Get It Right With KPIs

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are a set of metrics used to define and measure success for your business. These metrics are set based on your company’s objectives, goals and strategies. Organizations can set large-scale KPIs that measure business performance as a whole or departmental KPIs to get a read on performance as it comes together across disciplines.

When it comes to setting KPIs in marketing, there is often a clash of ideals between sales-driven individuals and those who value brand health, growth and stability. The latter lend themselves to the more “subjective” or perhaps “indirect” success metrics. It is important to blend the two to get an accurate read from KPIs that represent both the bottom line and your brand’s integrity and potential. This means as you are setting goals and measuring success, profit return on ad spend should rank alongside metrics like followers, engagement and a true study of who your current/potential users are demographically and psychographically.

To understand the metrics that drive success, you need to first understand the factors contributing to those metrics. Businesses cannot attribute their bottom line success wholly to sales tactics they are using right now. Sales are a process and somewhere along the way, likely after multiple touchpoints and interactions, your tactics convinced the consumer that your product or service was worthy of their investment. Start asking questions that yield measurable tactics to ensure your brand’s future ability to meet the needs of your consumers. For example, what is the need? What are creative ways to address it? How can we do more of this? When answering these questions, we are reminded marketing is not just about sales and profit, and our measurement cannot rely solely on sales and profit to understand success.

Trends lean toward more in-depth understanding of sales drivers and ever-changing, faster and more accurate ways to measure those drivers. With our clients, we are constantly looking for ways to maximize their return on investment with us to protect both their bottom line and the future of their brand.

At Koch Comm, we take a large to small approach on KPI strategy. We start by asking, what is the big picture of success? For most, it’s sales and brand potential.

• How do you break down sales? Identify all sales opportunities available to consumers and understand what actually drives those sales on a broad level
  • Find out what influences the purchase within those drivers and why.
    • Measure this.

As a PR, social and digital marketing partner for many of our clients, we focus on consumer perception and conversation to identify sales drivers and influencers. Through social channels, we have a chance to interact directly with consumers, which is extremely powerful in regard to convincing them to do something or changing their mind. Digitally, we can really measure that interaction and its effect.