The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about Marketing Metrics, click here to check out the book now. 

There are countless marketing metrics you and your marketing team could consider when it comes to planning and measuring marketing. Of course some are more important, relevant, and useful than others. Some depend on industry, or segment of industry, others depend on audience, others on channel, or current technology or trends. Yet some marketing metrics prove themselves to be most valuable, time and time again. Based on our extensive experience, those marketing metrics are the nine below. So take a look and see if you can apply them to your own business. We hope they are helpful! 

For even more insight, we recommend using the dashboard tool from scaleurs.com, which can help you define and tailor your business’s KPI’s. (They also have a “life dashboard” which we really like. Read more about it here.) 

And finally, take your metrics all the way with our FunnelIQ tool. It might be just what you need!  

1. Lead Volume: Lead to Customer Conversion Rate 

Obviously, it’s important to measure how many leads your marketing efforts are generating. But if you stop there, you’re missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: how many leads actually turn into customers. Knowing this figure can tell you whether your sales team needs a higher volume of leads, higher-quality leads, or additional supporting content to help close deals.

How to measure it: The benchmark for conversion rates will vary by industry, but a few minutes of Googling should give you a solid understanding of the number you should be aiming to outperform. It’s also important to consider conversion rates at each stage of the funnel: The middle and bottom of your funnel rates should be higher than your top-of-funnel numbers. 

The funnel you can create by using Google Data Studio can be one way to visualize each stage of the funnel, from first touch to lead conversion to opportunity creation, and gain a deeper understanding of the customer journey. Compare that number with the result you found with Google to see if you are on the right track. 

 2. Point of Conversion: Multi-Touch Attribution

Very few people research and buy during the same web browsing session. Most people will start their search for a product or stumble across a piece of content, click through to your website, and poke around your blog, but not necessarily buy your service or product. Days or even weeks later, they will search for your company name, click on a paid ad, and purchase. By only crediting the point of conversion, you’re not getting a full picture of the customer journey, and you’re undervaluing key aspects of your marketing efforts.

How to measure it: You can use many types of attribution models, depending on what you want to learn and how your marketing organization works. Google Data Studio’s Funnel can be one way to give credit to each stage of the funnel, from first touch to lead conversion to opportunity creation, and gain a deeper understanding of the customer journey. In this attribution model, 30% of the credit goes to the first click, 30% of the credit goes to the click that created the lead conversion, and 30% goes to the click that created the opportunity. 10% of the credit goes to all other touches. 

For both Unibake and CHD, I set up a dashboard to use to set and reach monthly objectives. I look at the dashboard to see if there have been any big changes in the past month and where we should adapt accordingly. Together with W2M, we draft a plan for the next month and adjust along the way. 

3. Blog Visitors: Engaged Time Spent 

It’s not enough to measure time spent on a page, because you don’t know if it’s active time or your content is just sitting open in an idle tab. Tracking engaged time lets you know how long users are actively paying attention to your content, and therefore how valuable that content is to your target audience. Are they even seeing your CTA? What can you leave out that people aren’t paying attention to, and what do you need to rework?

How to measure it: Content analytics software like Chartbeat or even WordPress plugins like Riveted can track user activity, including scrolling, clicking, using the keyboard, and page visibility, to determine whether the reader is actively engaging with your content or in an idle state. 

If you have a blog, it is important to understand what people do and don’t like about it. Which articles do they spend the most time on? You must deliver content that brings the most value to your customers. 

4. Number and Quality of Inbound Links

High-quality websites are judged by search engines as trustworthy and reputable resources. Low-quality websites can even penalize your website rankings, which is why it’s much more important to have a few high-quality links rather than dozens of low-quality ones. Instead of tracking the number of inbound links you’re getting, focus instead on these questions: How have certain inbound links helped you rank for certain keywords? Is your organic traffic increasing? 

How to measure it: To determine quality links, check whether the site is relevant to your site, authoritative/trustworthy, attracting a human audience or solely designed for web crawlers, or inking to other spammy sites (online gambling, payday loans, etc.). 

The Zapier tool lets you collect all of your leads in an Excel file after each campaign. It shows you the leads based on the company name, job titles, or other form fields (depending on your input) if leads are qualified based on your criteria. Sales development reps (SDRs) can then call on these leads daily because they are “warmer” leads.

5. Social Media Reach/Engagement

While it’s good to have a large number of followers of your social media platforms, it doesn’t help your business if they aren’t actually engaging with you. How many people are actually clicking on, responding to, and interacting with your posts? And who are they? Answering these questions will help ensure you’re delivering the right content to the right people in the right places.

How to measure it: Engagement types vary depending on the social media platform. Keep an eye on Facebook’s engagement score and number of clicks, likes, shares, and comments; Twitter retweets, replies, or favorites; Pinterest likes, comments, or re-pins; Google+ likes, comments, or shares, etc.

In general, I don’t waste a lot of time on organic postings. I post once or twice daily to keep current customers engaged. What matters is the engagement by consumers on paid media. How is one campaign performing vs. the budget? How many people completed an online form or request for information? These are much better indicators of a good lead. 

For example, your business might receive a lead through a form at your website. By tracking its history, you could see that this person had previously engaged with a paid post two times but hadn’t submitted the actual form. Two weeks later, the person visited the website again and filled in a form, so one of your sales team could contacted them and close the deal. 

6. Email Unsubscribes/Unengaged Subscribers 

Some people who subscribe to your list won’t stay engaged with your emails, which is why so many marketers keep an eye on how many recipients unsubscribe. But not everyone will go through the process of unsubscribing, especially when it takes fewer clicks to just trash emails that aren’t of interest. For the health of your subscriber list, it’s important to track unengaged subscribers.  

How to measure it: Decide on your marketing department’s definition of unengaged. Is it someone who hasn’t clicked on an email in three months? A year? Then, consider implementing an automatic unsubscribe that will remove these recipients from your list, and send an email notifying them that they’ve been unsubscribed. Keep in mind that some email services route “graymail” messages with low engagement to the junk folder.

At CHD, we had a lot of contacts in our system. During our first email campaign, we noticed that around 50 people unsubscribed immediately. The good thing about using a tool like Hubspot is that you can see who unsubscribed. Sometimes it’s better that less-relevant leads get removed so you can spend time and effort on resources elsewhere.

7. Website Traffic: Conversion Rate

A lot of your marketing efforts go into driving traffic to your website, so of course, you want to keep an eye on how many people you’re successfully attracting to your site and where they’re coming from — but if you only focus on visits without putting equal emphasis on conversion, you’re wasting your time and money. Plus, putting a little effort into bumping up conversion rates can have a big impact on your business: Imagine the difference that even a 1 or 2% boost in new customers could do for your bottom line. 

How to measure it: First, define what qualifies as a conversion. Is it a purchase? Booking a consultation or requesting additional information? Signing up for a free trial? Once you’ve figured out exactly what you want to measure, set up a landing page that visitors will only see after they’ve converted. Just make sure traffic can’t be sent to that page in any other way, or else you’ll get skewed figures. 

Before starting, make sure your tracking pixels are installed. Google Tag Manager (GTM), Google Analytics (GA), Google Console, and Social Media Pixels are critical for measuring web traffic for website conversion rates. If you get a lead, you want to know where it came from. 

8. Number of MQLs: MQL to SQL Ratio

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are generally defined as bottom-of-the-funnel prospects who have indicated they’re ready to purchase, or at least talk to a salesperson, by downloading buying guides, requesting a demo, or signing up for a free trial. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) are those potential customers whom sales determines are ready for a direct follow-up. Looking at the percentage of MQLs that are accepted as SQLs is a good indicator of the health of your pipeline and your marketing team’s ability to qualify and screen leads. It’s also a great indication of how well your marketing and sales team are aligned and communicating with each other, since a low ratio raises a red flag that there’s a disconnect between marketing and sales. 

How to measure it: Divide the number of SQLs by the number of MQLs to calculate your MQL to SQL conversion rate. What’s a good benchmark? After analyzing hundreds of companies, Implicit found that the average conversion rate was 13%, and took an average of 84 days to convert. But keep in mind: That number varies greatly, depending on the source of the lead. For example, website leads converted at an average of 31.3%, referrals at 24.7%, and webinars at 17.8%, while email campaigns convert at just 0.9%, lead lists at 2.5%, and events at 4.2%. 

Check monthly to track the cost of acquisition and see if you have the right leads in-house.

9. External/Internal Metrics

Obviously, it’s important to keep an eye on external metrics like lead quantity, quality, and conversion. But if (when) any of these numbers start to slip, how will you know what you need to fix if you don’t pay attention to how the work gets done in the first place? When it comes to getting the most out of your internal resources, don’t just trust your gut. Keep your marketing team running effectively by tracking the number of hours wasted in status meetings, repeatable work that could be automated, dealing with unnecessary interruptions, and the efficiency of your review and approvals process. 

How to measure it: Hold frequent check-ins with your team to identify roadblocks and gather feedback about how processes can be improved.

I hope these metrics have been informative and helpful. Now get out there and start measuring and testing. Good luck! 

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about SMART goals, click here to check out the book now. 

Trying to wrap your mind around everything a marketing team does can be daunting. Of course we’d like to accomplish everything right now, but too often we experience what is known as “task overwhelm”. And nothing gets done. Common mistakes include going too granular or too wide and neither the smaller or the bigger projects gain enough momentum. Then we eventually get frustrated and give up. But giving up isn’t the answer, of course. The answer is to focus on one thing. 

One of my favorite focus tools is the life dashboard from scaleurs.com. Use it to scale your team by dedicating only one simple KPI per team member. This is the tool we used at CHD Expert: Every team member is responsible for reaching their personal goal each year, which is evaluated into a SMART goal weekly and monthly. 

What are SMART Goals? 

SMART goals must meet the following criteria and can be used to determine your KPI: 

1. Simple – People need to know it and remember it easily.
2. Measurable – There must be an objective way to determine whether or to what extent you have achieved your goal.
3. Achievable – Don’t aim so high that the goal can’t be reached or so low that employees are left with nothing to do.
4. Realistic/Relevant – Every goal must relate to your function or service. 
5. Timewise – Deadlines should be short, realistic, and finite. 

SMART Goals for Marketing Teams

For example, a content writer’s goal is to attract the interest of consumers. Their KPI would be: Write five valuable content pieces per week, 20 pieces per month, or 240 pieces of content per year. Breaking the yearly goal into a smaller chunk (five per week) will still yield an impressive 240 pieces at the end of the year — writing five pieces of content per week seems a lot more manageable than 240 pieces per year. 

For a social media manager, the goal would be to target the right companies and business profiles using what the content writer produces. KPI: Win five MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) per week, 20 MQLs per month, or 240 MQLs per year. 

The PPC manager ensures that people find the company on Google and visit the website by fulfilling their goal of improving the company’s keyword ranking. Meanwhile, the goal of the website developer is to erase all the friction a customer might encounter when spending time on the website (e.g., incessant pop-up ads, buttons that are not clickable, links do not work, information is hard to find, etc.) so a customer can be converted into an MQL. 

Wouldn’t it be great if, as a company, you suddenly could gain 240 new customers in a year? 

Do you follow the logic? Everyone might have a different KPI, but together, they are striving for the same overarching marketing goal: getting more qualified demos to reduce the Customer Acquisition Cost. The content writer must write good content so the social media manager can target and capture the right leads, and so on. 

This snapshot of the dashboard for scaleurs.com could be helpful:

If your team is coordinated in what they have to do, then the right tools can take them even further. Check out our FunnelIQ tool here. It might be just what you need! 

Expanding Your Marketing Capacity

One of the challenges small companies might have is that the marketing department consists of only one team member or a small team. As discussed above, outsourcing is a good way to expand the talent pool. 

At CHD Expert, the marketing team comprised three people. I used a great Danish company called Web 2 Media (W2M) to supplement our compact team. W2M has different sub-departments to deal with all the above functions and account managers who serve as a go-to. At CHD, I worked with consultants from W2M’s social media team, their pay per click, and the analytics team. Together, they strongly supplemented and contributed to our in-house team. 

Staying lean doesn’t mean running your team (or yourself) into the ground. As your marketing business begins to scale, it can create an atmosphere of uneasiness and instability for everyone. Keep your top talent from looking elsewhere by holding regular check-ins and taking their feedback seriously. Recognize them for their hard work and celebrate the effort they’re putting in to help your business grow. Scaling is an opportunity to give employees more responsibility, and even expose them to new parts of the business they haven’t worked in before. Including them in product planning and projects like your strategic roadmap will help them discover new skills and prove that their input matters. They’ll have a sense of ownership — and be there when your business fully transforms from small to scaled.

Patience, Test, Grow

A  little bit of patience with your reps can go a long way. There is no magical “on” switch for scaling a marketing team. Just like adapting to a company is a learning experience for your new hires, scaling is a learning experience for budding businesses. Scaling doesn’t happen overnight. Don’t overextend yourself too much at the beginning of the process. Scaling a marketing team takes time.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about how to increase conversion rates for your business, click here to check out the book now. 

When making your business processes more scalable, the ultimate goal is to increase conversion rate of your business. Your conversion rate represents the percentage of visitors (to your website, your great blog, social channels, ads, newsletters, et cetera). That actually takes an action by buying your product or service and becoming a customer. 

In other words. Your conversion rate represents how effective your messaging is and how strong your product or service behind the message is. 

Read on to learn what a good conversion rate is, how the landscape has changed. And what you can do to maximize your conversion rate. 

Setting the Scene

Let’s start by looking at an example: In the month of April, 100,000 people visit an e-commerce site. During that month, 2,000 users purchased something from the site. Thus, the site’s conversion rate (2,000/100,000) is 2%.

The broader your scope and the more marketing activities you use (webinar registrations, emails, landing page signups, etc.). The more you can increase your conversion rate.

What’s a good conversion rate? Frankly, a good conversion rate is one that is higher than it is now. In 2020, the average conversion rate for e-commerce websites is 2.86%. The average e-commerce website conversion rate in the U.S. is 2.63% compared to the global website conversion rate of 4.31%.

The Landscape

Today’s marketing and sales landscape looks vastly different from that of just a few decades ago. With the advent of the internet, blogging, social media, and a myriad of digital communications channels, the path to purchase is not a simple straight line, but a complex and varied web of twists and turns — and touchpoints.

Today’s consumers are also increasingly immune to traditional advertising and sales methodologies, meaning they conduct more independent research and take more convincing before they’re sold on making a purchase. That’s why the buyer’s journey may differ from one consumer to the next: They’re not all listening to the same radio spots to learn about your company. They’re not even being exposed to the same information about your brand from the same sources. Some may have discovered your company on the web, while others learned of your products or services through word-of-mouth recommendations. Some may read online reviews before engaging with your marketing team or filling out an online request for more information. Others will visit your website, read your blog, and evaluate your competition before engaging with your company. 

Better Targeting, Better Results 

In addition to leads finding and developing affinity for your brand through different channels, when leads are passed from marketing to sales, they’re expected to be “sales-ready,” or at the decision-making stage in the buying journey. The myriad paths to purchase makes it increasingly challenging to qualify leads effectively as sales-ready. 

Consider this: It takes 18 touches on average to generate a viable sales lead. That means it takes multiple touches for a consumer to make the choice to request information — and even more for marketing to gather the information needed to determine whether a lead is ready to be passed to sales. At the early stages in the buyer’s journey, consumers are often merely gathering information and building awareness about your products and services. Often, these interactions are not in-depth enough to provide the information necessary to qualify as leads. 

As you further structure and optimize your marketing and sales channels and tracking, keep these factors in mind. Not only is it part of creating a flexible and scalable roadmap, but if you can’t regularly improve your conversion rates across the board you’re throwing money out the window. 

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

Once you have found your team, it’s time to focus on a common team goal-setting. You need a bridge between creating the team and being able to track their success in accomplishing goals. To do so requires setting and paying attention to goals (often thought of as quotas). Be realistic in terms of what you expect from your new hires and employees; it may take time for them to adapt to your business and marketing plan.

Tracking your team’s marketing performance guarantees a smooth transition for both current and new reps. “Stack” your team members side-by-side to make sure everyone is on the same page in terms of performance. Keeping an eye on your marketing analytics can help detect bottlenecks and other problems that could be holding your team back.

If your marketing organization isn’t productive, how can you realistically expect to scale? Productivity is about maximizing your time and tasks within a reasonable time frame. Depending on who you ask, priorities vary. A healthy knowledge of productivity tools shows that you’re motivated and skilled at time management. Popular tools include Slack, Trello, Google Drive, and Dropbox. 

Too often, people assume that you should only focus on one thing in your life, period, but that’s not what this strategy is about. It’s about being smart about what you pursue. Yes, you can achieve a lot of things … just not at the same time. You can’t build a career, get in shape, compete in marathons, write a book, invest in a business, have kids, and travel the world all at once, but you can do all those things over a lifetime.

Goal-setting tips

I stick to one major priority per area of my life. I’ve categorized my life as follows: career, health, learning, money, and relationships. That means I never work on more than one major project per category. I either write a book or create an online course. I also learn only one skill at a time, and I am either saving my money or looking to invest it (naturally, I’m saving most of the time). But what’s important to understand is that when there’s no structure, there’s chaos.

The natural thing for most people is to start a goal-setting or picking one priority to focus on. But unless you have trained your mind to focus on one thing, it’s not a smart thing to do. 

Scaling up a business with a strong marketing component does require that you are able to set, focus on, and accomplish your goals. That is part of having that scaleur’s growth mindset. As a business owner, you may have to go from “I want everything” to “I appreciate what I have.” It is about controlling your desires to achieve a greater outcome. 

Instead of having lots of small goals that are mostly meaningless, go for a few big goals. Try knocking off one every few months or even once a year if you have to. My current goal-setting is to pivot my career in a new direction. Then straight after that, I’m going to knock off some big speeches to up my public speaking game. Other than those two items, that’s about it. This strategy puts the primary focus on only one or two goals, so you get results faster.

You may find that as you gain momentum and see results quickly, you don’t need the motivation to reach that one big goal — your results become your motivation, and that requires all your energy and focus. 

Not yet convinced? Take these two-minute tests: 

• Test 1
  • Set your alarm for 1 minute.
  • Write out the alphabet from A to Z, followed by the numbers 1 through 9, as many times as you can.
  • Example: a – b – c – d – e … – z – 1 – 2 – 3 – … 9 – a – b – 
  • How many characters did you draw? 
• Test 2
  • Set your alarm for 1 minute again.
  • Alternate writing the sequential letters and numbers.
  • Example: a – 1 – b – 2 – c – 3 – … 
  • How many characters did you draw this time? 

I bet you have fewer characters in Test 2, right? It has been proven that multitasking is hard to master because you have a lot of interruptions. Focus on one thing, and do it right. Apply this same principle when scaling up your marketing. Find that one goal-setting, and track your teams as they move toward achieving it. 

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

Once you’ve reached around $1 MM in ARR (annual recurring revenue) and want to accelerate your growth. Then you need to think about how to scale your marketing team. But many companies are scared to do this. Because adding the salaries of new marketers into your budget can cause your customer acquisition cost (CAC) to skyrocket.

The strength of the marketing team in a growing company is invaluable. Every marketing strategy shapes the way customers will perceive and eventually interact with your product. But the salaries of team members who work to acquire customers are a huge factor in your customer acquisition cost. This is why new marketing hires can be a hit to your customer of acquisition cost (CAC) metrics. You need to reconcile the cost of scaling in order to make this investment in your company’s future.

Hot to calculate the Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total cost of sales and marketing efforts that are needed to acquire a customer. It is one of the defining factors in whether your company has a viable business model that can yield profits by keeping acquisition costs low as you scale. Managing these new costs is all about maintaining balance, optimizing efficiency, and scaling up customer lifetime value so you can get the maximum return on this investment in your company. You can’t make smart business decisions if you don’t know the full unit cost of each customer. Calculating CAC is theoretically straightforward

= divide the total expenses to acquire customers in a certain time period by the number of customers acquired during that period.

But the miscalculations—and the fatal underestimations—of CAC happen when you don’t account for all expenses to acquire customers. As you scale, the salaries of your marketing team members become prominent components of your CAC that you cannot forget to include. If you don’t account for team members in your CAC, you won’t really know how much it costs to acquire each customer and you won’t be able to determine how to earn back those expenses.

Simply put, the CAC formula is as follows:

CAC = (total cost of sales and marketing) / (# of customers acquired)

For example,

• if you spend $36,000 to acquire 1000 customers, your CAC is $36.

• CAC = ($36,000 spent) / (1000 customers) = $36 per customer

This increase shouldn’t prevent you from scaling, because with a larger team you have more power to generate revenue. If your new hires own some of these processes and metrics, you can leverage the power of their addition to improve the quality of your marketing and, ultimately, increase your revenue.

Putting it in another way:

– you’ll spend $50,000 on an individual marketing team member’s annual salary, that’s an additional $4,166/month in total expenses to acquire customers.

– Hypothetically your other costs might total $11,000/month ($1,000 in paid advertising + $10,000 in marketing tools and software). Adding $4,166/month increases monthly CAC by over 37%.

– Adding two new marketers at that salary means over 75% increase in your monthly CAC, given these other monthly expenses.

Need more questions? Feel free to contact me!