The Ultimate Guide to Using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Growth: Part 2 Digging In

Somewhere, someone right now is reading your content, whether it’s on your website, in an email, or a social media post. And my guess is, that you’re pretty darn good at content marketing if someone is actually reading and engaging with it. The question isn’t whether you have great information to offer the world. It’s this: Do you have the processes in place to record and analyze that interaction? More importantly, do you have the right key performance indicators (KPIs for short) in place to know the impact of your marketing message in that micro-moment? Or are you still relying on simplistic metrics that don’t give you an accurate glimpse into how effectively you’re engaging your future clients/consumers/customers/fans/or whatever title best describes the person(s) who contributes $$ in your pocket?

If you’re like many marketers I’ve met over the last several years, the latter is true for you. That’s why I’ve created this three-part, in-depth series on KPIs. If you missed part one of the series, go back and check it out. It’s a great introduction to what KPIs are, the kind of KPIs that are most important for your specific business, and how you can set up a reporting and tracking system for the right metrics.

If it’s been awhile since you read it, here’s a quick summary to serve as a refresher on what’s already been covered.

A Quick Recap of Setting Up a Data & Analytics Plan

 

 

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Marketing is all about messaging and showing up in the right place at the right time. But, organizational growth grounded in Customer Experience (CX) – my passion and focus – is about so much more, which is why it’s so critical that these two teams work together to get deeper in the data.

The goal of any growth team is to get granular enough that you can deliver a sublime customer experience. Give your customers a reason to fall head-over-heels for your brand and you’ll have an army of advocates helping propel your business forward. This, my friends, is what growth is all about. To do this, you need to understand what deserves to be measured, so you know where you can improve, iterate, and innovate. Tracking dollars and cents alone aren’t enough. If your KPIs are still made up of tracking revenues, you’re missing the point. Your customer experience initiatives will stall out. You’ll silence your buyer’s voice, and in turn, you’ll stifle any human purpose behind each action that drives your customer to buy.

You can avoid falling into this common trap by measuring the right successes. That’s where key performance indicators (KPIs) come in.

Now, this guide isn’t meant to overwhelm you with jargon and terminology. It’s meant to give you the tools you need to find the right metrics to track so you can get back to providing the human experience consumers demand today.

Tracking Dollars and Cents Isn’t Enough

As I mentioned several times in Part 1 of this series (and again above), tracking dollars and cents isn’t enough. Basing your success solely on the revenues that you bring in will make it downright impossible for you to grow. You won’t know why people are buying, and therefore won’t be able to continue marketing in the way your audience needs to make the purchase. You also won’t analyze the right data to understand the human reason each buyer progressed in their journey, choosing your business at each step.

With the right KPIs, you’ll discover how to reach your audience in the most effective way, making their experience with your business a delight (and in turn, making buying from your company a no-brainer). In other words, your KPIs should humanize the data you have on hand to give you deeper insight into the buyer’s experience – an impossible task if you focus exclusively on revenues and expenses.

Industry Matters

Industry plays a big role in improving CX. Buyers go through a different journey depending on which industry you’re operating in. For example, buying a piece of clothing from a retail store is much different than signing up for a SaaS product or a new insurance policy. Understand your industry’s unique buyer’s journey and you’ll be able to start defining the metrics you should be monitoring to achieve the ultimate goal of revenue growth.

Avoiding KPI Analysis Paralysis

I know how overwhelming data can feel. There’s so much of it available that when you look at it and try to absorb everything at once, you’ll be hit with analysis paralysis. There are so many stats and figures that you’re not sure what to look at or where to start, so you just don’t start at all, right?

Avoiding that feeling of paralysis is exactly why I’m writing this guide. I want you to grow and to do that you need to dig into the right data – the type of data that’ll show you the greatest opportunities. Deciding on your KPIs will help you discover what you need to monitor. Hint: It might not be what you think it should be. In fact, sometimes (as in the example I gave in Part 1) it might be a weighted average of several different metrics.

When we left off, I suggested to you to start thinking about how to build a KPI measurement and reporting system that would focus your efforts on sustainable growth.

This included:

• Setting your specific goals
• Defining your objective using your North Star metric
• Determining how to reach those objectives with modern strategy
• Choosing your KPIs (which I’ll cover more below)
• Outlining the time frames in which you need to reach those goals
• Building an A/B optimization plan
• Improving, iterating, and repeating

If you haven’t done this yet, go back to Part 1 of this guide to KPIs and go through these steps. Then, come back here. We’re about to pick up right where we left off.

Categorical KPIs Around Content Marketing

With your objectives, goals, and time frames in mind, you’re able to start breaking down your KPIs into different categorical buckets to analyze. This lets you compare various channels to determine where you’re seeing the highest rate of growth.

Content marketing has become the focal point of marketing in today’s world. It’s often hailed “king” because consumers demand it to make decisions. Your buyers don’t want to get on the phone with a salesman without enough information first. Content lets them feel in control of their decision making. It’s an important component of every buyer’s journey, regardless of industry. So content is a necessity for your customers.

You might get the importance of content already but the question then becomes, how can you use your content to fuel your growth? And what data or business intelligence can you find that’ll help guide you on the right strategic path toward growth?

The places and ways you show up with your content matter. Some platforms will be more effective than others. The only way for you to know what’s working and what you should focus on to GROW is to analyze each categorical content marketing bucket side-by-side. And to do that, you need categorical KPIs to know what you’re looking for in each area.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the most important areas of content marketing and the categorical KPIs associated with each.

Landing Pages

Landing pages in the marketing world aren’t just any page on your website where a person lands. They’re pages designed to get customers to take a specific action. There’s no navigation bar (usually). There aren’t distracting alternative options. There’s just one focus and thus, they have slightly different KPIs.

I like to monitor four main KPIs centered around growth for each campaign.

1. Conversion Rate

Perhaps the most obvious KPI is the conversion rate. This is the number of people who take the action you wanted them to take in the campaign. They converted from basic visitor looking for more information to a buyer, subscriber, or whatever else you wanted them to become.

There is a lot that goes into whether or not a person converts on your landing page.

• Where your buttons are placed?
• How clear are you in making the ask?
• How much effort is required to take the next desired step?
• How timely are you when making the ask (are you attracting people when they’re in the right stage of their buyer’s journey)?

Once you have a baseline of conversions, I recommend testing your assumptions against what the customer deems best. This is called A/B testing. Most landing page software gives you the opportunity to A/B test for conversions where you can make small tweaks and let the market tell you what they want to hear, see, and feel when on your pages.

LeadPages publishes some of their user’s split tests to show just how impactful A/B testing can be. Take a look at this example below where two different headlines were tested. In this A/B test, you can see that one headline (spoiler alert: it was the bottom headline) converted 123% better than the other.

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The more you can test and tweak your landing page for conversions, the easier it’ll be for you to increase your conversion rate. But this isn’t the only KPI that tells you about your customer’s experience with the campaign.

2. Bounce Rate

Probably one of the biggest frustrations of any campaign is seeing a customer hit the back button (or type in a new URL, or close the browser altogether). Welcome to what’s affectionately called the bounce rate. When a visitor “bounces” from your website, it means your marketing message fell flat. It wasn’t compelling enough for the visitor to take the next step with your business. More specifically, the bounce rate represents the number of people who land on your page and then leave without taking any extra steps. They do not pass Go. They do not collect $200 (and neither do you). They came, they saw, they left.

Now, landing pages naturally have a higher bounce rate, so don’t get too upset when you see your bounce rate higher than your other pages. That’s because there’s only one goal on a landing page – to get the visitor to make a specific conversion. On your website, the goal is to get them to learn but on a landing page, you want them to perform one single task. In spite of there naturally being a higher bounce rate, it’s important to know what’s normal and what’s too high. Here’s a Quicksprout infographic which shows the benchmark averages for bounce rates.

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If this number is high, you know that something is amiss. Test your message, simplify the on-page experience, and add more dynamic content. Try new elements to see what keeps people on your pages.

3. Click-Through Rates

There’s a middle ground between converting and leaving altogether: taking some action but not following through to the end of the conversion.

For each step in the conversion journey, track click-through rates. See which pages get the most people to click and which ones don’t. For example, if you’re trying to get people to sign up for your email list and then buy a product from you, you might track the click-through rate of people giving their email address and the click-through rate of people who take advantage of your offer. Instead of only basing your success on how many people buy, you can see the specific areas where people drop off in the process and fine tune from there.

4. Exit Pages

Exit pages represent the pages where people leave your website. Similar to click-through rates, exit pages show where people take action in your funnel. The lower the exit rate on a page, the more likely a person is to be taking action on that page. And, similar to bounce rates, this KPI shows you where you lose people in the process. The higher the exit rate, the more people you’re losing at that specific stage in your funnel.

Look closely at each page. Which pages have the highest exit rate? Those are the pages that you should be testing and tweaking to keep people engaged from start to conversion.

Your Website

Unlike landing pages, KPIs for your website needs to be determined in a holistic nature. That’s because there is so much that goes into generating traffic to your website – specifically, search engine optimization (SEO).

That’s right. When it comes to your website, where you rank and for which keywords are key. But here’s the clincher. If you rank high in the search results and have zero conversions, where do you start optimizing your website for growth? What’s going wrong? What’s causing you to lose people? Judging rank alone is misleading. You need to understand the bigger picture, such as how long each person stayed on your website, etc. This is where things get tricky.

Brand Lift

Did your SEO efforts drive visitors to a blog post? If so, the visitor might’ve left but not before diving deep into your content and finding it helpful. Blogs are particularly effective at increasing brand awareness and boosting a customer’s intention to buy from you when the time is right, but how do you track this? How do you track feelings? No amount of data can read buyer’s minds after they’ve been on your website – or can it?

Presenting: Brand lift.

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Brand lift metrics measure the increased perception a person has about your business. In this graphic from Marketing Land about brand lift, you can see the various elements of brand lift. It’s not a simple thing to track, but it is powerful. There are several ways to put numbers to the emotions behind engaging with your content – the most popular of which is surveys. Google AdWords does surveys for their clients to show the true picture of what they got out of their campaigns. BuzzFeed uses reader surveys to do the same.

You can do the same for your business but you have to first understand what brand lift looks like for you and how you can measure it through your website. Here are a few ways to do that:

1. Engaged Time

How much time did your visitor spend engaged with your content? That doesn’t mean how much time they spent on the page (although that’s a good start). This means, how far did they scroll down reading your content? Did they watch videos on your page? How far did they get into those videos?

The amount of time a person is engaged with your content directly determines how likely a person is to return to your website, according to Chartbeat.

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You can see in this graph that their findings determined that a visitor who reads an article for three minutes was twice as likely to return as a visitor who only read an article for one minute. Pair this information with a tool like Hotjar. Hotjar is a heatmapping tool that shows you information about what people are doing on your website. How far down are they scrolling? Where are they stopping? If it’s on a video, you’re probably keeping people more engaged because they’re stopping to watch the video. Where are they clicking? If it’s on buttons at the end of your blog post, you’re engaging your reader by getting them to take action, such as sharing your content.

2. Engagement Time Based on Referrals

Break down engagement time even further and you can determine which channels send you the most engaged readers. This will give you a clearer picture of where you should place your ad spend and efforts. Take a look at this example, also from Chartbeat.

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Here, you can see that although you get significantly more traffic from Facebook than Twitter, both social sites send similarly engaged traffic. And although you get far less traffic from the Internet than you do from Facebook, the traffic you’re getting is more engaged. Using engagement helps you understand the value of each visitor, which is far more powerful and telling than looking at visit numbers alone.

3. Repeat Traffic

Content marketing and SEO are long-term games. They aren’t something you do once and expect to see immediate conversions (or they shouldn’t be if they are). So it makes sense that targeting repeat traffic will help you determine if you were found and forgotten, or if you made a strong enough impression to get visitors back to your website.

Here’s a good example of why this matters. In a BuzzFeed case study about Virgin Mobile, survey respondents said they were 278 percent more likely to consider the brand the next time they made a cell phone purchase after seeing sponsored content between five and nine times.

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Visitor stats can’t give you this kind of information. Tracking repeat visitors can, which is why it’s such an important metric for determining your website’s success.

4. Frequency of Revisits

Another way to determine how effective your content is at bringing people back (and hopefully buying) is by checking how frequently they return after their first visit.

A Vulture.com reader loyalty study determined that visitors who visited five times within a month were more likely to keep returning to the site on a regular basis than those who visited less.

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Getting people back to your site regularly shows you how interested they are in your content and in your business as a whole. The more often they visit, the more engaged they are with your brand, which in turn makes them more likely to purchase.

5. Cost Per Lead (CPL)

As I mentioned, judging website success requires you to take a holistic approach. Digital marketing isn’t a linear occurrence, so to judge whether your website efforts are a success, you cannot take a linear approach with one-off metrics. A good way to do this instead is to track how much you’re spending overall for each lead that comes in.

To do this, calculate your total marketing spending in a period and divide by the number of leads you generated that period. This doesn’t break down the nitty gritty about where you’re maximizing your buyer’s experience, but it does show you how well your overall marketing efforts are paying off.

Video

One of the hottest forms of content marketing these days is video. Video engages audiences on multiple levels – visual, audio, and many times (when subtitles are involved) text. But like any type of content marketing, you can’t jump on board just because it’s a popular approach. You have to understand the goal first. Three of the main goals with video marketing are:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Action

Google did a good job of outlining the unique KPIs associated with each of these three main goals, so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here. Check out this image to see which KPIs you should be tracking depending on your target goal:

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Sometimes, measuring these KPIs is easy. Views, impressions, unique users, view-through rates, watch times, etc., are all trackable analytics available to you through YouTube’s analytics (or your Google Analytics account). But let’s take an even deeper look at what video can tell you.

Lift Tells You Whether You’re Making a Healthy Return on Your Investment

Check out all of the KPIs that end in “lift.” Those are a little harder to measure and often, the data isn’t as readily available to you like surface level metrics are, such as views and impressions. Like we talked about earlier, any type of KPI that addresses brand lift of any kind, you’ll need to start performing surveys. This is the best and only way dig deep into the mind of your customer. There’s a lot that goes into this, so to get a better understanding, I encourage you to watch this video from a brand lift expert at Google (nothing’s better than hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth, right?).

Increasing Brand Lift With Video

Brand lift is essential. It’s the reason you publish videos on YouTube and the reason you start a content marketing campaign. But it takes constant iteration. Having fast access to real-time data from videos lets you develop and release new updates quickly, so you’re always a step ahead.

Remember when I talked about the importance of A/B campaigns in part 1 of this KPI series? I also mentioned its importance on your landing pages. Now, again, A/B testing video is one of those times when A/B testing comes in extremely handy for growing your business.

A/B testing your campaigns lets you test your creative to see which execution is most likely to drive brand lift. This takes away the risk of relying on dirty data and instead allows you to execute on the campaigns that are proven to bring you the most success. It lets you see what resonates instead of relying on guesswork to decide.

One example of a company that did this well was Trident Unlimited. Mondelez International, a snacking company that distributes popular snacks like Oreo, Nabisco, and Trident gum, wanted to create an ad that measured the highest brand lift, so they took to A/B testing. In one video, they shot Brazilian actor Caua Reymond chewing the gum from the start. In a second version of the video, they shot him putting the gum in his mouth and then chewing it. There wasn’t much more to the ad (as you can see in the example below), but the results were telling. This version (below) without seeing the gum at all showed a 36% brand recall, which was higher than the original version by 5%.

This approach is equally useful when deciding if you’re reaching the right group of people. With video platforms, such as Google’s YouTube, you can target video ads to a specific age range, gender, or other demographic. You can then watch which ads perform the best among which demographics and tweak your growth model from there.

In Canada, Nissan used this approach to create two videos for their target market. One featured Jim Parsons, while the other one didn’t have a celebrity name attached to it. Brand lift was pretty much equal across the board, but Nissan Canada found that they were able to get clearer on their demographics. Interestingly enough, their ads resonated more with women ages 25 – 34 and 45 – 54, so they readjusted their spending accordingly. The video is no longer available, or I’d share it with you here.

Need more examples? Check out this video case study from Lux where they describe their process, content, and how it all impacted their brand lift. Great case study! I think you’ll find it interesting.

Social Media

As marketers, it’s easy to get caught up in the glitz and glamour of social media. With billions (that’s right, billions with a “B”) of people on social media every day, you should be able to attract even a tiny percentage and still see success, right? But when you can’t, it’s frustrating. Why don’t you have more likes? Why don’t you have more people commenting on your stuff?

Social media is prolific in our society but here’s the catch: no one goes there to be sold to. And those that do like your page are there because they hope to get something valuable from you. If you have 100 engaged followers, that’s always better than 1,000 non-engaged fans. Yet, from a growth standpoint, when we try to nail down KPIs for social media, many businesses fall into the trap of focusing on vanity metrics that don’t mean a lot to their overall success.

So, what should you be tracking on social media? I have two important metrics that go far beyond the basic stuff of tracking reach, shares, and leads. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Purchase Intent

Do you know how often people talk about your brand on social media? Tracking mentions is easy, but we’re going to take it a step further. How many of those people talking about your brand have an intent to purchase from you?

There are infinite reasons why people might mention your brand. Many times, they have no relevance to their decision or interest in buying from you. You want to track and access the conversations that demonstrate people have an intent to buy instead of random, one-off conversations that will not turn into any kind of growth for your brand.

Share-of-Voice

Share-of-voice refers to how loud your voice is compared to your competitors’. In the social media world, you can get deeper into this than any other channel because it exposes the voice of the customer, too.

This is a great metric to track for determining the performance of specific campaigns.

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In this example, you can see that Starbucks’ Frappuccino had tremendous success with a campaign run in April based on the people who were chatting about the drink online.

But you can go deeper than this to really get in the mindset of your customer by listening to their voice on social media. You can also track the sentiment behind your campaigns compared to your competition’s campaigns. This lets you see how people view your product compared to your competitors by listening to their voice on social media.

To gain more clarity on both of these metrics, I highly recommend a tool called Brandwatch. It gives you data that enables you to understand what consumers think instead of getting caught up in the basic metrics that don’t offer meaningful insights.

Search Engine Marketing (or Paid Ads)

I already discussed the KPIs that go into landing pages above. Those metrics show what happens after a person clicks on your ad and goes to your website, but how can you tell whether your pay-per-click (PPC) ad spend is worth the investment?

When you launch a PPC campaign through Google AdWords or on any search engine, there are a few KPIs you need to track to know if you’re growing from your efforts as well as you could be.

Cost Per Conversion

Cost per conversion is relatively straightforward. It’s the amount you’re spending to convert someone you acquired from your PPC campaign to a subscriber/buyer/or whatever else you determine a conversion to look like.

This is great because it lets you keep an eye on your return on investment. Are you spending more than you need to when bringing in customers? Or are you efficiently attracting new sales dollars to your business? Tracking cost per conversion as a KPI lets you cut out unnecessary spending.

Advertising to Sales

This KPI is calculated as a percentage of how much revenue you’re bringing in based on how much you’re spending. The lower the percentage, the lower amount you’re spending compared to what is coming in.

The only time this isn’t the best KPI to track is when you’re advertising with a goal of attracting repeat buyers. In that case, the initial revenue might be low, but the overall revenue for the customer might be high. This is known as the lifetime value of your customer, and it can paint a bigger picture depending on the type of product you offer.

Lifetime Value

Sometimes, your product is low cost. You spend more in marketing to get the person in the door than you make on the first sale, but does that mean you’re not making a return on your investment? Not necessarily.

By tracking the lifetime value for customers you acquire through your search engine marketing efforts, you can determine how much you’re making off of that customer over a lifetime, as opposed to just one transaction. This tells you a better story about whether you’re growing as a result of your efforts.

Email

Email is far from dead as some marketers try to claim. In fact, it remains one of the best ways to reach customers to date. So how can you be sure you’re using it most effectively? By having the right KPIs for your email marketing, of course.

Too many businesses rely on open rates and clicks to determine an email campaign’s success, but this is unreliable data. It doesn’t show the long-term results of your email marketing efforts, and that’s what an ideal KPI for email should focus on. Not one-off campaigns, but rather overall engagement with your list. According to MediaPost, there are six stages of a subscriber’s lifecycle.

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If you focus on just one of them, you’re missing out on a tremendous opportunity. Each stage offers a unique way to inch a person to the next stage of their decision process to buy from you. Then, on top of these six stages of a subscriber lifecycle comes more analysis and information, including how each segment or category performs. There’s a lot to track, so with that in mind, here’s a more sophisticated approach to analyzing your email marketing efforts.

1. Long-Term Subscriber Engagement

One of the best ways to understand what’s happening with our email marketing campaigns and how effective they are at driving growth is to look at the big picture. This doesn’t include looking at specific campaigns, but rather looking at what resonates with a buyer over time.

To measure long-term subscriber engagement, you need to look at all of the actions your subscribers take, including opens, clicks, and shares. Then, combine these over a definitive period of time and analyze how much engagement you’ve seen. You might be surprised to find that, although your open rates are at 18% for a typical campaign, your overall list engagement over six months is at 70%.

2. Segment Engagement

You have a big list, but not everyone on that list is in the same spot in their buyer’s journey. Therefore, you break out your list into segments. Some of your offers will be more relevant for one buyer over another. Some segments will respond to one product over another. For example, if you’re a business targeting other businesses, you might find more success segmenting your list based on industry.

Adjust the content to match the needs of your audience. If you notice one segment isn’t as responsive or engaged, revisit how you address their needs.

3. Categorical Engagement

Which calls-to-action and offers engaged your audience the most? What products or services are most interesting to your audience?

By breaking down your campaigns by category, you can get a better picture of what the people on your list want. This can further your growth marketing efforts because you’ll get a better idea of what the people you’re talking to are longing for, which can reshape how you email your list in the future. A simple example is this: If one offer or product is getting a lot of attention in your emails, you can take note of that and make it more prominent in the future so that you can get even more traction from it.

What Does This Look Like In Action?

Phew! I’ve given you a lot to chew on here. This might all make sense in theory, but how can you put the many pieces I’ve presented to you together to make it work for your organization?

Most things around data are a time suck for creatives, and even for executives. That’s because there’s just so much of it these days to absorb and it’s difficult and highly specialized. To get a better understanding of your data, and to make it worth your time to sift through, you must leave all that collection, mining, scrubbing and modeling – you know, the heavy analytical work of it all – to someone else. When this data hits your desk it should look like a work of art. Something like this:

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Tableau Business Intelligence Dashboard Designer

Or this:

These data dashboards look beautiful and like something you could use, but before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we need to figure out which specific KPIs are right for you and what you should be tracking. To understand the best way to do this, let’s take a look at an example company. For the purpose of this article, I’ll use a SaaS product.

Using Data to Justify a Switch in Strategy

Consider this first example: A CMO of a well-funded middleware company wants to measure a new tiered pricing model and compare it to the previous freemium-to-paid model because the company is maturing. But he needs enough data to justify that this is the right approach to the board. In the past, the data pointed to the freemium model leading to faster revenue growth over offering a tiered pricing level. Now, as different maturity levels have ensued, he needs the right data to support his push for the strategic pricing shift. So, he gathers some data and puts it together in an easy-to-digest format to demonstrate that his new model will work.

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Here, he determined that X equals the growth of freemium users onboarded over days, weeks, or years. By looking at annual sales growth and customer attrition, he can show the sticking point on the graph and the exact moment when the tiered model will overtake the freemium model in terms of revenues. Here, the KPI is the number of freemium users that took action and paid for a product AND the attrition rate. Together, these metrics determined the consumer’s investment.

Using Data to Prove a New Strategy is a Success

This time, let’s look at a VP of Growth Marketing for a traditional software service company. He has a goal of SasSifying (yep, I just went there), their service into a paid product. By doing this, the company can anticipate a lot of customer questions about the new approach. To answer these, he plans to deploy a more robust content marketing strategy, since their sales staff is so limited. Not only will he need to justify this new strategy, he’ll also need to prove that it’s a success.

To start, he might baseline the current customer experience and then compare this to the new initiative against that baseline by measuring the real-time customer experience. Then, as they develop out a new “how-to” or “informational educational” content stream, he will need to start measuring. Which KPIs should he use?

Sure, he could analyze click-through rates, impressions, and open rates, but he read this post (he’s smart!) and he knows that ultimately the KPI must align with revenue growth. So, in this case, he would monitor the customer experience scores at each content marketing touch point over the next days, weeks, and months. That’s because high customer experience scores equate to more loyal consumers, which in turn equates to more revenues. His beautifully-formatted data would look something like this:

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Then, to build this measurement model out even more, the VP of Growth Marketing would plot whether or not an increase in those customer experience scores would result in an increase of revenue growth. By comparing experience numbers to overall sales dollars, he can see show that the shift in strategy makes sense.

Using Metrics to Achieve Fast Revenue Growth

In this final example, put yourself in the shoes of a founder of a social media analytics platform. She believes the only way to achieve fast growth is through word-of-mouth marketing, which, in her case, is based on total usage. This means she will need to understand how many users are using the product at any given moment. So, her KPI becomes total usage growth.

That’s simple, right?

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She could then take this a step further and compare/contrast the total usage growth with customer churn over days, weeks, and years. And to move even further along, she could drill down to EXACTLY where the churn is happening and where the usage occurs the most in terms of platform, time of day, partnership sites, etc. Understanding all of this lets her see what’s happening in the customer’s experience and aligning that with what’s happening with her overall revenues.

So, Why do Key Performance Indicators Matter So Much?

What’s the point of all of this? Growth. Every single person who works to achieve growth is trying to build revenue growth by using other measurement objectives to perfect a product, service, or customer experience. We’re trying to be better than our competitors at it, too.

The best practitioners are relentlessly iterating, testing, identifying, and ascertaining those “a-ha” moments – you know, those moments where the offer, the value proposition, the story promote growth. When you have those nailed down, you can measure the moment and get deep into the mindset of your buyer.

This approach keeps you on track toward what I call your North Star metric. It can be used for startups and enterprises alike. The point is that, through tracking the right beautifully crafted data, you can give your customers the best experience possible and grow your business.

Want More? You Got It!

There’s a lot to absorb when it comes to growth marketing. If you’re eager to learn more, I encourage you to check out one of these free resources.

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