Using marketing KPIs to measure performance across your marketing efforts and marketing channels can sometimes feel like too much.
It should not require a degree in statistics to measure whether or not your marketing investment is returning solid marketing ROI.
You want to stay busy building organic traffic and getting new, local customers with lead generation marketing tactics.
This post should help you understand the basics for managing with key performance indicators in your next marketing campaign so your team can increase your website traffic, the number of leads, and improve conversion rate.
FREE: Marketing Channel ROI Performance Worksheet
To start, feel free to download our Marketing Channel ROI Performance Worksheet to see how your marketing campaign is working across all channels.
After you’ve entered the basic data, you will be able to answer critical questions for improving your marketing campaigns and marketing KPIs like.
- How do we increase website visitors?
- Does our organic traffic have a better conversion rate vs. social media?
- What changes can we make to increase lead conversion rate?
- How do we increase the number of leads we get?
- How do we lower customer acquisition cost (cac)?
- Which marketing campaign investment is
- How well does a sales qualified lead close to new
- Which channel generates the best marketing qualified leads (mqls)?
Your marketing and sales team should be looking at all your digital marketing together in order to make improvements.
Your sales and marketing team (this may be another agency like FANNIT, internal employees or contractors) should have no problem developing a clear digital marketing strategy with a tactical plan for your business to grow.
Here Are The Top Marketing KPI Examples You Should Start With.
Using this powerful worksheet will help your sales department and marketing team(s) track the top marketing KPIs and marketing metrics across all the relevant channels that generate leads to acquire a new customers.
Marketing expenses per channel
Measures what you invest in marketing costs
Website traffic data
Tells you how many people are looking at your website
Conversion rate
How much of this traffic turns into qualified leads. 100 visitors, 10 leads = 10% conversion rate
Leads generated
Qualified leads that you are able to put into your marketing database. Volume is not always the best. Sometimes quality over quantity is what is needed, but you and your team should create a system for evaluating how good (or not good) the new contacts you are generating.
Cost per lead
If you invested $1,000 on digital marketing and generated 100 leads = $10 per lead
Customer acquisition cost (cac)
Not all leads are created equal. So if you have spent $1,000 to generate 100 leads and 30 of those leads turn into new customers (or sales) your cac is $33.33.
New sales revenue
Revenue generated from new customers. If your business can generate new sales and keep customer retention high, you’ll grow your business much faster. BUT, if all your revenue comes from new customer acquisition, you’ll need to always replace that revenue each year.
Average (gross) revenue per sale
This is easier to figure out if you are selling jobs or projects – some service with a start and end that has revenue attached to it. For example, a Moving & Storage company, a Personal Injury Attorney, or a Window Cleaning Company can assign a revenue to a “sale”. To follow our example above, if you averaged $500 of gross revenue per sale x 30 new sales = $15,000.
So in the example marketing KPIs above, would you continue to spend $1,000 if it returned $15,000 in gross revenue?
The easy answer is YES! All day long! BUT, what if those sales are not profitable? You would be spending more to go further behind, faster.
Most Owners and marketing Managers in charge of the digital marketing strategy tend to focus on gross sales metrics and basic web analytics – new sales, how much revenue is generated by your sales process, lead conversions, social media efforts, and SEO efforts. They do this because it’s a place to start.
(Bonus) Customer lifetime value
I mention this because as a local service business (like an attorney) you might not care about this KPI. Although you may want to have the same client multiple times, my bet is not really. Other services businesses like Landscaping, you definitely care about this metric.
What ROI Should You Expect With Campaigns?
This is why you will need to start focusing on gross profits of each sale, not just gross revenue when calculating ROI (return on investment) of your marketing spend.
The best explanation of simple ROI I’ve read is on Investorpedia. Yes, this is a site for financial investment, BUT as a business owner you are financially investing in your business.
Keep in mind, right around $1M in annual revenue and again at $3M in annual revenue, your local service business starts to hit a wall and will need to expand the types of digital marketing you are doing in order to reach sales goals and bust through your barriers.
This is why each key performance indicator you measure performance with needs to be examined individually and collectively (by channel) if you want to make the slight improvements you will need to in order to unlock the next level of sales growth and break through those walls.
Start by looking at how each channel is generating a marketing qualified lead, getting customer conversions, your traffic to lead ratio, and your cost per lead and cost per sale.
That is what our worksheet will help you start to think about.
Each industry and business has their nuances, so we’ve outlined the top sales channels we’ve see work for Local Service Companies.
Local SEO (organic search)
Over time can generate the least expensive leads for your business by far, but there are several factors at play. This is why you need an a professional SEO expert like FANNIT to help you with these campaigns.
- Content on your website
- Technical SEO
- Google reviews
- Local citations
- Google My Business Local Listing posts
- Website visitor engagement
- Backlink signals
- Social media signals
Resource: Google PageSpeed Insights
Paid advertising
This generates leads faster, but can also burn through your investment more quickly if you are not monitoring how your campaigns are set up and bidding is being done. Make sure you outline your process.
Social media marketing
This can be used to build loyalty and increase lifetime value of customers by building community, but who wants be a part of a community built by a Plumbing Company?
TV and Radio advertising
These are expensive, but great brand builders. The only problem is, like other forms of paid advertising – when you stop paying, people forget about you. This is why SEO plays an important role in keeping your brand
Non-digital campaigns
These can work well, but you have to choose wisely. If they are done in combination with digital campaigns the momentum they can help build is typically worth it.
Top Channels for Local Service Businesses to Generate Marketing Qualified Leads
Begin by examining your overall marketing strategy and how each of the lead sources generate sales qualified leads (sqls) for your business.
Then you can start to improve on the various marketing efforts with each channel to eek out more qualified leads, reduce customer acquisition cost, and increase sales growth.
While tracking marketing KPIs your sales team should pitch in to see how your collective marketing efforts produce results across the following channels.
Organic Search
People who use search engines to find information and click on the organic results displayed to them. Not advertisements.
Organic website traffic will end up being the least expensive on a per lead basis, but will be one of the longest for you to develop.
Paid Advertising
There are several ways paid advertising is presented to your potential customers in order to increase website traffic. Below are some examples.
However, if you want to dramatically increase your chances of increasing your traffic to lead ratio, landing pages are the best way to do this.
- Text Ads from Google Adwords
- Google Local Service Ads
- Click to Call Ads from Google
- Paid Social Media Advertising on Social Media Sites
- Display Ads on other websites
Social Media (Platforms) Marketing
Social media is one of those channels that can help you in many ways. Not all leading directly to sales, but providing you with opportunity to get and build.
- Potential Customer Referrals
- Brand Awareness
- Customer Support Channel
Email Marketing
Unlike social media, emails can typically be targeted for specific segments of your audience who have opted in to receive very specific information from your business.
There are marketing agencies who purchase lists and send unsolicited emails to prospects in a list. This is illegal in the EU due to GDPR.
Here is how the US views email marketing laws at the time of this original post in 2021.
How to Comply with Email Marketing Laws
- Obtain Valid Consent
- Re-permission Contacts With No Record of Consent
- Display Proper Contact Details
- Keep the Communication Honest, Straightforward and Clear
- Opting-out Should be Simple, Easy and Accessible
Local service companies who are trying to increase the lifetime value of their customer relationships will use email lists as reminders.
Like, ‘It’s Time to Fertilize Your Lawn’ or ‘Tips for Repairing Roof Leaks’ that are sent to past customers.
Radio / TV
Get ready to spend a lot of cash, but these campaigns are a great way to remind everyone your brand is thriving. These are great for brands that serve regional markets.
Yard / Truck Signage
This is a low cost way to get eyeballs on your brand and show people you are serving in a local market.
Post Cards & Mailers
The rate of return on this channel has been a steady .5% to 1.5% return and depends on your target market. In some cases, like local healthcare, this can work better than social media.
Local Print Advertising Magazines
One great example of this is Hometown Values which serves small local communities across 5 states in the Northwest who still respond to print advertising.
Or in the Northeast, Uncle Henry’s is a great place to find local vendors.
No matter the marketing channels you choose you will still want to examine each of them for how they can help your team acquire potential customers, what the cost per lead is, how high (or low) the conversion rate is.
TIP: partner with whomever is the best sales copywriter in your company or area that you can find.
Sales Copy in Marketing Campaigns That Increase Sales Qualified Leads
Everyone’s goal with marketing campaigns are to increase sales growth or at least not to damage it.
So how do you make sure your campaigns do what you need them to in order to increase the number of leads, grab new customers and reduce the cost per new customers?
Write top notch sales copy in your campaigns at each step.
Marketing teams can sometimes rely to much on the same old marketing speak and forget they are speaking to humans. Human beings skim content because – THERE IS JUST SO MUCH OF IT COMING AT US?
It’s why we like video so much. We can just turn on the telly and become a sponge.
So, when you are thinking about writing great sales copy in your marketing campaigns I encourage you to think about the following.
- Who is the hero in the story being consumed?
- What challenges do they THINK they have
- Real
- Psychological
- Theoretical
- How can you prove to be the trusted guide they are looking for?
- Do you make it clear to them what your promise or process is?
- What does their life feel like if they follow your advice or adhere to your promise to them?
Analyzing all the marketing metrics in the world won’t help you until you are able to understand that YOU are not the hero in the story … YOUR CUSTOMER IS.
For example, when you write good sale copy for an SEO campaign marketing KPIs like cost per lead will drop because you’ve learned how to increase search engines’ search rankings which drives more organic traffic visiting your website.
Writing relevant, searchable copy with a strong SEO strategy is something that is engineered, but also takes a knowledge of your customer.
Like, take this post as an example. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that a lot of our clients over the years have asked us the questions this post (hopefully) answers.
Because of my experience and knowledge of my audience I knew, prior to writing this post, that in order to compete with other posts on the Internet discussing similar topics this post needed the following.
- Be at least 3,000 words
- Have 109+ paragraphs
- Have over 9 images
- Make sure to include 78 keywords or phrases
- Have at least 35 headings
- Link to other relevant content on and off our website
- Preferably have a video
- Be original and valuable for a human to read IF they wanted to
How am I doing so far?
This is one example of writing copy for marketing. A few others on our site are.
- The Money Back Guarantee we offer to Plastic Surgeons
- The Local Marketing Strategy Session we provide to local home service companies
- The Sales & Marketing Playbook we offer to anyone who visits our website
Great sales copy can also help build brand awareness on social media channels. For example, one of the posts we wrote about What Color Makes People Want to Buy is the third most visited page on our website.
We recorded a video for that post and offer a FREE Brand Review for you to learn more how your brand is influencing visitors.
If you’re thinking about a simple website design refresh or you want to rebrand your company like we recently did in 2018, you’ll want to check that out.
Or if you are wondering what type of brand equity you have built, you may first want to look into your social media account and the local reviews you’re getting online. Brand equity is a much deeper topic for another time.
The objective of your marketing campaigns is to increase website visitors and increase the number of leads of potential customers.
Getting backlinks for your website is a critical part of SEO. These links placed on other websites (not yours) and are followed mostly by search engines, but sometimes by people who are curious to learn what information is behind the link.
You can read How to Do Digital Marketing: 10 Steps to Create Online Campaigns for Your Business
Backlinks can also come from social media sites. The point is make sure your sales copy represents your brand, knowledge you can share, and is a source for valid information to your audience.
Ever wonder who should be doing all this digital marketing work?
Roles to Have on a Digital Marketing & Sales Team
A Digital Marketing Team is different depending on what stage your business is in currently. In my 20+ years in operating businesses, I have seen typical small businesses go through the following stages of digital marketing and sales.
Evolution of Marketing Manager
Do it yourself
When you start your business you should do everything you can to generate revenue without overspending. Become a self-educated expert on everything, including marketing and sales. The goal is to improve traffic and lead conversion rate of a prospective customer to get more new sales opportunities .
Have a consultant or trusted employee help
You might hire someone or bring in a “consultant”. This is typically known as “doing it on the cheap”. This means you are still watching every penny and getting the most out of who you’ve brought in to help you.
Most marketing consultants at this stage will not be an agency, but an individual. And typically these individuals can only help you with one or two aspects of digital marketing.
A trusted employee takes it on and hires help
As the business grows and can afford higher quality marketing help we typically see one or two employees take on the responsibility of overseeing the success of marketing efforts.
This is typically where FANNIT is brought in, to provide a strategy, tactical plans, and specialist help for growing leads and by extension, sales. Take a look at How to Hire a Marketing Agency (and Build Your Company) for insight into how we do this.
What is a digital marketing strategy?
Marketing Strategy
Before you bring in a professional digital marketing agency like FANNIT to help, you’re going to want to have an idea of the total and digital marketing budget.
This means you have an idea of what you can afford to spend every month and what ROI you expect to get from that spend. If you are in this position I highly recommend you take a look at How to Figure Out a Marketing Budget to Bring Results
Having a solid marketing strategy means that everyone from Sales to Customer Success or Service Delivery is clear on a few things.
Marketing Campaigns
These are the targeted efforts of your marketing to achieve specific goals.
Marketing Tactics
This is the set of steps taken within a given campaign. Like using landing pages in paid advertising campaigns.
Marketing KPIs
And, of course, these are are what the team uses to understand leading and lagging indicators of success.
Leading indicators are actions recorded BEFORE the result you want happens. For example, an increase in website traffic and social media followers might lead to more marketing qualified leads generated. Both the traffic and the leads are “leading” indicators of marketing success.
Lagging indicators are action recorded AFTER the result you want happens. For example, the larger the volume of marketing qualified leads, the more new sales we should bring in. But, if sales conversion rate is down, this would not happen. Sales conversion is a “lagging” indicator of sales success.
Setting your sales team up for success is critical to generating the new sales revenue you want.
Sales Team
Your sales personnel is responsible for turning any sales qualified leads (opportunities) the marketing team or they themselves generate into new sales.
In local service businesses this can be a single person (even the owner) or a team of people. They have their own KPIs to monitor.
- Quote (sales) conversion rate: how well they turn (convert) new quotes into new sales
- Number of Sales: the volume of new sales
- Revenue: the amount of gross revenue generated from new sales
Often times sales and marketing personnel clash, especially when you start create a division of labor with separate responsibilities. Sales can’t close new business if the opportunities run dry or the leads brought to them are not qualified.
This is why it is so important for sales to lead marketing. Yup, sales knows the customer, why they buy, what challenges they have, their process for buying, the value they see in your business.
Sales is on the front lines with new customers and should define what qualified means. This requires the sales team to know precisely how the service team delivers value to the customer.
So, what about how new customers get services impact KPIs?
Customer Success Team
These are the people who deliver the services your sales team sells. We know client satisfaction has a director correlation to customer retention.
This means that the more satisfied your customers are, they more likely they will be back to use your service again or refer other customers to you. This increases the single customer lifetime value and makes it easier for your marketing and sales people to do their jobs well.
This is why we call this Customer Success. The experience your customer are given impacts the success (or failure) of
And leaves an impression of your brand.
What is Brand Awareness And Why Is It Important?
Many believe that the marketing efforts which create a website, run ad campaigns, and hand out the swag at events is what makes a brand.
The people who provide the process your customers experience creates your brand. It’s what your customer remember about you.
Read article Best Google Analytics Tips for Beginners (Blog Improvement Tricks & More)
How Often Should We Look at Our Marketing KPIs?
Marketing efforts are going on continuously. The cadence at how often you look at performance is determined by how fast your business is moving. This speed is directly correlated to the revenue volume you are generating. If you want to move faster, meet more often and make changes more frequently.
Top Questions to Ask to Fix Poor Performing Marketing KPIs?
Before you start fixing issues, you may want to read Web Crawling: What Are Search Engines? (+What Is a Site Browser & Web Crawler Definition). We’ve seen it all.
But, I encourage you to go back to the basics and ask the right questions
- Are we getting enough of the right type of website visitors?
- Do we get enough organic traffic?
- Are we getting the right number of leads and lead quality?
- Is our lead and sales conversion rate at optimal levels?
- Are our customer acquisition costs acceptable?
- Are we seeing an improvement in customer lifetime value?
Next Steps
Take small steps with specific intentions for improving a specific KPI, then rinse and repeat until you see the results you’re looking for.
