As marketers we love metrics. At the mention of metrics, you’re probably mentally listing the ones you use already! The difficulty I have found is that when you are presenting back campaign results to your marketing team or the whole company, those who are aren’t close to the process don’t have a framework to understand what you’re presenting.
“The Q1 campaign had a 30% CTR, 15% conversion rate, and led to 150 MQLs.”
This is usually met with blank stares and people mentally asking themselves “Is that good?” It’s an excellent question. How do you explain your campaign successes in a simple, impactful way? How do you convey to the layman how this campaign stacks up to your other campaigns?
In this blog, I’ll cover a system that you can use to communicate your campaign’s key marketing metrics that can be universally understood.
First, reduce the number of metrics which you are using to determine if a campaign was successful. If you are trying to generate new leads then using marketing qualified leads (MQLs) as your success metric is better than looking at open rates. Now that you have fewer metrics to determine your success rate, how do you answer the question of “Is 150 MQLs good?”
A fantastic idea is rather than rattling off your favorite metrics or showing a cluttered dashboard for perspective, you can create an internal rating system. Then, translate these internal ratings into something straightforward and simple to understand: a trophy system.
As an example, you could say that as a marketing team all of your events are targeted with attendees, all your lead generation activities are targeted with MQLs, and all your ads are targeted on new names, etc.
Let’s take the example of lead generation activities. In your company, let’s say that for a typical lead generation program 100 MQLs is good, 120 is great, the best you ever got was 150, and anything under 80 is something you wouldn’t repeat again. This then gets translated into:
Bronze: Under 80 MQLs
Silver: 100 MQLs
Gold: 120 MQLs
Platinum: 150 MQLs
There are 3 reasons you do this:
1. It Answers the Question “Is That Good?”
As everyone knows that platinum is great, silver is good but not the best we’ve ever had, and bronze comes just short of silver. Awarding trophies should happen as soon as the campaign has ended. This is great for people outside the team to know what’s working, and for people on the team it is much more emotional and creates a sense of pride when you run a platinum campaign. You can even honor the moment by giving the team miniature platinum trophies!
2. It Socializes the Idea That Your Marketing Programs Have Targets
Your team has targets. Your team is performance driven. Everyone should know that! The trophy system is a tangible way to communicate that there are clear and comparable measures of success. This also helps when you have to push back on campaigns that keep underperforming as you can say that you’ve tried them before, the results are low, and the best you’ve achieved is a bronze result.
3. It Helps With Planning and Budgeting
When you can easily see which campaigns are best and which are worst at the end of the year, you can simply say “let’s review all of our bronze campaigns and look to repeat and expand the gold and platinum activities.”
It doesn’t have to be MQLs that command the trophy, either. It could be revenue or ROI. In fact, it doesn’t have to be a single metric at all, it can be an overall calculation of a range of metrics. The whole point is taking complex analytical data and presenting it back to a broad set of stakeholders in a way that is easy to understand, easy to benchmark, emotional, and impactful.
How do you present your marketing teams campaign results and success internally? Do you have your own internal ranking system? Tell me about it in the comments.