In order for a company to determine if they are being successful they need to set expectations and measure against it, hence where KPI’s come in. KPI stands for key performance indicator and this allows company’s to see how the stack up against goals or benchmarks.
My favorite way to think about this is, are your goals SMART? According to mindtools.com these are defined as
- Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
- Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
- Achievable (agreed, attainable).
- Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
- Time bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive)
When determining what KPI’s to use think about your goals. Are you goals to drive traffic, increase conversions, grow an email list, or create sales leads? Knowing what you want to achieve makes it easier to write a goal and say what the two or three KPI’s you will use to measure success. Marketers need to set these and be aware so that they can quickly make decisions and change ad spend. This often happens in real time and usually because upper level management sees a decline or spike and needs to know what caused it.
Leveraging data is how business make decisions on what products to get, market segments, spending ad dollars, investments in technology and even resources. Knowing if marketing efforts are working can impact getting additional money to expand marketing efforts, hiring a new team member, buying additional goods, or where optimizations need to be made on a site or store collateral. Also making sure that you are benchmarking against yourself year over year as well as within your industry will help you streamline marketing efforts and could provide a cost savings to the company.
SMART Goals: – How to Make Your Goals Achievable. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/smart-goals.htm
Jackson, S. Cult of Analytics. [MBS Direct]. Retrieved from https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/#/books/9781317561880/
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