So, your company offers some products or services. Now, you want to market them to educate your customers about your offerings. You must have created a website along with social media accounts for your brand. You’ve also invested your valuable time and money in creating high-quality content and to align your marketing strategy with your business goals.
Naturally, you want to see some results. But, do you know how to check the ROI of your marketing campaigns? In the end, you need to have a complete data set of the success of your marketing campaigns. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) can help you with that.
KPIs simply acts as guidelines for accomplishing your marketing goals by showing whether you are going in the right direction towards meeting your goals. Hence, choosing appropriate goals and KPI becomes incredibly important for your entire marketing campaign.
Short-Term VS Long-Term Marketing Goals:
Strategic marketing plays a vital role in the overall growth of any business. Whether you’re a dental practice or a construction company, you need to invest time and energy into creating marketing goals that can influence your target audience and bring them to your business.
Most businesses often struggle to differentiate between short-term and long-term marketing goals. Both are an essential part of your overall marketing strategy and contribute to the growth of your business. Therefore, there are several differences between these goals.
Short-Term Business Goals
Short-term goals range from increasing sales to hosting events to running a successful marketing campaign. These are the goals that you want to accomplish in a matter of days, weeks or months.
Short-term business goals are practical and flexible. The best thing about short-term goals is that when it’s not working, you get a chance to change or tweak your strategies to try something new and check whether it works for your business.
Examples of Short-Term Business Goals
- PPC/Google Ads: Effective PPC campaigns can bring targeted traffic to your website’s landing page in the short term. Moreover, these are very crucial leads in the buyer’s journey. Maybe they are not going to buy today but are definitely close.
- Events: Trade shows, customer appreciation and other such events require a short-term marketing strategy that enables you to execute the event with ease along with setting the baseline for success. Hence, it is considered as a short-term goal.
- Social Media: In terms of marketing, social media is often considered a long-term goal and sometimes a short-term goal. This is because it needs both a long-term and a short-term marketing strategy. However, your social media promotions along with giveaways are a part of short-term business goals.
Long-Term Business Goals
Long-term business goals are basically a “big picture” in your mind that you want to accomplish in the long run. These goals will typically be in place for over 6 months to several years.
Furthermore, when we talk about long-term business goals, you must ensure that you’re in a marathon, not a sprint. You might struggle to get immediate results, but your hard work and struggles will definitely pay off someday.
Examples of Long-Term Business Goals
- Branding: Establishing your brand in the market, is a big task for most of the brands. Brand reputation, awareness and recognition needs to be managed on a large scale. You will have to constantly focus on improving your website to keep your audience engaged.
- SEO: Search Engine optimization (SEO) is a long-term process. So, you need to create long-term marketing strategies to enhance your rankings on the SERPs. Google rankings don’t move overnight, so it becomes very crucial to keep an eye on your SEO campaign in the long run.
- Social Media: When we talk about long-term marketing goals along with social media, there should be a big picture that you are trying to paint with your social media presence. Ultimately, your marketing strategy will be shared in your long-term business goal.
In the end, both the goals are an essential part of every marketing strategy for the overall success of a business. It becomes important to delineate between short-term and long-term goals.
KPI to Assess Marketing Performance
If you don’t hit the correct standards for your marketing, something is either wrong with your marketing strategy or maybe you aren’t productively assessing your marketing campaigns. This is where the need for KPIs come in. Here are the various KPIs that you should be tracking to run a successful marketing campaign:
- Website Visits: You have probably invested your time and multiple resources into your web presence. Now is the right time to make the most out of it and enhance your ROI in the process.
- Email Marketing Conversion: Email marketing conversion rate is the percentage of users that complete the desired action upon opening your mail. You can easily calculate it by the given formula:
Email Marketing Conversion Rate = Number of Conversions / Number of Delivered Emails x 100
- Customer Retention: Customer Retention Rate (CRR) is the percentage of the regular customers to your business. Moreover, it defines how effective your retention strategy is.
You can calculate CRR with the help of given the formula:
CRR = {Number of Customers (End of Period) – Number of Acquired Customers (Throughout Period)} / Number of Customers (Beginning Period)
- Marketing ROI: Calculating marketing ROI can be quite challenging for some businesses. Especially for the companies that have complex ROI formulas and algorithms. Moreover, it requires patience. You need to measure months or maybe years to see if your campaign is profitable.
Here it the simplest way to calculate ROI:
ROI = (Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost
Concluding Thoughts
We have reviewed the various KPIs that you should be considering when assessing your marketing performance. Additionally, we have discussed short-term and long-term marketing strategies in-depth.
In the end, you should consider how frequently you need evaluate performance and make changes. As this interval will depend on the nature of your business and the sector it operates in.
If you would like help creating a marketing strategy for your business, reach out to us today to get started.