Use these six metrics to communicate the success of your marketing efforts to your boss.
If you are responsible for marketing for your company, you may feel that your tireless efforts are sometimes difficult to quantify to your boss. Much of what we in marketing do is behind the scenes, measured by myriad metrics that demonstrate our strategies are at work. Oftentimes, those metrics do not necessarily speak the same language as our boss.
We are motivated by website visits, conversion rates, generated leads per channel, engagement on social media platforms, blog post shares, email click-through rates, and many other methods that can illustrate the success of today’s marketing campaign. But when you are trying to present the impact of your marketing strategies to your boss, it is hard to demonstrate all of this with measurable results.
You probably sense this, too — a sort of unspoken question mark hanging in the thought bubble over your boss’ head. You share that email click-through rates went up 40%, and there is a blank expression on his or her face. You suspect your boss may not fully appreciate the importance or the overall impact of your work.
And you are probably correct. Bosses theoretically understand that a solid marketing team can directly impact your company’s bottom line, but a whopping 73% of executives don’t believe that marketers are focused enough on results to truly drive incremental customer demand.
Your boss is looking for marketing metrics that matter to him or her, ones that they clearly see a result (or a connection) in customer acquisition or increased sales. This means you must be prepared to report on data that deals with the total cost of marketing, salaries, overhead, revenue, and actual new customer acquisitions.
Six Marketing Metrics Your Boss Wants To Know
There are basically six marketing metrics that your boss is interested in. Here is a brief overview:
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This is a metric used to determine the average amount your company spends acquiring a new customer. Take what your company spends in marketing costs, divided by the number of new customers it produced. There you have the price of each new customer.
Marketing Percentage of CAC: This is taking your marketing department costs and dividing it by the total cost of both sales and marketing to determine how much your company is spending on marketing as it relates to the what you spend to acquire new customers. A low marketing percentage of CAC shows that your marketing programs are relatively inexpensive for the results they are producing.
Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC: This is an estimate of total value that your company derives from each customer, compared with what you spend to acquire that new customer.
The Time to Payback CAC: This calculation demonstrates how many months it takes for your company to earn back the CAC it spent acquiring your new customers.
Marketing-Originated Customer Percentage: This takes all of the new customers from a set time period and examines what percentage of them started with a lead generated by your marketing team.
The Marketing-Influenced Customer Percentage: This is a metric that highlights all of the new customers that marketing interacted with while they were leads, anytime during the sales process.
When reporting to your boss about the most recent marketing results, it’s crucial to convey your performance in a way in which he or she can quantify the results in terms of impact to the company. Rather than focusing on “soft” metrics like per-post Facebook engagement, use the top six metrics that demonstrate how the marketing efforts led to new customers and what those customers are worth to the company’s growth and success.
For more tips on how to calculate and demonstrate theses metrics, download our cheat sheet on how to show your boss the measurable value of your marketing strategies.
Firing a client can help you make way for others who better suit your business.
Letting someone go can be hard to do. But when it comes to certain clients, it may be necessary to ease them out of your business portfolio.
Fire a client? Who does that? Well, successful companies committed to providing the best service possible and maximizing their energy for future growth do it whenever necessary.
Let’s face it: We all have had all-encompassing clients with whom the payoff does not correspond to the hours spent catering to their needs. These clients just may not be a good fit for your business. Essentially, if what you give far outweighs the return, or if you struggle to meet your client’s needs and expectations, it is probably time to fire that client. You are not doing what is best for them (or you) by keeping them in your portfolio.
This may seem counter-intuitive to growing your business, and the thought of giving up hard-earned clients may make you cringe, but, in fact, it better supports your success.
Why? If you have clients who are overly demanding, temperamental, or requiring skills or services you do not wish to provide — especially if they do not pay you what you’re worth — perhaps it is time to cut ties to make room for new clients.
According to the Forbes article “4 Reasons to Fire a Client,” sometimes a business will discover that focusing on a different set of services is far more profitable than some other services they offer. So, the business focus shifts, and the client portfolio should shift with it.
Firing those ill-fitting clients allows time to acquire new clients who align with your top skills and practices, and who will pay you what you’re worth for them. Essentially, you set yourself free to work with those that can fully benefit from your services. And focusing your time on clients that fit your business model will better support growth and happy clients who recommend your services to others.
How do you decide?
You may have a client that comes to mind as you read this. You are always making adjustments to provide them the best service. You second guess yourself and your quality of work. Quite simply, the relationship is exhausting.
First, you should do a thorough audit of your relationship with this client. Identify why the client doesn’t seem to fit your company’s business model. Essentially, try and identify why your client’s needs and your company’s services do not seem to align.
Perhaps your business and theirs were once a good fit, but now you have grown apart. According to the Harvard Business Review article “A Consultant’s Guide to Firing a Client,” business owners typically learn exactly where they excel, and where they’d like to focus their attention, over time, so perhaps your focus has changed or grown. Maybe this client has never been a good fit, and hindsight is 20/20. Examine the entire business relationship from the time you first acquired the client, and document everything.
How do you fire a client?
Once you determine that you will fire a client, the approach must be done either by phone conversation or in person. Never leave a message, send an email, or text a client to accomplish this. You need to do it with tact and professionalism.
Discuss and illustrate the basic reasons why the client and your services are no longer a great fit for either of you. Recommend another company to take your place if you can, and thank them for the time you worked together.
You need to keep your company’s strengths in the forefront of what you do and the services you provide. Some clients mesh with your particular expertise, interests, ethical practices, and work style. Other clients will make you feel like it is a constant struggle to provide them what they need and deserve. Sometimes firing a client is the best thing you could do for both your business and theirs.
A recent collection of social media facts and stats offers an interesting look at B2B company and buyer behavior.
Last month, Webbiquity published a list of 49 social media facts and stats about user behavior on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Google+. These figures, collected from various studies, offer insight into how people and businesses are using social networking in recent times.
B2B companies may find several of the stats particularly interesting, and it may influence the way they think about social media marketing. I have pulled out some of the most applicable and offered some thoughts below.
Social media facts and stats from Webbiquity
88% of B2B companies use Facebook for marketing (and 96% of all B2C companies )
If you are not using Facebook in your marketing efforts, you are in a quickly growing minority. With 968 million active daily users, the largest social networking site offers a huge opportunity — actually, the most expansive opportunity available — for your business to attract, court, and convert potential customers. Here are some of our top tips for using Facebook to market your business.
93% of small business owners and marketers use Facebook.
Small businesses don’t have the time or budget to compete with large brands when it comes to marketing — but social media can level the playing field. Social media, and Facebook especially, is an ideal marketing platform for small businesses because it can be relatively inexpensive but have a high impact on growth. Your company can cultivate your brand, engage with customers, and form business relationships. Learn how two small companies saw enormous growth thanks to social media.
21% of consumers say they unfollow brands that post repetitive or boring content. 19% say they would unfollow a brand on Facebook if the brand posted too often — more than six times a day.
88% of B2B marketers in North America use Twitter for content distribution.
Twitter is one of the more effective channels for gaining business, and the numbers prove it. A Market Probe Internationalsurvey found that 72% of those who follow a business on Twitter are more likely to make a purchase from that business, and that 82% of followers are more likely to recommend a product or service to friends and family. Additionally, 85% of respondents reported feeling a closer connection to a small business if they follow them on Twitter. Learn more about Twitter for business.
Pinterest has 47 million active monthly users worldwide, 80% of whom are women.
While Pinterest use is rapidly growing among B2C marketers, the B2B world still hasn’t quite figured it out yet. I pulled out the two above stats to show the enormous potential this channel has, particularly for businesses whose customer base is primarily women. Fronetics’ social prospecting workbook has some ideas on how to get started using Pinterest.
32% of U.S. companies with 100+ employees used Instagram for marketing activities in 2015. eMarketer predicts that number will jump to 70.7% by 2017.
The importance of Instagram for B2B companies will continue to grow. Here’s why: 90% of Instagram users are under age 35. A recent Google study showed an increasing number of Millennials on the B2B purchasing path — up to 46% of potential buyers were of this generation in 2014. Their preferences and behaviors are having a noticeable impact on B2B buyer behavior as a whole. So if your business wants to capitalize on the nearly 300 million active monthly users, Instagram should be on your radar.
64% of North American B2B marketers use Google+ to distribute content, but just 17% use it for new product launches (vs. 81% who use LinkedIn).
Americans may use Google+ less frequently than some of the other networks, but don’t count it out entirely. More people check the site than people realize, including die-hard fans of Google products and the many businesses who use the Google suite professionally.
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jennifer Cortez, Director, Marketing Communications, Transplace. Transplace is a North American non-asset-based provider offering manufacturers, retailers, chemical and consumer packaged goods companies the optimal blend of logistics technology and transportation management services.
Content has become a critical component of the modern marketing mix, but companies have to walk a fine line when it comes to the information that is being pushed out to the market. Too little and your audience will become bored and uninterested, and unfortunately, may look elsewhere for information (i.e., your competition). Too much and your audience may not know where to start (especially if it’s poorly organized). And if churning out too much content leads to a decline in quality, your audience may be left with dull, unremarkable content that, most importantly, is lacking in value to the industry.
When we’re creating content here at Transplace, (and I encourage others to keep this in mind) we ask ourselves this question: “Why should my customer care?” If you can’t answer that question, then it’s time to rethink your strategy. If you’re creating content just for the sake of it or because it’s something you know you need to do, you are most likely headed down the wrong path.
If you’re new to content marketing, first figure out what you want your content to solve before getting started. Do you want to increase brand awareness or drive more traffic to your website? Or maybe you’re focused on converting more leads into customers? Whatever it might be, each of your marketing goals will influence your content marketing strategy and therefore help you understand the audience you’re writing for, what channels you’ll share the content on, and how you’ll communicate key messages.
3 Key Content Considerations
Content is an extremely important part of our marketing and communications strategy and helps us continue to grow our brand awareness and thought leadership in the logistics and transportation industry. Our main objectives focus on three things: creating quality content that is relevant and helpful to the people in our industry, easy to understand and comes in a variety of formats. Let’s dig into these three areas a little further.
1. Producing helpful content
It’s easy to produce self-serving content such as sales pitches or a 1-pager on ‘Why you should pick our company,’ but let’s face it – tooting your own horn isn’t going to do much in terms of moving the needle closer to any of those marketing goals we mentioned previously. And most likely, these types of content pieces aren’t going to be searched for or probably even read by your target audience. One of two things occurs with standard sales slicks these days – they get deleted or physically thrown in the trash.
What is going to be helpful is producing content that becomes a useful resource for people in their day-to-day job. We want to keep them updated on trends, but it’s also important for us to keep in mind what we should be talking about that others aren’t. What are we foreseeing based on our unique position in the market that we can relay through content so our network is more prepared? If we can do a better job of talking to the buyer and figuring out what they want to hear about, then our content is only going to prove that much more valuable.
2. Content readability is key
Sometimes the topics in our industry can be complicated and it’s our job as the subject matter experts to make these complex topics understandable. It’s also important to not talk above your audience. You’ve probably heard of the Flesch readability score before, which indicates how difficult a reading passage is to understand. Content readability is powerful and your content marketing, website and SEO are dependent on it. Search engines like Bing and Google prefer readable content so when it comes to writing – keep it readable, compelling and easy to understand.
3. Content variety keeps things fresh
What I mean by this is have some fun with the types of content being created or reused for additional purposes. Did you conduct a survey and now have some great data points to share? Instead of housing this valuable information in a long article or whitepaper, you could highlight the research in an animated infographic. At Transplace, we’ve had great success at creating a variety of content pieces – from videos and podcasts to our TIP List and Q&As – we change up the types of content we’re creating to keep our audience coming back for more. You can also leverage existing content to create “new” types of thought leadership to push out. Nowadays there are several different ways people prefer to digest news and information, and we don’t have a crystal ball to show us these preferences, so you do typically need content in multiple forms in several different places whether that be print, online or social media. The permutations of content creation are endless if you tap into your creativity and keep things fresh!
Today, there is so much content out there that it’s become all too important for companies to truly create value in the information that they’re pushing out to the market. And when it comes to valuable content, keeping these three tips in mind will have you well on your way to creating content that is helpful to your audience and keeps them coming back for more!
Meet five women who are changing the face of digital marketing at their big brands.
March is National Women’s History Month, and thus we’ve been talking a lot about female leadership, the gender gap, and related issues. Today I’d like to call attention to five outstanding women behind big brands who are taking the digital marketing world by storm.
Here they are, in no particular order:
Yin Woon Rani
VP Integrated Marketing
The Campbell Soup Company
Camden, NJ
You may have seen the commercial where a mom, pushing two wild kids in a shopping cart, exasperatedly grabs a bottle of wine and a few cans of soup as the report of an epic, school-canceling snowstorm plays over the loudspeaker. It’s part of Campbell’s Soup’s Made for Real, Real Life campaign (#RealRealLife), the brand’s first integrated advertising campaign in more than five years. The collection of 11 ads has run across TV, digital, and social channels over the last five months. As VP of integrated marketing, Yin Woon Rani has helped drive the campaign’s success as part of her efforts to modernize the marketing program.
Rani has helped reposition several of the Campbell’s Soup Company’s brands to better resonate with a contemporary audience. Overseeing the advertising, media, design, digital, and social media disciplines, she has helped accelerate the company’s digital and content marketing program. Rani also championed an increase in digital investment — which will shift to be around 40 percent of the media buy, up from 22 percent last year.
Pamela Vaughan
Principal Marketing Manager, Optimization
HubSpot
Boston, MA
As principal marketing manager for optimization at HubSpot, Pamela Vaughan helps grow traffic and conversions from the company’s various marketing assets, with a special expertise in blog optimization. She has played a leading role in optimizing the HubSpot blog, which receives 1.5 million visitors and generates 14K+ new leads each month.
SVP Global Brand Marketing
Under Armour
Baltimore, MD
Adrienne Lofton leads the team that serves as Under Armour’s brand compass and communicates the company’s “underdog” attitude to millions of athletes across the globe. A former captain of the Howard University NCAA Division I women’s volleyball team, Lofton has championed the company’s focus on the athlete, rather than the apparel outright. This ethos permeates the brand’s digital presence, and is a main part of the strategy that, no doubt, has helped Under Armour become the second largest sports apparel company in the U.S.
Pushing for confident and inspirational messaging, particularly for women and young girls, Lofton has driven several marketing campaigns that have taken the company’s digital presence to new levels. Videos from the “I Will What I Want” and #RuleYourself campaigns — created in collaboration with agency Droga5 — have reached viral status on social platforms. In particular, the #RuleYourself video featuring the USA women’s gymnastics team had nearly 10 million views on Facebook in just 3 weeks.
Alex Hisaka
Head of Global Content Marketing
LinkedIn
San Francisco, CA
Alex Hisaka has scaled LinkedIn’s content marketing efforts to impressive proportions. Her team plans, creates, and markets content for all stages of the buying process, producing daily blog posts and almost-weekly ebooks, which has had a massive impact on business. With a background in copywriting, design, and social marketing, Hisaka oversees much of the work herself — and her high standards are well known and much praised by her colleagues.
Hisaka adamantly believes in the social value and authenticity of content marketing and how it can bring audiences together in a mutually beneficial relationship. She has become a leading voice in content-led lead generation and strategy. We look forward to hearing more from this talented marketer.
Alexandra Wheeler
VP Global Digital Marketing
Starbucks
Seattle, WA
As vice president of global digital marketing over the last decade, Alexandra Wheeler has helped Starbucks strengthen the connection between the physical and digital worlds. This bridge is a key part of the brand experience, and one that Wheeler believes deepens the company’s relationship with its customers. Starbucks is recognized as one of, if not, the most socially engaged brands in the world, and business performance has mirrored digital growth.
Wheeler cites authenticity as central to the company’s success in the digital space. For example, when the team noticed customers posting selfies with their frappuccinos, they encouraged the #sipface campaign, which boasts over 15K posts on Instagram. Leveraging an authentic customer sentiment on the platform where they were already engaging is right up Starbucks’, and Wheeler’s, alley.
When Arrow Electronics came across Kendrea Durr-Smith, senior leader of export control audits, training, and communications at Honeywell Aerospace, on LinkedIn, the company was impressed with what she had accomplished in her nine years there. Now Arrow’s Director of Global Trade Compliance for the last four years, Durr-Smith has led a group that is both unique and diverse, and has helped to shepherd in significant changes.
Durr-Smith’s department is unique. “The majority of functional departments at Arrow are regional- or site-specific,” she says; “however, because trade compliance is global by nature, our department is global in scope.” This means that Durr-Smith’s team is diverse, and “not just in terms of gender, but also in terms of background and culture. Learning about these differences and learning how we can best work together has, at times, proven challenging, but is critical to success,” she explains.
Success is something Durr-Smith has achieved. Arrow has made significant changes in the last few years in an effort to better support the needs of customers and suppliers. Durr-Smith and her team have assumed new responsibilities with respect to trade management and compliance in order for these new efforts to be ushered in.
To support these corporate changes and her department’s new responsibilities, Durr-Smith’s department has changed. Three of the most recent hires are women. What is exciting to Durr-Smith is how these women got to where they are today.
“Two of the three women we recently hired are self-educated,” she says. “They were interested in trade compliance, and they educated themselves on the field and took steps to make a career change. This is exciting — exciting that they actively wanted to be involved in this field, and exciting that they were proactive in getting to where they are today.”
Durr-Smith’s enthusiasm for these women’s accomplishments is genuine and speaks to her general ethos. When asked what leadership advice she could provide to others, she offered the following:
“Take on new or different responsibilities whenever possible. Place individuals in different functional areas, and focus on the benefits afforded to both the company and the individuals. Also, focus on helping people grow, and focus on supporting others.”
Thinking about pursuing a career in trade management and compliance? Durr-Smith offers this advice:
“Be flexible. Be patient. Have a good sense of humor. In the field of trade management and compliance, these characteristics are essential.”
Yin Woon Rani
Pamela Vaughan
Adrienne Lofton
Alex Hisaka
Alexandra Wheeler