KPIs - Essential Know How for ROI Success

What's the KPI story? When you consider the complexity of your customer interactions, before they eventually decide to purchase, you can easily imagine all sorts of touchpoints - from Google search to web page to google maps to Trust Pilot to retargeting ad to campaign site landing page to LinkedIn ad to email click through; and the list goes on. The customer journey is not linear at all. And it usually happens over days or weeks.

If we assign KPIs to every known touchpoint, then we need to know which ones are telling us that this prospect is on the right path to becoming a customer. In other words, which Key Performance Indicators story is providing us with the best business intel.

Without KPIs it's very easy to drown in data analytics and ROI reports that are as complex as the data science underneath. KPI's lead to informed business decisions that increase return on investment. Not only that, but your relationships with your marketing staff will also improve, not least because they will understand what is it that you want.

Apart from the fact that over 80% of marketers admit to lacking the confidence with KPI measurement, the big digital challenge for business leaders trying to setup accurate performance measurements is distinguishing between Google Analytics, UTM Tracking, Attribution Models and Market Segmentation settings for each ad campaign.

The Marketing Tech Stack software options are growing by the month so it's getting more and more vital to be able to simplify this equation. At my last count there are over 600 MarTech options available, and you probably only need between 5 and 10 of them.

Ask yourself this: How can senior stakeholders make the right business decisions without understanding how to effectively and efficiently measure their return on investment (ROI)?

So working out what your KPI's are isn't straight forward because there is so much data to consider and the MarTech software conundrum looms heavy to remind you that even when you have worked out what matters to your stakeholders, collecting and attributing that data can't be done without first unpacking and understanding the Software as a Service ( SaaS) options.

For example, just considering the relationships we have to nurture with our customers, in order to build our brand and service/product portfolio:

Engagement Scores

tell us that our customers like the content we publish.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Tells us how likely our customers are to recommend our products/services to others.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

another KPI for our campaigns, but we have to remember that 'satisfaction' is a long way from brand loyalty - unless your CSAT score is 100% of course. Usually, always room for improvement I think.

Once we have our KPI story, we can look at the Marketing Tech Stack. I'm not going to list them all here, but in my experience (with a long technical software engineering background) I will strongly advocate the need to keep the tech stack as simple and small as it can be.

You MarTech Tool Stack is the key to measuring your ROI. Get this right and you're all set.

Remember, everything is evolving, the tracking metrics, the available software and the customer expectations. One example is Salesforce. This SaaS CRM has long dominated as the go to tool for customer relationship management. This dominance has had a lot to do with how SF integrates with other MarTech and communication tools. But there are other CRMS that have been expanding their integration options by using SF as the benchmark. The same has happened with workflow and social sharing platforms.

Collecting KPI data

Create surveys, polls & quizzes

So if all you need is a MarTech Stack solution, that would be a very good place to start preparing your business for a marketing journey that provides you with constant feedback about your prospects, customers and Brand.