There is no one-size-fits-all strategy in the virtual world. The key is to find the right approach for your organization.
Think back to when you had to implement a new CRM system, and you had to choose between the various proven platforms in the market today. You probably had to assess the various capabilities of all your options. Then take account all your organization’s need. What aren’t you able to do with your CRM? Manage your contacts better, provide better sales and marketing analytics, or execute advanced automations?
Your performance marketing initiatives need the same approach. You need to find the right solution for your organization; and that means identifying determiners that can help you enable optimizations that will boost campaign performance. This blog covers three determiners that will never steer you wrong.
Determiner 1: Your revenue Model
A campaign’s success boils down to how much revenue was generated. That makes your revenue model a critical piece of the puzzle.
Is your business based on subscriptions? Or, does it depend on retention and repeat purchases? In either case, revenue generated from a single customer over a period, i.e., customer lifetime value (CLV), serve as an accurate gauge.
On the other hand, if you provide a product or service with a longer shelf-life, the price tag on every sale determines revenue. Meaning that average sale value would make a more appropriate gauge.
To identify your first determiner, you need to answer these two questions:
• Should you be measuring CLV or average sale value?
• What is the dollar value you would assign to it?
When the revenue projection is clear, it is far easier to accurately measure, optimize and maximize marketing’s ROI.
Determiner 2: Your Tracking Ecosystem
A wise man (most agree that it was Peter Drucker) once said: You can’t improve what you don’t measure.
So, what are you able to track as of today? Is it form-fills and the number of marketing qualified leads you and your team generate every quarter? That is the key performance indicator for your team. After all, whether a lead becomes a customer isn’t entirely in your control.
But are form-fills your only source? You’ve probably seen the word ‘other’ mapped against source in your CRM a few times. In which case, should you be optimizing campaigns to drive audience to these sources too? The questions below will help you assess the situation critically:
• How many of your qualified form-fills become customers?
• How long does the process take on an average?
• What other means of communication or touchpoints do your provide your audience? For example, do you have a phone number listed, or do you have a live chat feature enabled? Does your store get walk-ins from a google business listing?
• If yes, how many leads or sales are generated through them?
• Following up on that, how many of them convert to customers?
• Further, how long does it take for these specific leads to go through the process?
• Finally, what is the CLV or average sale value (whichever you identified as the first determiner for your organization) for them?
If you struggled to answer question four and beyond, here is some food for thought: What if the leads from these sources convert faster and spend more? Wouldn’t it make sense to optimize them?
Long story short, the second determiner you must identify are your various customer touchpoints, and their contribution to revenue generation.
Determiner 3: Your organization’s single source of truth
Performance marketing, at its core, is nothing but a series of data-backed improvements. Which brings a crucial question front and center: Where do you go when you need to pull and analyze data?
Which platform do you use to find out:
• How many people visited your website and how they found you?
• How many form-fills or leads you generated?
• How many of them did sales mark as sales qualified leads?
• What stage of the sales cycle the different MQLs are in?
• How many leads became a customer?
• How much revenue did you and your team generate? In other words, are you on track to meet the revenue goals set for your department?
While trying to answer these questions, how many different platforms did you name? And, would it require some level of manual work like merging reports from two platforms to draw the needed insights? Also, what happens when there is a conflict in data from two different platforms?
Performance marketing demands speed and action. Leaning on your CRM to map your customers’ journey with you is great. But that alone will not provide you with all the data needed to optimize successfully. You need to layer that with behavioral data from in-platform solutions, and visualize it, to find actionable insights.
Ensuring seamless integration between the various platforms with visualization reduces manual work, surfaces data you can trust, and empowers you to draw informed insights with confidence. In a nutshell, you can focus on formulating new experiments. This visualized dashboard, ideally, should be your organization’s single source of truth.
Parting words
Like we said in the beginning, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. But the determiners outlined in this blog can help you identify opportunities that will boost performance. The secret to this is finding the right optimization settings for your organization: Knowledge is power.
About the Author: Brad Camus
