In every industry and department, everyone has their “North Star”.  Marketers, Business Analysts, even your SEO guy may refer to them as their SMART goals, or KPI’s or OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) as all the latest companies like to call it now.  Many times it is just a mesh of general metrics.

With so many metrics floating around, it can be difficult to define the ones that matter to your business.  Download the same measurement plan template we use to facilitate this for our clients.  Then watch the video or read below on about how we at MashMetrics help organizations through the critical definition step along the path of analytics maturity.

• Defining your marketing goals
• Setting your marketing or conversion targets
• What to do next

How do I identify my goals?

Everyone talks about “Defining Your Goals” like it is some big consultant mystery.  It isn’t.  Going back a few decades in my college psychology days you realize that humans (and many species, frankly) go through very basic elements of kinship.

• You gain attraction to yourself (by dancing spontaneously or simply introducing oneself)
• You engage the person through thoughtful conversation (for some of you, 99% of the time it may end here!)
• You are striving for commitment and acceptance, almost consistently honestly, until they become ever so loyal, but yet it never really ends does it?

Taking this back to measuring your website, your digital marketing campaign, your landing pages, your eCommerce site … your goals are the very same:

• Attract PEOPLE that matter to make them aware of your owned media (through paid and earned media impressions and click-throughs or store visits)
• Engage and building trust in PEOPLE.  (through product tours, better search or analyzing surveys, user path analysis, email engagement, content analysis, funnel friction review)
• Converting those PEOPLE through top, middle and final money capture mechanisms (capturing their email, starting a demo, closing the contract, buying the product)
• Building Loyalty and even Evangelists (re-purchasing, commenting, sharing)

Our simplified illustration of various objectives or projects being performed in the four quadrants.

If any of these four areas are lagging, so will your business, but it is the things we are doing to impact this behavior we should be measuring.  While goals are the broad strokes, longer time frame, final destination; Objectives are the stepping stones to reaching those goals.

Time for a white-board challenge!

Get your team in front of the closest white-board, split it into four big areas (Aware, Engage, Convert, Loyalalty) and just start writing down all the things everyone has been doing and you may be planning throughout 2020.

You may notice that you shout out what may become a ToDo of an overall objective and vice versa … that means you are on the right track.  If you can’t think of why you are doing something … put it in the “parking lot” area.  It will be useless in a bit (whiteboard vocab).

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How to set your marketing targets

As Chester the Cat stated in Alice in Wonderland:

If you do not know where you are headed, then who cares which direction you head?

To bring the above To-Do list from a list of promises to a data-driven summary of whether each is working or not … let’s add two metrics .  One that measures the volume or quantity of the task and another measuring how well it worked or its quality.

So let’s say we want 10,000 views of the feature on the website/app/etc within the defined period (remember the time in SMART goals).  Also, while we may nail the initial campaign we want to make sure it was positive (or maybe not?!) by getting at least 100 shares or comments on the feature.

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Determining what to do next

Many of the times we start to build a series of dashboards or reports to track a series of metrics without a clear path on what to do next.  The great thing about this framework is that it starts to prioritize just that, what should your team be focusing on.

Analysis is about two things:  Determining if you should improve or grow – Tim Wilson

If we are not meeting some of our quantifiers, or quantity metrics (such as impressions or organic sessions) then we know to focus on growing that effort (or trying new execution techniques).

If our qualifiers are not up to par, then we know we should start to be improving our efforts.  This is where CRO, heatmapping, inventory swaps and many other optimization techniques come into play.

If you are spending a lot of time trying to grow areas that have less than stellar quality (high bounce rate, low conversion rate) you are treading water and not being data-informed.

A marketing team may get excited about the quantity of transactions, but not by the overall revenue.  Looking closer the Avg. Order Value took a nose-dive (likely due to discounts) but it barely increased the detail to cart to purchase rates.

Summary

I (almost) guarantee that if your team defined at least 1 initiative in each of the 4 AECL categories, narrowed down quality and quantity metrics, and started to report on the progress you will start to find areas that need improvement and ones that are likely ripe to grow at full speed!

This is where data-informed change happens.  Define if you are –

1. Throwing ads that are poorly converting into the browsers of untargeted folks,
   or worse
2. great creative to the right audience to a less than stellar form on the website
   or
3. an amazing product/solution fit, except to the new target audience you just captured that is flooding customer service that leads to mid-term churn that you can’t see because you were only looking at your AdWords ROI conversions!

Anxious of how to report on all this information?  Check out our post on performance monitoring vs dashboards

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