Understanding how well your marketing efforts are doing is vital for identifying areas for improvement, allocating resources, and showing progress against strategic goals. But knowing what and how to measure your performance can be overwhelming. It’s easy to get lost in the data and quickly lose sight of what you set out to measure in the first place—especially when you have a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data from a variety of sources.

The secret to preventing this overwhelm and getting meaningful marketing metrics is to create a measurement plan that maps your goals to the types of data you need and provides strategies for collecting that data. Developing a measurement plan doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult. It just takes a few thoughtful steps:

1. Prioritize marketing objectives and goals by importance, urgency, and relevance, and potential impact on other organizational goals.
2. Define the measures of success or key performance metrics (KPIs) for each objective and goal. What do you need to know to be able to say, “Yes, we met our goal”? For example, let’s say you recently redesigned your website and you want to know if the new design is more effective at attracting new users. One of your KPIs could be new user traffic volume, monitored over a specific time period.
3. Review the types of marketing data that can be collected based on internal and external efforts—click-throughs, leads, press mentions, sales, partner relationships, and website traffic are just a few examples—and map each to a measure of success.
4. Identify data sources and the tools you’ll use to collect the data. Some top-of-mind examples include Google Analytics, Salesforce data, proprietary customer data, and media placement reports. But don’t stop there—think creatively about other sources of data. These could include surveys, insights from your sales team, events, and social media.
5. Communicate with colleagues, partners, and vendors who are integral to providing data. Gathering metrics and measuring success is a team effort. Let the members of your team know their roles, what data you need from them, and how often data will be collected.
6. Implement, collect, and analyze. Now that you have your measurement plan developed, it’s time to implement it and collect the data. But don’t forget to continually and analyze and assess outcomes. Measuring success isn’t a “one and done” endeavor. Goals, priorities, and programs change—and that means your plans should change too. Your measurement plan should be agile so you can course-correct if needed.

For your next marketing effort, make sure you have that measurement plan in place. Need help creating a plan? Contact LMD.