Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measurable factors of performance over a set period of time that tell you how well your brand is thriving. These can be milestones that show you how far you’ve come as a brand or benchmarks that you need to meet in order to reach your goals.
Marketers have always relied on KPIs to grow and adjust their marketing strategies, and in 2023, they are no less important. In some ways, they have become more important. Let’s dive into why you need to keep your eyes on your KPIs this year.
Common KPIs for Marketers
KPIs are used in almost every element of business analysis: employee performance, accounting, and yes, marketing. When measured and analyzed, KPIs can tell marketers what elements of their strategies work and what may be a drain of resources.
Some common KPIs for marketers include:
- Number of unique website visitors
- Lead and customer acquisition cost
- Lifetime value of customers
- Lead generation form conversion rate
- The amount of money brought in by your marketing (revenue attribution)
- Marketing return on investment (ROI), particularly return on ad spend (ROAS)
- Social media follower growth
- Rate of customers leaving the brand
- Traffic to marketing qualified lead (MQL) ratio
If your marketing strategy was a school assignment, the KPIs would be the factors that your professor would take into account when determining your grade. You want to keep your KPIs optimized, and if the results are less than ideal, you may want to change your strategy.
Importance of KPIs in 2023
In 2023, we’re coming out of the past few years of uncertainty — and for many, it seems that we’re not quite out of the water. That’s why it’s so important to have measurable, concrete data that you can use to make decisions with your marketing. Here are some of the reasons why the above KPIs are so important to track:
Helps You Set Goals and Measures Your Progress
Every marketing strategy has a goal, and every brand has goals of what they hope to achieve. The more concrete those goals are, the better. KPIs help you keep your goals SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
By taking a look at your KPIs, you might be able to set a goal like “grow my Twitter following to 5k by the end of the quarter” or “gain 25 new leads this month.” Then you can determine how best to achieve that and track your KPIs throughout the period of time to measure your progress. If the KPIs are changing more slowly than you’d like, you can tweak your marketing strategy to best suit your goals.
Allows You to Monitor Your Company Vital Signs
Your KPIs give you an insight into the health of your company overall. Are you great at driving traffic to your website but struggling to attract leads? Or do you have a wealth of leads who bounce from your emails rather than engaging further? Is there a particular time of year that your company does better than other times of year?
These questions can all be answered by looking at your KPIs. Not only will you be able to monitor your brand’s health, but you can come up with solutions to improve your weaker areas.
Keeps Your Brand Flexible, Even in Uncertain Times
If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that there are going to be hard times that you don’t see coming. Your business may be booming one week, and the next week something changes in the world and you struggle to make even a few sales. It’s important for you to stay flexible and be able to adjust when you don’t know what life will throw at you. Monitoring your KPIs helps you to do that.
When looking at your KPIs, you can play to your strengths. But your strengths might change over time based on the world around you. When you notice a fluctuation — for instance, maybe certain services do well at certain times of year and less well at other times of year — you can adjust your plan accordingly.
Keeps You Constantly Improving
You never want your business to be too static. The goal is to constantly grow and improve your business as your customers grow and improve, and even to find new customers. By monitoring your KPIs, you know exactly what areas could stand to improve. Once you’ve strengthened one area, take a look at your KPIs again to see what needs to be improved next. If you want to truly optimize your business, watch your KPIs.
