Meaningful Metrics: Using Data to Inform Your Strategy

Metrics and analytics are key to doing just enough

Digital marketing channels like social media and email platforms give you no shortage of data to track and analyze. However, not all metrics are created equal.  

The number of likes or followers, the size of your list or email open rates might look great on paper – and make us feel good – but they don’t give you any true indication of how your business is really doing (i.e. making sales, babe).

In the marketing world, we call these “vanity metrics” because while they might look good, they aren’t translating to sales, at least not immediately. 

The Most Meaningful Metrics

To get a picture of the health and viability of your business, the more meaningful metrics to track are those tied to revenue. Depending on  your business model, these might include: 

• Overall revenue 

• Monthly recurring revenue 

• Conversion rates (how many people saw the thing vs. made a purchase)

• Margins

• Cart size

These are important because if you’re not bringing in revenue, you’ve got a gap in your business foundation that needs to be addressed.

Measuring Marketing Impact

Where vanity metrics are valuable is measuring the impact of your marketing and content. Understanding what works and what doesn’t is the key to doing less marketing, better. 

Analytics that measure engagement with your marketing such as likes, comments, email opens and clicks can tell you a lot about your audience and what interests them. You might start to notice that certain topics or calls to action get more engagement – a sure sign that you’re hitting on something that interests your target audience. This is valuable data that can help shape your business offers and strategy. 

On the flip side, if your marketing isn’t performing the way you want it to, that's valuable information that can be used to identify gaps in your strategy, offers, messaging, audience, channels or other foundational pieces of your business.

Using Your Metrics to Inform Strategy

Tracking both revenue and vanity metrics can give you a lot of insight into your business – it’s the reason why every Slow & Steady client engagement starts with an audit and assessment of the data.

But here’s the thing: you have to look at them and you have to use that knowledge to inform your strategy! 

Start with a mini marketing audit. Block off some time to dig into the performance and analytics of your most recent marketing activities. Go high and wide and take a look at everything you’ve done over at least the last month and notice:

• Which marketing activities got the most engagement?

• What got the least engagement?

• Can you see any trends emerging? Topics, days of the week, time of day that seem to be working best?

• Where can you use this information to adjust your strategy? Maybe switch up the time you send your weekly newsletter or try re-sharing a piece of content you felt good about but under performed.

There is a lot you can learn from tracking your metrics over time, from revenue forecasting to marketing planning - and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of data available.

Join me for the next Just Enough Session Talk happening on March 27, 2024. I’ll be doing a short talk and then opening it up to answer your questions. It’s free to attend and a replay will be sent if you can’t make it live.