My name is Cara, and I am the newest member of Wheels Up Collective. As the second Gen-Z’er to join the team, I am eager to offer a fresh perspective to complement the decades of experience from my more seasoned colleagues. It is so lovely to meet you!
Maybe it's my Gen-Z tendencies shining through, but if there is one thing you should know about me, it's that I am a highly competitive, goal-oriented person. My father was a professional athlete, and I was a committed athlete growing up. I am no stranger to hard work and am determined to win.
As a goal-oriented person, results are my source of motivation. In my previous role, I struggled to feel like I could quantify the impact of my work. I’m not alone in this thinking. According to LinkedIn, 1 in 3 CFOs say their biggest concern about their digital marketing teams is that they present vanity metrics. Yikes!
The good news? This challenge is exactly the reason I landed at Wheels Up and in your inbox today. You are reading this because I want to produce work that is proven - with metrics that go far beyond vanity - to drive sales for our clients, and so does the rest of the Wheels Up team. Now, let me also share some advice for how you can prove the worth of your marketing efforts for your company, with metrics that matter.
Three ways to measure meaningful impact:
1. Prove ROI
What is the ultimate guiding principle that marketing professionals live by? Return on investment (ROI). Calculating your marketing ROI is a method of measuring campaign efficacy by comparing your ultimate profit and revenue growth against the investment made in your marketing initiatives.
To do this, start by calculating your CPC (Cost Per Conversion) - the total investment it took to get a prospect who received your marketing content to take the desired action. The conversion metric you measure should be the action promoted in the campaign that matters most to your business. Yours might be subscription sign-ups, app downloads, website visits, webinar views, or completed purchases. In math terms, your CPC is the total cost of the marketing campaign divided by the number of campaign recipients who took the desired action.
Once you’ve assessed the cost per conversion, the next step is to compare your CPC with the dollar value of that conversion. This is the amount of revenue your business realizes as a result of that person having taken the action. It might be a lifetime value of a new subscriber, an average purchase value, or some other metric. To be ROI positive, your CPC needs to be higher than the value of the conversion.
Your overall ROI on a marketing campaign is the total invested campaign cost divided by the projected (or actual) value of each of the conversions the campaign drove.The bottom line is that if the purpose of marketing is to drive revenue, measuring the effect it has on a business's overall profit is non-negotiable.
One caveat to this is that not all marketing has to be immediately profitable - some campaigns will be awareness-based or part of a longer-term investment. Intentionality is king here. Measure where it matters most.
2. Use SMART goals
Determining your team’s marketing performance is futile without something to measure against. That is why setting quantifiable goals is so important. Effective goals should track your most valued business outcomes and help every area of the business move forward at the strategic level, from HR to finance.
Since goals are important across an entire business, you need to be SMART about creating yours. SMART is an acronym that provides criteria for the goal-setting process:
Specific: Be clear about what you want to achieve
Measurable: Assign a number to the goal
Actionable: Don’t set a goal that is too easy or unrealistic to achieve
Relevant: Align goals with your larger strategy
Time-bound: Define a timeframe
Examples include, “Increase customer acquisition by 25% over the next three years,” or “Grow sales by 3% by the end of Q2.”
By following the SMART goal framework, you can build goals that are quantifiable and realistic for your marketing initiatives. Once you have tangible goals in place, you can calculate exactly how much impact your marketing initiatives are having on your business instead of feeling like you’re in the dark about whether you’re achieving what you’ve set out to do.
3. Track engagement metrics
Carefully monitoring engagement metrics is another important method for measuring meaningful marketing impact because it is quantifiable and also measures audience perception.
Examples of engagement metrics include time spent on a page, social media likes or comments, and brand awareness as measured by Net Promoter Score (NPS). There are different tools for analyzing metrics, including Hubspot, Marketo, and Google Analytics.
For example, regarding social media, the platforms themselves are the best tools for measuring the number of engagements. Twitter and Facebook have their own social metrics that allow you to export the post data in an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet lists the number of comments, likes, and shares your posts get along with other useful metrics.
While you are at it, type your business’s name into the search bar of Facebook and Twitter to see what people are saying about your brand.
Ready, set, takeoff!
Say goodbye to vanity metrics. With these impact-proving strategies under your belt, you are now equipped and ready to prove your marketing chops to both yourself and your team.
Want a little help establishing your performance tracking plan? Reach out to our team. We'd be happy to lend a hand.