When you think about the health of any business, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Most people immediately go to sales numbers—pipeline, bookings, and revenue. And, they are not wrong. However, here at 3Sixty Insights, we push our clients to focus on another aspect of the business: marketing. Let’s put this into context a bit. How often do you personally purchase a product or service from a business that you’ve never heard of before? If we are being honest with ourselves, the answer is “never” or “very rarely.” This is why we believe that tracking the performance of marketing is as equally important to the health of the business as tracking sales performance. Current statistics show that it takes an average of 5 – 7 impressions for people to remember a brand and that In 2015 Facebook influenced 52 percent of consumers’ online and offline purchases, up from 36 per cent in 2014.
Now, as a business, you can try the old school, brute-force method of focusing solely on outbound sales to generate revenue—and it does work. But in all honestly, this method is directly in line with the “working harder and not smarter” mentality, and it is guaranteed to lead to burnout of the team over time. There is the misconception that marketing equals huge expense, but that simply isn’t true; there is a significant amount of marketing that could be completed with zero budgeting dollars spent (just effort). We’ve already covered that in previous articles: Social Media and Online Forums, Hidden Gems of Customer Insight, The Importance of Testing in Marketing Campaigns, How To Develop A Social Media Marketing Strategy For Your Business and will continue to cover that down the road, but today we’ll talk about how to put a focus on marketing to boost overall corporate performance and morale.
A phrase we use quite frequently is “what gets measured, gets done”… However, we are also firm believers that if you really want something to be done, make sure everyone knows how a team is performing. With most organizations, this is done on a daily basis with respect to sales, as sales numbers are typically reported across the business in dashboards, update emails, and meetings. Yet, with respect to marketing, this almost never happens, and in most cases, no one knows how the company is performing from a marketing perspective. I’m reminded of my time with HubSpot. As a company, not only did they focus equally on sales and marketing performance, but they also adopted the terminology “Smarketing,” frequently combining sales and marketing in corporate communications and meetings. This ensured that both teams were on the same page and also gave everyone the sense of pride that they were all moving forward in the right direction as one team and company. In this vein, we always recommend to our clients to put the marketing team’s performance on a pedestal alongside sales.
At the very core of this, we recommend sharing at a minimum: website performance and lead performance, along with email and social media community growth on a weekly or monthly basis, paired alongside with trending data… But, these are the bare minimum and we always suggest tracking other items such as:
- Percentage of new vs returning visitors
- Average number of pages viewed
- Average time on site
- Most popular pages
- Social campaign performance
- Email marketing performance
- Pipeline generated from marketing
- Sales generated from marketing
Each and every one of these statistics provides some real insight to the marketing lifeblood of a company, and when combined with sales and trending data, they can truly lead to a deeper understanding of the real health of a business. Once you start measuring these data points, you can then try to find ways of continuous improvement to keep them moving in the right direction. Sharing these numbers publicly has an interesting side effect as well: it can boost morale … Again, thinking about HubSpot, one of the greatest things about sharing the numbers and trajectory is that it gave everyone a huge sense of pride in the business and was a large part of their culture: Why HubSpot Treats Its Culture as a Product. As a leader within your organization, give it a try and see how it affects the business… We can almost guarantee you’ll have a boost in corporate performance and morale.