Once you have the brand strategy well in place, do you have any idea on how you can measure the impact of your branding efforts? Any idea on your business’ marketing performance and key reasons why the marketing strategy is not working well?
It is important to understand what’s working and what is not working in marketing, which makes the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) so important in the marketing strategy. It not only helps to measure the performance but also indicates the mistakes and misses.
If you are clueless or unsure about these metrics, then keep on reading.
It is well known that marketing strategies are a crucial part of business in today’s era. It is also essential to note that all these marketing strategies need to be measurable, definite, and implemented with a specific goal. There should be no guesswork as to why a marketing strategy has worked out or not.
It starts by looking into the KPIs and understanding the marketing efforts with it. It is essential to understand it takes time to understand and assess these KPIs which keep changing with time and trends as well.
If you’d ask us, there are a lot of KPIs that you can look into marketing today. These common KPIs apply to all marketing efforts today. If you look into the internet, you’d find many recommendations, which will help you to improve your marketing strategy but are not essentially significant.
With our experience in branding strategy, we have located some hidden KPIs that are equally efficient in measuring the performance of the marketing strategies.
Brand Awareness
The thing that you need to know: How well does a customer remember your brand?
KPIs at this level:
- Unconscious brand awareness
- Spontaneous brand recognition
- Hinted brand recognition
To get an estimated measure or index of these KPIs, you might need to ask a certain question like – Does your brand come to mind when people discuss your product? To test hinted brand recognition, you need to present a list of brands, including your own, and ask the customers what they are more familiar with.
For spontaneous awareness, the customers need to recognize your brand with specific hints of your theme and messaging. This indicates that the audience is relating to the brand voice and the specific marketing strategy has an impact on the audience.
If the index is less than 10% for any of the above, it means that your branding needs more work in creating a lucrative brand persona and story building that connects with the people. The index will help you measure the percentage of the audience that associates with your brand.
Leads via marketing strategy
Things that you need to know: How many people are buying your product from the influence of your marketing. It is simple. The more leads you get after the marketing strategy, the easier it is to improve the chances of sales growth. The marketing strategies act as fuel to the sales machine, It is what drives more sales in the long term.
Understanding the relevance of marketing and sales will help to map down its impact. These metrics are directly related to the improvement in sales over a specific period. A more in-depth analysis is required to understand the scope of impact of marketing strategies on sales.
Website traffic in proportion to the leads generated
This is pretty direct and simple. With the technology, it is easier to ascertain the traffic to a page. Now, we need to ascertain how many people are getting converted into hot leads. These metrics can be measured in two ways.
- The quality of visitors’ traffic
- The conversion rate – downloading e-books, signing up for the newsletter, etc.
What is important is to get to the baseline – How many people are downloading the freebies on your site? Are they interested in signing up for a newsletter? What are the turnaround ratios for online workshops and sessions?
These metrics inherently state the impact of content marketing strategy on the audience. If the difference between cold and hot leads is low, chances are that your marketing and branding strategy has hit the cord.
Social media engagement
Another aspect to look out for is the engagement derived from social media outreach and engagement.
A good way to track is to see the response and engagement of your content. These give real-time data on the impact, so it becomes a lot easier to make swift changes. There is also advanced software that helps to measure lead conversions and website traffic via social media.
Email marketing response
Today. Email marketing is another crucial strategy to retain the life value of the customer, besides social media. Email marketing campaigns need to be implemented, evaluated, and analyzed again.
Unlike social media, email marketing is completely independent and 100% depends on the content you put out. It has its own merits as the content is not influenced by social trends. Metrics to assess email marketing success includes –
- Delivery rate
- Open rate
- Click rate on links
- Unsubscribe rate
Recommendation
Would your customers/audience recommend your product if given the chance? This reflects the trust and confidence your customers have in the product, that they become promoters of your brand. This is the golden touchpoint for any brand.
This maximizes the conversion as people tend to act less impulsively before buying and seek out the opinions of others, especially when they deal with a new brand. This requirement fades away after repeated purchase till they become a loyal customer.
This chain needs to be in motion and bring a positive result, which is possible with a successfully impactful branding strategy. Higher the portion of the audience recommending your products means the better impact of the branding strategy.
How can Vowels help?
The ultimate focus of any business should be to create a branding strategy that is measurable and impacts these key focal points. This blog has barely scratched the surface on KPIs. There are much more complex KPIs that give the accurate result and reflect the performance of the marketing strategy. Without measuring the marketing strategy, the company will be clueless about its performance.
It is important to measure the performance as much as it is to implement. It helps to direct the way for an effective marketing strategy. Vowels is a branding agency, armed with experienced professionals who can help you effectively reach your marketing goals. Want to know more? Get on a consultation call with us and we’ll be glad to help you!
