Ever wondered if you can shrink your list of marketing objectives to just one? Or to find a mechanism where you can align all the different marketing tactics using a single set of measurement? If so, let look at the issue and find a case where you can essentially start off with your marketing efforts with the focus on just one KPI.

Setting Up Goals that Matter:

As marketers, you are faced with the issue of selecting the KPIs that matter. Defining and then adjusting your marketing goals and KPIs will go a long way in fixing your content marketing and targeting tactics. Such KPIs can act as a blueprint for your future efforts.

Alignment Issues

It’s obvious that your marketing goals should be aligned with your business goals. Yet many falter in that pursuit too.

Many are tempted to come up with vague marketing goals that could take any shape like More Visitors, Followers, or Engagements and so on. All of such goals are important, yet focusing on such KPIs can lead to business loses too.

Consider a case, where you bring in 25% more visitors. This could be part of your marketing goal and your efforts should be recognized for this effort. To top that, your acquisition costs were 25% less. You might assume that you overachieved your goal.

But a deep dive might reveal that most of the new customers didn’t covert well. Your channel selection wasn’t right or your creative was sending a message that you didn’t intend. All that could happen and happens.

Profitability — The KPI that Matters and Aligns All

So, what’s the best approach to defining right online marketing goals. In my opinion, the most important goal has to be Profitability. Profitability for the company, for that product, for that channel, for that creative and so on.

Once you align all your marketing efforts to profitability, you bring in many processes, workflows, tactics that are aligned to making your company successful.

Remember you can and should also set targets like increasing revenue by certain %age, or decreasing acquisitor costs by a certain %age, but your prime focus has to be about profitability.

So, in terms of tracking, you need to work with capturing all relevant KPIs like New visitors, %age of repeat buyers, Acquisition costs, Retention Rates and so on. Once all such KPIs are in place then you can learn which tactics; be it %age sales, or %age increase in repeat purchase, or up-selling or cross-selling, or a %age increase of avg. cart size, led to an increase in profitability.

Summing Up:

It’s paramount to define the objectives, find a mechanism to measure and track, and then come up with a mechanism to improve based upon your learning. Right KPIs will help you with the process.

It can also help you set up a mechanism of an iterative or an agile approach to marketing.