How to measure and maximize marketing productivity in your organization

Marketing campaigns can go on for months, sometimes even years. They are often many-step processes that require dedicated time, money, and resources. This is why it’s important to ensure that your marketing efforts are as effective as possible. Not only can doing so help conserve resources, but it can even increase your return on investment when it’s time to wrap the campaign up. Tracking your marketing productivity equips you to make adjustments, understand what’s working, and where to innovate.

What is marketing productivity?

Marketing productivity describes the performance or quantifiable value of any given function. For example, if the goal of your marketing campaign was to drive more conversions, you could measure marketing productivity by the number of conversions you make for the life of the campaign, compared to the conversions you have made in previous years.

What makes a marketing function “productive” changes based on the end goal. More often than not, these campaigns can have more than one goal. This is why it can be incredibly useful for marketing professionals and companies to start tracking their productivity, in order to get a clearer picture of the success and performance of each part of their campaign.

Metrics for measuring marketing productivity

There are several different metrics you can use to track marketing productivity. You can use these metrics separately or combined, depending on the type of campaign you’re running as well as what you’re trying to achieve. These metrics can include, but are not limited to:

• Lead-to-sale conversions
• Customer retention
• New customer acquisition
• Engagement
• Click-through rate
• Cost-per-lead

You can track all this data separately via backend metrics on your site or using a Customer Data Platform, an integrated platform used to track multiple metrics at once. This can be helpful when compiling a holistic picture of your marketing campaign, as well as saving time when checking metrics, as it’s all in one convenient place.

Factors that impact marketing productivity tracking

There are countless factors that can impact your marketing productivity metrics — seasonal trends, changes in customer attitudes, even current events — but marginally fewer factors that you have to worry about when it comes to tracking those metrics. The two biggest contenders are often time and your business model.

Change takes time; to notice or track any noticeable changes in your metrics, you’re going to have to be willing to be patient. The amount of time it takes will depend heavily on what type of business you’re in.

For example, if you’re trying to measure profit increases via new customer acquisition, and you have a seasonal business, like lawn care, then you’ll have to wait until your busy season is over to accurately track your metrics. However, if you have an all-year-round business that experiences high turnover like a restaurant, you could even use month-to-month numbers.

It’s important to be aware, not just of what’s affecting your numbers, but what’s affecting your ability to collect and compare those numbers. This way you can have a holistic understanding of your marketing productivity.

The benefits of optimizing marketing productivity

Optimizing your marketing productivity and understanding the tracking experience can not only save you time and resources at a business level. It can help you improve your customer experience by giving you a deeper understanding of their behaviors. Customer insights gathered from these campaigns can also help you better address their needs and pain points.

For example, if your business caters mainly to working parents, insights gathered from marketing productivity tracking can help you implement a successful online ordering or delivery service, which is popular in this demographic. By using marketing productivity tracking, you can take the guesswork out of implementing new services or products because you have a wealth of information at your disposal.

How to improve marketing productivity tracking

There are several actionable ways that your marketing department can increase and improve its marketing productivity tracking. These include:

• Clearly define the quantifiable metrics you want to track: Before you can start tracking, you need to identify the goals and outcomes you want to achieve. This will give you a clear idea of how the data you’ll be receiving should be used and interpreted. Without this, you’ll have what feels like a mountain of data without a clear goal for what to do with it.
• Invest in behavioral data tracking software: Behavioral data is a marketer’s superpower. It can give you insights into how your customers are interacting with not only your products and services, but with your website, social media accounts, and overall business presence. You can invest in marketing software that has behavioral data integrated into it to save time and money.
• Have a data management process in place: Marketing productivity can reap a lot of data, so it’s important to have a process in place for how it will be managed and stored until it’s time to close the campaign. This is especially important for long-running campaigns. By staying organized, you can increase efficiency and accessibility to important data.
• Communicate all changes to team members: Communication is key to creating the most effective and efficient campaign process. Before you implement anything new or make any changes, make sure to hold a review with the relevant team members, so everyone is on the same page. Not only can this save time, but it can reduce user error, which can preserve the integrity of your data results.

Marketing productivity tracking is another tool that can be leveraged to help create better service and efficient business processes. Implementing marketing productivity tracking into your marketing campaign process can help you get the most out of your feedback, and turn that data you collect into usable assets.