No marketer can avoid analyzing marketing metrics. With today’s martech and marketing innovations, marketers have access to various kinds of metrics and analytics to have a deeper understanding of their marketing performance. But when you start diving more deeply into identifying the primary digital marketing metrics that should be top of mind, all the time:  there again exists a different set of priority metrics based on every marketing team’s specific goals, future plans and core business strategy.

While there will always exist a big list of base level marketing metrics that should never be ignored, here are a few that should be given importance to measure overall efficacy and digital marketing performance.

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Assessing Brand Awareness with Deeper Insights

Most companies strive to create and grow their online presence, in fact, in a digital-first business environment, a strong digital brand presence is integral to overall marketing success. This is why it is important for marketers to not only just measure the brand’s growth on social media (by followers, for instance) and online search engines, it is also important to measure how impactful the brand is online, how fast social media followers are growing, what kind of engagement are social media posts across various platforms bringing in. Another good way for marketers today to better understand how strong the brand is online is be diving into the number of online and social media mentions the brand garners (through influencers, customers, 3^rd party websites, blog references, etc), it also helps to understand more about what kind of mentions are more common.

Breaking down other parameters like the number of people who are constantly looking for your brand via search metrics; in a way, by keeping tabs on the number of organic visits your website homepage brings in is important. But it doesn’t stop there. Constantly identifying changes in these metrics by evaluating performance or increase in search / organic visits over a period of time can help marketing managers and leaders understand how much of a difference their marketing efforts (social media marketing / content marketing plans / paid ads if any, etc) are really making to overall online brand awareness.

There can’t be specifics set in place for measuring brand awareness effectiveness, each marketer has to put their own parameters in place based on their quarterly goals or targets. But for marketing teams who are in the process of launching a brand awareness campaign, it is crucial to set forth a strong foundation to measure future impact in a way so that it allows the team to take corrective measures at the right time.

Marketing Spend Per Customer; Region-wise

Keeping your marketing processes simple, effective and result-oriented is not a difficult task. There are some areas that always need more tightening to ensure this. With all the sophisticated marketing technologies today, it can become commonplace for marketers, especially those with globally distributed processes and teams end up doing a bunch of marketing activities that are not aligned and because of this, not measured properly. If a brand has a region-wise distribution of marketing teams, evaluating the cost spent on acquiring new converted leads within a specific time frame and comparing it against a total number of successfully acquired customers region-wise is important. Regularly using a central system to save this data helps to streamline more than just marketing budgets, it can serve as a guideline for improving marketing operations processes and core marketing plans. This is how marketers can also improve their personalization techniques and localized campaigns.

Marketing leaders who dive deeper into each marketing channels metrics (email marketing / social media marketing, etc) can then work on an optimized plan that allows their marketing teams to start focusing on those channels that are giving them the most value in terms of number of leads that match their own target ICP. Understanding the marketing ROI of each marketing channel the brand uses for their efforts based on the successfully converted leads, will also allow marketing teams to also improve their martech investments because it gives rich insights into what the marketing team may need more of in terms of martech support.

It’s not Just About Measuring Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

In a digital first world, there are various ways to measure the interest a lead has in a brand. But this is where marketing and sales teams have to work more closely together to create strong processes that allow them to centrally measure sales qualified leads (SQLs) and marketing qualified leads (MQLs) together using a central platform like a CRM.

When marketing and sales teams focus on then building out centralized campaigns it allows the marketing team to build a more seamless handover process. Marketing and sales can work closely at this stage to build consensus on how they want to nurture these leads together using personalized campaigns and unified messaging.

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Modern marketers need to constantly have an eye on various marketing metrics like online visitors, returning visitors, growth in online traffic, and so much more. But every marketing team has to further deepen their marketing measurement and metrics systems to also breakdown impact of marketing costs, marketing campaigns and marketing strategies. Base level metrics can never be enough for marketers and there will always be a growing list of metrics to consider based on changing business environments and buying trends.

The difference lies in identifying what metrics matter most at the moment, what metrics should be aligned to immediate and near-term marketing goals, while constantly optimizing marketing processes based on these results.