• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, May 11, 2016

Remember when the role of a marketer was simple?  You had two things to accomplish; build a brand and drive demand.   It was brand and demand — and half of those objectives were completely intangible with no real metrics to work with!

I say that sentence sarcastically because I actually love accountability.  That being said, marketers do have a difficult time these days because you have to find a way to prioritize and correlate the metrics at your disposal.  It’s not easy!  

In my role as a marketer I have no less than a dozen different metrics that I have access to on a daily or weekly basis, and those are just the ones I’ve actively put in place with existing systems.  You can track things like awareness metrics, net promoter scores, website visits, landing page downloads, MQL’s, SQL’s, social engagement, conversion to customer, cost per customer acquisition, retention metrics and more.  

I could easily expand that set of metrics to 20 or more if I wanted to, but then you spend most of your time just aggregating the information and trying to make sense of it.

To be successful you have to ask yourself three important questions:
-- What metrics are causal and important to track?
-- What metrics are correlative and might be helpful, but lower priority?
-- How do these metrics determine which tactical elements you should prioritize for execution?

By asking yourself which metrics are causal, meaning you know that action A causes an immediate and measurable action B, such as an inquiry or a meeting or a sale, you can determine which tactics are core to what you are doing.  In a B2B campaign, lead nurturing is core and causal, along with sales quotas on meetings, which have a direct and causal impact on lead flow.  

Events and advertising are sometimes less causal and more correlative, meaning you have a feeling that advertising is driving awareness and interest but you may not have the systems in place or access to the right information to be sure they are causing specific actions.   They may be creating a halo effect that drives the business, but you might need more insight to confirm.  It doesn’t mean you don’t do those things, but if the metrics by which you evaluate them are too far removed, it may not be worth looking at them in detail until you can tie them together.

Prioritizing your tactics can help you identify what you need to do to create the right dashboard for your own internal analysis and it also allows you to ask the question, “What should we stop doing?”  In some cases you may be doing too much and stretching your team too thin, and that simply results in burnout and fatigue.  You may be building your business, but you could be breaking down your team and without them you have no ability to accomplish anything at all.

Do the analysis and think through the situation. Are you prioritizing properly?