What are Marketing KPIs?

Marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are specific, numerical marketing metrics that organizations track in order to measure their progress towards a defined goal within your marketing channels. 


When it comes to setting and tracking your marketing KPIs, many marketers and business owners are fully aware of the usual suspects.
Sales revenue. Leads. Cost per acquisition.
But there are a number of other KPIs that you should be tracking in order to execute a more successful marketing campaign.


No one wants to support a marketing activity that's losing their company money. By tracking the right marketing KPIs, your company will be able to make adjustments to various strategies and budgets.
Without the right ones, however, your company might be reporting and making decisions based on misleading information.

The 10 Most Important Marketing KPIs You Should Be Tracking

1. Sales Revenue

How much revenue has your inbound marketing campaign brought your company?
Understanding your sales revenue is important to knowing how effective your inbound marketing campaign is. No company wants to spend money on something that isn't generating money.
Most likely you would move that money to other marketing activities. To determine your sales revenue from inbound marketing you must first have a thorough understand of what you mean by inbound and outbound marketing.
You can calculate your sales revenue from inbound marketing by utilizing the following calculation.

(Total sales for the year) - (Total revenue from customers acquired through inbound marketing)

Note: At IMPACT, we track this metric and a host of others for clients in a custom Databox template. You can get the template for yourself here!

2. Cost Per Lead

Not only do you want to calculate your customer acquisition costs for inbound marketing, but outbound marketing as well. How much is it costing you to acquire a customer through inbound marketing versus outbound marketing?
Calculating your customer acquisition costs requires the integration of your marketing automation and CRM platforms as well as accounting for all relevant costs associated with ERP integration.
Calculating CAC for inbound marketing, relevant costs include:

• Manpower (creative and technical)
  
• Technology and software
  
• General overhead

Calculating CAC for outbound marketing, relevant costs include:

• Advertising
  
• Marketing distribution 
  
• Manpower (sales and marketing)
  
• General overhead

Once calculating the costs associated with your inbound and outbound marketing campaigns, you can directly account for new sales, as well as allocate particular budgets for each campaign.
If your company is utilizing mostly inbound marketing, you can break down that component further by campaign types then assess how successful and profitable each activity is. When you know that, you can start implementing activities to improve over time.

3. Customer Value

With inbound marketing, there is no better way to measure customer value than reach out to your current customers. Not only can doing this help you keep in contact with leads, but it can also help reduce churn, keep your customers happy, and expand your customers lifetime value.
You can calculate the lifetime value of your customers by using the following calculation:

(Average sale per customer) x (Average number of times a customer buys per year) x (Average retention time in months or years for a typical customer)

A great way to increase the lifetime value of your customers is by developing lead nurturing campaigns that reach out to existing customers.
Providing you and your sales team the opportunity to inform existing customers about new services, products, and resources.

4. Inbound Marketing ROI

Every company wants to see their return on investment!
Calculating your inbound marketing return on investment is huge to help assess your monthly and annual performance. Equally important is the ability to start planning strategies and budgets for the following year or even months.
You don't want to continue adding money or increasing your budget for a marketing activity that is costing your company money. So, no matter what marketing activity your company is using, your return on investment will determine the future with that activity.
Use the formula below to calculate your inbound marketing ROI:

(Sales Growth – Marketing Investment) / Marketing Investment = ROI

5. Traffic-to-Lead Ratio (New Contact Rate)

Understanding your website traffic, especially knowing where your it is coming from, whether it's organic, direct, social media or referrals is extremely important.
If your traffic is steady or increasing, but your traffic-to-lead ratio is low or decreasing, that's a surefire sign that something is missing on-page.
In the spirit of conversion rate optimization, track this number to help you determine if and when a change in your website's text, design, form, etc. may be needed.

6. Lead-to-Customer Ratio

After all of your marketing efforts, it's important to know how many leads your sales team is able to close. You will want to calculate both your sales qualified lead conversion rate and sales accepted lead conversion rate.
What's the difference between the two?
Sales Qualified Leads are leads considered to be sales ready based on their lead score or specific activities/triggers they completed. Most companies would consider a lead who filled out a form, such as "contact a rep" a lead who is ready to buy your service or product. For example, a waste management company with a lead who filled out the form  "rent a dumpster," would be considered a sales qualified lead.
Sales Accepted Leads are simply leads your sales team considers opportunities, and have either contacted the lead directly or a scheduled call.
Looking at these two ratios, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is my campaign capturing leads?
• Is our CRM successfully passing qualified leads to sales at the right time?
• Do we have high close rate?
  

If the answer to any of these questions is no, meet with your sales team to determine what, if anything, is missing and how you can work together to improve your numbers. Here are a few questions to help encourage sales enablement and move the conversation along.
Note: This is another metric we track in Databox. Get our "Ascend" template here. 

7. Landing Page Conversion Rates

So your landing page is up; it's beautiful, it follows all the best practices, but is it actually converting?
A landing page that doesn't generate leads is useless, no matter how much traffic it gets or how beautifully designed it is, so monitor your conversion rate. Find out how to improve your landing page conversion rates here.
Like your traffic to lead ratio, if your landing page is getting a lot of traffic, but has a low conversion rate, then it is a red flag that you need to change something on the page.
For example, try A/B testing some of the changes below to see which delivering the highest conversion rate:

• Change your CTA color
• Convey more value in your CTA text
• Make your written content more persuasive
• Shorten your form
• Add social proof (i.e. reviews, social counts, awards, etc.)

Note: We track this one in our "Convert" template on Databox.

8. Organic Traffic

The goal of any business using inbound marketing is to have most of their traffic come from organic search.
High organic traffic means that people are finding your website on their own, minimizing not only your effort for your cost of attracting them to your site.
It should come as no surprise that organic traffic is directly correlated to your SEO strategy, so make sure to monitor this number (along with your keywords) and refine your SEO strategy accordingly.

9. Social Media Traffic (and Conversion Rates)

Many clients are often wary about the importance of social media in their inbound marketing, but over the years it has proven invaluable to every campaign's success.
Metrics you can utilize to show the importance and impact of social media on your marketing efforts include:

• Number of lead conversions generated via each social media channel
  
• Number of customer conversions generated through social media channel
  
• Percentage of traffic associated with social media channels 

With social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram you might not have all the time in the world to effectively utilize every platform, but breaking them down by the number of leads, customers, and percentage of traffic coming from each will help you determine where to focus your efforts.

10. Mobile Traffic, Leads, and Conversion Rates

Is your website effectively optimized for mobile? With so many people browsing the web exclusively from their smartphones and devices and Google showing preference for sites optimized for mobile, you need to know how your visitors are using it.
Pay close attention to:

• Mobile traffic
• Number of lead conversions from mobile devices
• Bounce rates from mobile devices
  
• Conversion rates from mobile optimized landing pages
• Popular mobile devices

Understanding how and what your visitors are doing on your website on mobile will help you improve the experience, and optimize it to increase mobile conversions.

Originally: https://www.impactbnd.com/the-10-marketing-kpis-you-should-be-tracking

Key Digital Marketing Terms

Digital marketing is full of technological jargon which can be daunting if you’re new to marketing on the Internet. Here’s a quick guide to deciphering some commonly used terms.
3G – 3G or third generation is the name for the enhanced data communication services that allow video calling and rich media on mobile phones. The birth of the technology led to the setting up of mobile operator 3 in the UK.
Blogging – The act of creating a web log – a personal online web space where users can write their thoughts and anything else they want.
Cookie – A small text file on the user’s PC that identifies the user’s browser (and hence the user) so they’re ‘recognised’ when they re-visit a site. A cookie allows usernames to be stored and websites to personalise their offering.
CPA (Cost Per Action) – A metric for measuring the effectiveness of an Internet advertising campaign. Take the total cost of the campaign, divide it by the number of desired responses (actions), and the result is the cost of each customer action.
CPC (Cost Per Click) – One way to price Internet advertising. In the CPC model, the advertiser pays when a prospect takes an action and clicks an online ad, and not just when that ad is viewed.
CPM (Cost Per Thousand) – The standard unit for buying or selling Internet advertising. The ‘thousand (or M in Roman numerals in the abbreviation) stands for ‘thousand advertising impressions’, or views. To figure out what it costs to reach each individual viewer of an ad, divide the CPM rate by 1,000.
CTR (Clickthrough Rate) – The percentage of those clicking on a link from those to whom the link was displayed.
CYA (Cover Your Assets) – CYA simply means that you make a move in order to not ‘miss the party’. Use CYA to justify starting your Internet marketing effort and then use what you learn to find better reasons for maintaining and expanding your online presence.
FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) – A document provided by many websites (and sometimes email lists) with general information about a newsgroup or email list. Sometimes used with a press release to cover technical details of an announcement.
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) – The code, placed in special markers called tags, that’s added to a text document to make it function as a web page.
Hyperlink – Also called ‘Call-to-action’ links. Links in online marketing campaigns that take the reader to the next step in a process.
IE (Internet Explorer) – The most popular web browser in the world.
ISP (Internet Service Provider) – A company that provides dial-up or other kinds of access to the Internet to individuals and businesses. Online services have their own proprietary content but also serve as ISPs for their users.
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) – A standard for compressed pictures, widely used on the web. JPEG is best used for photographs and other images with many shades of colour.
Keyword – A word or phrase that potential customers type into a search engine to find a service or product.
Podcasting – Making audio or video files available over RSS to consumers for viewing or listening.
ROI (Return on Investment) – The percentage of profit or avoided costs generated by an expenditure. ROI is hard to calculate for marketing expenditures because tracing exactly which sales are the result of which marketing expenditures is very difficult. However, try to compare ROI for Internet marketing expenditures versus other marketing expenditures in order to help you allocate resources wisely.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) – A technology that allows people to receive constantly updated content without having to revisit a website.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers.
SMS (Short Message Service) – The most widely available service on mobile phones other than voice. Often known as texting, it permits the sending of short messages between mobile phones, other handheld devices and even landline telephones.
Spam – Another word for unsolicited commercial email, bulk email or junk email.
TLD (Top-Level Domain) – The three letters at the end of an Internet domain name that denote the type of organisation that owns the website. Examples are .com for a commercial organisation or business or .edu for educational institutions.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator) – The technical name for a web address. The URL allows you to locate services via the Internet.
WAP or Wireless Application Protocol – WAP is an open international standard for applications that use wireless communication. The main function of WAP is to provide access to the Internet from mobile phones.
Web 2.0 – A collective name given to new technologies and consumer trends online including blogs, social networks, RSS and podcasting.
www (World Wide Web) – The number one vehicle for digital marketing efforts! (Also, www. is commonly found as a prefix to web site names.)

originally:  https://www.dummies.com/business/start-a-business/small-business-marketing/key-digital-marketing-terms/

What is Affiliate Marketing?

“Affiliate marketing has made businesses millions and ordinary people millionaires,” Bo Bennett, YearToSuccess.com

Affiliate marketing is a popular way of promoting online businesses, where an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, or sale that they refer to the online business.
It works through a network of website owners, known as affiliates, being sourced by an online business wishing to increase its traffic and sales, known as the merchant. These affiliates work to generate traffic and refer it to the merchant’s website. The merchant then rewards these affiliates with a commission for a desired action taken by each referral, which is in general one or more of the following:

• Pay per Lead – payment made for each registration
• Pay per Sale – payment for each confirmed sale
• Pay per Click – payment for each visitor referred to the merchant’s site

E-consultancy estimates that the value of UK sales generated from the affiliate channel was £2.16 billion for 2006, rising from around £1.35 billion in 2005. Commissions and fees paid out to affiliate networks (covering payments for both networks and affiliates) amounted to an estimated £83 million in 2005, and it is forecast that this figure will have risen to £133m million by the end of this year.
Therefore affiliate marketing is a huge marketing channel and for many online businesses it has become the key growth driver.
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Why set up an Affiliate Marketing Programme?

Risk Free

Merchants only pay for results, such as confirmed registrations or sales. Therefore it’s an ideal way to generate new business – if affiliate marketing doesn’t generate any leads or sales then you don’t pay anything.
Affiliate marketing can be seen as a form of online advertising but it shouldn’t be confused with the nature of advertising because affiliate marketing is risk-free in that you know how much you will have to pay out per click, lead or customer.

Excellent for Brand Awareness

If you decide to only make payouts for concluded sales the awareness levels of your site can improve hugely for very little cost, as affiliates promote your site to their membership base.

Reach More People

Many affiliates own niche websites, containing people that would be interested in your product or business but would otherwise be extremely hard to reach. Affiliate marketing is an excellent way of reaching them.

Quality Traffic

Your adverts are shown on sites where the owners themselves feel that your business may be of interest to their members and visitors. This leads to higher conversion rates.

“Affiliate programs are one of the most powerful marketing tools available. Basically, it moves advertising from being an expense to being more akin to a cost of goods sold. In other words, rather than paying out a lot of money and hoping that it works, you’re only paying out money when you know that it has worked,” Steven Rothberg, CEO and founder of CollegeRecruiter.com.”

Originally:  http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk/what-is-affiliate-marketing/

What is Viral Marketing?

Viral marketing refers to any marketing techniques that encourage users to pass on a message or link to other users, thereby creating a potentially exponential growth in the message’s visibility and effect.

“Creating entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by e-mail,” definition used by Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA)

Viral marketing is a very powerful tool and exploits people’s propensity to share humorous, enjoyable or useful information – jokes, special offers, and games.
Viral video marketing has exploded over recent years, with the industry as a whole now valued at over £100 million. The popularity and subsequent acquisition of YouTube by Google is testimony to the fact that viewing videos online has moved into the mainstream.

“Last year around 30% of campaigns had a viral element to them. This year I’d say it’s closer to 65% (2006)”, says Dusan Hamlin, media and communications director of media agency Carat International.

This rising popularity has resulted in many companies developing viral campaigns, although as a consequence of this popularity the cost of developing a viral campaign ahs increased significantly, and the increased ‘viral clutter’ has made it more difficult to stand out from the crowd and really allow the video to go viral in the true sense of the word. However, despite this viral marketing can be extremely cost effective when done well.

Choosing the Type of Viral

Viral marketing can reach huge number of people at a relatively low cost, and can be used to collect data, generate brand awareness, or encourage click-throughs to a website.
It generally takes one of three forms – video, emails or interactive games:

• Videos – the most common form of viral marketing. Videos can reach the most people and therefore tend to be best at creating brand awareness.
• Emails – this generally involves creating an enticing offer, one which people will automatically forward onto their friends. This creates a direct call to action but requires something of real value to be being given away or people simply won’t forward the email.
• Interactive Games – these are excellent data collection tools. Fewer people will be reached compared to a video but you’re able to build a database that you can continue to market to. Interactive games tend to be especially effective when combined with a micro site.

Naturally the choice of the type of viral should also depend on your target audience. Younger people tend to play more games, as do men in general. Women prefer emails and videos, and are more likely to forward viral content to friends, especially if it includes helpful information and special offers.

When is Viral Marketing not Suitable?

The nature of viral marketing is that the message can be forwarded to people anywhere. Therefore regionally-based companies are not well suited to exploiting the effectiveness of viral marketing.
Similarly, products aimed at the elderly may not be ideal because elderly people traditionally watch online videos and play interactive games less than the younger generation.
Also, you do have to be careful when promoting products that are only for people aged 18 and over because the nature of viral marketing means that your message can spread anywhere, especially into the hands of under 18s.
In reality the vast majority of companies can utilise the effectiveness of viral marketing, particularly with its relative low cost, the potential to reach huge numbers of people, its brand interaction value, and the way that it can be used as a data collection tool, to generate traffic, or awareness.

Originally: http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk/viral-marketing-overview/