Small Business Marketing Metrics That Matter
In the world of small business ownership, data has a way of consuming even the most seasoned owner all while missing out on metrics that can affect your bottom line. So, what is it that actually counts to grow your business?
Revenue-Focused Metrics
CAC — customer acquisition cost — the most vital metric of them all. Divide your total marketing spend by how many new customers you have and calculate what it costs to acquire each customer. If £500 spent on marketing, and brought in 10 new customers; CAC = £50.
Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV is a total revenue per customer you get during your relationship with them. The average CLV of a customer visiting monthly and spending £40 will be in the region of £960 over two years. If you are new to business, your CLV should be 3x than CAC; which means that if you invest £1 in the client acquisition process then this customer is going to bring at least £3 of profit over time.
For example, if your website gets 1,000 visitors a month and you only receive about 10 enquiries per month from that traffic then it’s converting at around just one percent. Aim to increase this % rather than just driving in more traffic.
It has a direct effect on sales, right from email open rates to click-through rate. The open rates are around 20% and click-rates of 2-3%, but these vary a lot by industry.
Engagement Quality Over Quantity
The follower count vs. social media engagement rate — You can find this by simply taking total engagements (likes, comments and shares) divided by your follower count. 500 highly engaged followers > 5,000 shares or subs to your newsletter. For Marketing Strategy Consultants, visit Really Helpful Marketing.
A signal for marketing health: Email list growth rate. If you have to grow your list too quickly — a sure sign that something is wrong with your marketing approach — shoot for slow organic growth versus fast expansion via purchased lists or giveaways attracting freebie-seekers. Marketing Strategy Consultants can help.
Local Business Essentials
Google My Business Insights – These local data insights are essential as they will tell you how customers found your listing (i.e. what search term(s) people searched for), whether or not they clicked through to the website, and show peak engagement times etc. This free tool even provides richer insights than most paid analytics tools.
What to Ignore
Quit it with the vanity metrics — counting social media followers or website page views without understanding their context, or email list size unaccompanied by engagement data. Those are nice numbers but do not necessarily translate to business accomplishment.
Simple Tracking Methods
Generate web data for free with Google Analytics, get native social media insights and track your customers in easy-to-handle spreadsheets. Small businesses tend to get too fancy with their analytics, where simple tracking would provide all the insights they need.