Fractional CMO Services:
Defining, Tracking and
Optimizing Marketing KPIs

The wealth of data marketers have access to is rapidly increasing in today’s digital-driven marketing environment.

But rather than making it easier to set the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will drive growth and revenue-attainment goals, business leaders are having more trouble developing and achieving the right KPIs, according to an MIT Sloan/Google report.

Executives are often torn between different approaches to goal setting. Should KPIs be strategic or tactical? Operational or financial? Broad or focused?

As a result, most organizations are actually KPI underachievers.

Underachievement doesn’t have to be part of the equation, however. By asking the right questions, business leaders can develop accurate, realistic and suitably ambitious goals and KPIs that will be used to build highly successful marketing+tech initiatives.

During the goal-setting process, it’s important to consider a few factors that will help your organization not just set KPIs – but identify the right ones that will ultimately have the greatest impact on a business’s top and bottom line.

SELECTING SOFT VS. HARD METRICS

Historically, many companies have focused their attention on the “high-level approach” or marketing goals such as awareness and perception that are difficult to measure.

There is no doubt that these are real metrics – and ones that are getting easier to define with today’s advanced marketing data, systems and tools.

But market leaders spend their time and attention focused on data-driven, or hard, KPIs. There are several reasons why, chief among them being that, soft metrics are hard to define and measure the impact of their contribution to specific results.

This not only makes it more difficult to justify marketing investments when company leadership is evaluating performance and budget allocations, but it also adds confusion among teams as to how they prioritize their work in alignment with more critical drivers of growth and revenue attainment.

It’s easy for soft metrics to become moving targets – people often have different ideas of what success means. This can lead to a poor allocation of marketing budget, personnel or to channels that deliver better results and have a greater impact.

Business leaders, as should agencies, embrace this data-driven emphasis on numbers, metrics and KPIs as it provides tangible evidence of success.

Our process of defining business objectives and the right, hard KPIs starts at the very outset of the Discovery process. During this process, we undertake a comprehensive, 360-degree review of a client’s current business performance, including areas such as acquisition, operations, organization, processes and automation, customer experience and delivery. We are then able to deep dive into our clients’ businesses, evaluating performance to uncover, identify and optimize areas ripe for improvement.

And before actually implementing multi-faceted marketing campaigns or resources, we want to ensure that clients have the ability to measure their business performance against previous baselines.

We also want to address inhibitors to scaling the business so there is zero drag in performance. So when marketing+tech programs are turned on, businesses can measure the impact of our marketing+tech roadmap and compare year over year, quarter-to-quarter, or even day-to-day.

Having the necessary systems, tools, and analytics to measure performance is critical to ensuring our programs achieve their stated goals and your businesses’ KPIs over time.

Without hard metrics, marketing+tech organizations will find it difficult to substantiate their reason for being.