, because the channels that worked for you might not give consistent results, while something new might give you the desired results. Constantly evaluate yourself and keep curating your content because the indicators for closure will keep evolving over time.
Q3. How do you set marketing budgets?
Ideally, you should have a marketing plan in place before you start looking at fixing a budget. Accordingly, you can identify which channels you need to focus more on and what platforms you can choose to cut down on. This will help you distribute your costs effectively based on what you plan to achieve with your marketing efforts. But don’t restrict yourself because of your budget.
In terms of the metrics, once you start measuring, you will see certain channels showing better results than others and that is where you should concentrate your cash flow on. Similarly, when you find the ROI on certain channels to be low, then you shouldn’t hesitate to pull the plug on them. Therefore, have a flexible budget plan that you can move around to accommodate your marketing needs, and be willing to accommodate any additional expenses that may arise.
Q4. How do you co-relate branding with sales conversion?
From a startup perspective, it is very important to have a strong positioning when it comes to the market. Most of the brands today try to attract customers by telling stories. But when you build a story around your brand, you must make sure that it is one that resonates with the core values of your business. If you are unable to back up the brand value with the actual product, then you would lose out on sales. So, make sure that the alignment of the message and the actual product are consistent with each other so that you can increase your conversions.
The best example of this would be, Apple. From the very beginning, they have been telling a story of products that are easy to use, simple and of high quality. They have made sure that their products stay in line with the promise of innovation, so much so that Apple has become the quintessential example of what brands strive to imitate.
(For more inputs on online branding, take a look at this webinar)
Q5. How do you calculate the average lead closure time?
The first thing you should do is look at the quality of leads that you are bringing in. Some of these leads would be qualified and some might not make any sense for your business.
For example, at Jifflenow, we target a group of companies who are prospects. We then try to qualify those leads based on requirements and send these sales-ready leads to the sales team. Then we ensure that we have marketing campaigns running to get these leads to sign up for a demo. When these leads sign up for a demo, we know that we are on the right track.
Though, the formula to calculate conversion rate is pretty simple, the average closure time is highly volatile as it depends on a number of factors. But, you can get a picture based on the difference between when the lead enters your system to when they converted.
Q6. Can you suggest a few tools to analyze the key marketing metrics and track marketing campaigns efficiency?
We use Google Analytics to track our traffic and HubSpot to track our email marketing campaigns. Use a tool that will work best for your organization, as there are many tools that are built for various businesses. For effectiveness of your social media campaigns, you can use Facebook/Twitter analytics, Hootsuite etc.
LeadSquared is another great marketing automation tool that helps you track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and measure key marketing metrics. (Plug: It has now been ranked among the top 10 Marketing Automation solutions by GetApp, G2 Crowd, and TrustRadius.)
(You can sign up for an online demo)
Q7. What would you call the most effective lead generation activity?
It is not just one activity that gives you the best leads. For instance, although email marketing may be one of the best sources for generating quality leads for a business, one cannot rely on email marketing alone. You need to understand the psyche of your customers, their needs and the places they visit to design appropriate lead generation channels. Once you understand this, you can easily identify which channel works for your company.
At Jifflenow, we attend a lot of events and conduct a lot of webinars which has given us a lot of leads. Instead of trying to identify the best lead generation channel, focus on the value that your product has to offer and the message that you wish to communicate to your audience. This would help in identifying your best lead sources and help you capitalize on it.
(You can learn more about lead generation from the LeadSquared blog) :)
Q8. I am working on email marketing campaigns. How can I get good open rates?
While running email campaigns there are a number of factors that you need to keep in mind. It eventually comes down to the content. However, the open and click rates also depend on:
- subject line
- list relevance
- list segmentation
- IP history (if it lands in spam)
- target audience
(The LeadSquared blog has several posts on email marketing and more specifically, open rates and click-through rates, targeted email marketing and how to prevent your emails from hitting spam. Do check them out.)
Q9. What are the industry standards for CTR of emails for a B2C company?
Here are the current industry standards for click-through rates of email campaigns as published by Smart Insights and MailChimp. This should give you an idea of the benchmarks for each industry.
Bonus: You can also follow these email marketing best practices for better results.
You can access all previous marketing webinars here.
