When you’re tired of wondering where your business is at, get real with key business performance metrics.
KPIs are little tools you can use to measure the health of your startup, how quickly a larger corporation is scaling, and what you can do to make your enterprise bigger and better than ever.
What are KPIs?
KPIs, or key performance indicators, are used to quantify the success of a marketing campaign or certain elements of your overall marketing strategy. KPIs should be:
- Easily quantifiable (you can represent them as a number or percentage)
- Connected to your core objective
- Easy to define and understand
- Capable of being tracked, either manually or via software
What are examples of core KPIs in business?
The KPIs you choose to track will depend on factors such as your industry and your intent. For instance, companies dealing primarily with sales might want to track churn rate and the average length of individual salespeople’s sale cycles. Some KPIs common to a variety of industries include:
- Profit: How much money your company is making after accounting for costs
- Cost of goods sold: How much it actually costs to produce the item(s) you’re selling
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC): The amount of money you spend to acquire a single customer
- Employee turnover rate (ETR): The number of recently departed (fired or quit) employees divided by the average number of company employees — if this is high, you might have a moral issue
- Bounce rate: The rate of single-page visits or visitors that leave your website without viewing more than one page
- Net promoter score: Level of customer satisfaction or the likelihood a customer would recommend you product, service, or brand to their friends
- Lead-to-client conversion rate: How often leads are turned into actual paying customers
Why care about KPIs?
Without KPIs, you’re relying on guesswork. Without KPIs, you may think your new social media campaign is working because you got a few kind comments on some of your posts.
With KPIs, you can see whether that campaign is converting, how often it’s converting, who is clicking on the posts, and so on. That data not only informs your current campaign (you can adjust on the fly, even when the campaign is in full swing) but helps you decide what initiatives might best benefit your brand and resonate with your audience in the future.
How to track KPIs
You can track KPIs manually, but who wants to?
That would be hours upon hours spent huddled over a spreadsheet or — horror of horrors — fiddling with pen, paper, and a calculator. You know you have better things to do. Luckily, there are tons of different apps and web-based software that can help you track and interpret KPIs. Some are free, some cost money, some are user-friendly, some are a little less easy to navigate.
Contact the Aliste Marketing team today – we can help you track and analyze the key business metrics your business needs for growth.
