While analytics are important, they can’t magically solve your problems. In order to ensure that your marketing actions are producing your intended results, you have to track the right metrics. In this video, I’ll share how to create a measurement plan for your business.
Video Transcript:
In this episode, we’re talking about how to build a measurement plan to ensure that we’re tracking the right KPIs for our business.
Tracking analytics is essential to understand what’s happening on our website. What people are doing once they get there, how they got there in the first place, and are they taking the actions that are delivering the business objectives that we are looking to see come into play.
A lot of businesses will install Analytics or some sort of tracking analytic software on their site, and typically do not use the data to its full advantage. Or they just try to track everything, or they aren’t tracking the right metrics and they don’t have a good grasp of what’s happening, and what they should be tracking to ensure that they get the information they need to make smart decisions.
One way we can solve that problem is by building a measurement plan first. What a measurement plan does is helps you stay focused. It helps you have a goal in mind and then make sure that everything you’re doing tracks towards that goal.
Start Marketing Efforts with a Business Plan
Every good measurement plan should start with the business objective. The goal here is to describe the main objective of the business. This could be generating leads, generating demos, or something of that nature. Typically what we want to look at, let’s say from a marketing plan, increase the number of demos for the sales team.
So, if we have a business objective like this, like we want to increase the number of demos for the sales team, or maybe even increase the sales and convert 35% into sales, we have a clear objective of what the business is looking for. It’s typically from a marketing side. You know, we’re looking at driving new leads for businesses, and we want to make sure that those leads are qualified. If we can deliver qualified leads, they would hopefully convert at a much higher rate.
Now, in order to drive these leads, we have to have strategies. And that’s right here. What are we doing to meet this goal? Are we doing inbound marketing or outbound marketing? What types of strategies are we using? Are we doing cold-calling, email, email outreach, email nurturing, blogging, SEO, and Social Media Marketing? What are we going to be doing here? This is where you would do the strategies, you know, maybe an SEO content, marketing, legion. I mean, it’s obviously very broad, right? And email outreach.
Once you’ve described the strategies that you’re going to do to help meet you here, we’re going to take it a step further, and we’re going to talk about the tactics. So, for SEO, we might be doing on-page SEO. We might be doing some technical SEO with schema. And we might do link-building and outreach.
For content marketing, we’re going to blog three times a week, right? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on your niche.
For lead generation, create three new offers and a new demo page. In email outreach, email 500 emails to targeted companies, and add nurturing follow-up. I’m just coming up with this on the fly. This is not necessarily something that you want to follow exactly to a tee. But, as you can see, what we’re doing, we have this big goal, then we break it down into strategies. And now, we’ve broken it down deeper into specific tactics that we’re going to take under each one of these strategies.
Key Performace Indicator Breakdown
Now, next is to look at the KPIs. Now there’s a difference between a KPI and just a PI. We’re looking at KPIs. We’re looking at Key Performance Indicators. And when you’re giving these to a business lead, you do not want to overwhelm them. If you give them too many performance indicators, that’s all they are, they’re just indicators. They’re not key performance indicators because they’re not being measured back to the top, and they may be related, and they may be something you need to track, but they’re not the most important thing.
So here, we would want to do … So, the total number of referring domains would be a good one. And then maybe rank position. You have to find all the ones that matter to you and your business owner, the businesses you’re working with, or your boss. But for here, we will be able to show we’re doing link building, so we’re able to show the number of referring domains that are being pointed to this site, which can increase this site’s authority. Ranking position tells them where they rank. These are things that they can look at tangibly to see the work that’s being done.
In content marketing, we would want to look at the number of visits, maybe to the site, in the content. That might be a better one here, actually. A total number of organic sessions, right? And then, we might want to look at the average time on the site.
These KPIs are going to be completely attached to the business objective or what the business wants to see. So we want to look at the conversion rate of pages. And then, we might want to look at the number of demos booked versus attended. Because just because somebody booked a demo doesn’t mean they actually did it, right?
For emails, we might want to look at opens and clicks. And then, we might want to look at connections or sales activity. The key here is to have goals and KPIs that actually tell us metrics that are pushing us towards the number of demo sales and leading to conversion rates. We want to make sure that all of this is going to tell the full story. If it doesn’t, we want to spend some time on it to make sure that we have the right KPIs. That’s a very important thing is to make sure that these are right. Obviously, this is an example. We’re just running through it very quickly, but using a plan like this takes some time.
It can really help make sure that you have those KPIs in place. Segmentation is right below that. What insights about the business do you want to better understand? Right here, we can look at the referring pages. What are those sites? Are they in our industry? We can look at traffic from various terms. This helps us get a little more granular and helps us get to a deeper level of understanding of what’s going on. Right here, we can look at the top pages. Maybe we can look at some demographic metrics as well. You can pull that end through Google Analytics. Lead generation, again, top pages. You can do offer type. You can do content type. You can do topic.
So you can break these KPIs down even more, saying, “Hey, our pages on this sort of topic are performing a lot better than the other ones.” And email, you can look at segmentation.
Industries would be a good one that you could do. So, obviously, you can get the lower, and on the data chart, and start to get more granular by adding in segmentation. The last thing that’s added in here is targets. And it’s what you hope to achieve from the specific strategy, using the tactics that you’re implementing. And you want these goals to be SMART. So you want them to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. You want to make sure that these goals have an end, that you can get to them, and that you can measure against them.
In the targets here, you can say, “When our average ranked to be in the top 20 …” This is for all keywords … by the end of Q1.” So what makes this goal SMART? We have something that’s specific, average ranked, to be in the top 20. It’s measurable because we can measure how our average rank is, using Search Console. It’s attainable. I’m assuming that it is. Obviously, this is a fictitious goal that we’re setting up here. Relevant, it is relevant because it has to do with ranking position, which is a KPI that impacts the SEO that we’re trying to fill in order to get visibility for demos. And then, end of Q1, so we know when Q1 ends. It’s time-backed, so we have to do it within a specific amount of time. You would do this through each one of your targets to make sure that you have a specific goal that you’re looking after and looking to achieve. This helps make sure that your team is on the same page, that the business owner understands what you’re going for, and that everybody working on this project has a clear end in mind and knows what the strategy is. This allows you to be a better team because everybody’s headed in the same direction. They’re swimming upstream the same way.
Adding these all in is going to make sure that you have everything you need in order to track this. We could go through each one of these pieces of data. After you’re done, what you want to do is make sure that you know where all this data is. So top referring domain is something that you’d have to pull from an SEO tool. But you could plug it into your report and either pull each week or pull and do a dashboard. Rank position that’s another thing you can get from a search tool, where you can see where you’re ranking. You can also check this with Google Search Console. A lot of these other ones, you’re going to be able to see via Google Analytics, so making sure that it’s installed on your site, and that you’re tracking the metrics you want to see, that you have goals set up on Google Analytics, or within your marketing automation tool, like HubSpot. Make sure that you have those setup, and you can run these queries quickly and understand how many people went to the demo versus how many people booked a demo.
Email, the same way. You can measure open to clicks and responses in most email marketing tools. And this is going to show if you are getting engagement. Just looking if somebody opened an email doesn’t really matter. Even if they clicked an email, sometimes they didn’t really do anything. They didn’t take any action. But we do want to see this is a beginning metric. You know, that’s taking it a little bit further.
Once you’ve laid out your measurement plan, you can start to build out your dashboards or your reports that are going to be on target to reach this business goal. And this is what business owners, business leaders, and C-level people, really care about. They care about you meeting the business objective more than anything else. So, I’m going to give you a link to this Excel spreadsheet. If you want to check it out for yourself and put it into practice. If you’ve got any questions, please let me know. Also, hit the subscribe button. We publish new content each and every week. If you have any questions, again, comment below. And, until next time, Happy Marketing.