344. KPI reporting 👖
Two ways to answer the question, "What does success look like?"
Hi there 👋
Planning season continues with another newsletter issue devoted to the annual strategy process. Last week’s newsletter was all about translating vision into strategy and was one of my most-viewed issues this year. The topic must be top of mind for you all!
This week’s is all about the numbers. Hope you enjoy! And happy planning,
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Measuring (and reporting on) success
Step one: create a great marketing strategy to inspire your team and communicate to the company.
Step two: How can you tell if it’s successful?
Many great strategies seem great because they sound great — inspiring ideas backed by ironclad research and communicated in buttery-smooth language. A large part of creating a strategy is inspiring those around you to take action, together. But once you check that box, it’s equally important that you’re following through on how the strategy is performing so that you can celebrate wins, learn from misses, and iterate along the way.
The solution is to add KPIs to your strategy.
You’re probably thinking, Duh.
It is a very obvious next step, but it’s also a very tricky next step. For the numbers you choose end up carrying a lot of weight for the work your team chooses to do over the next year. You remember the saying:
What gets measured gets moved.
We want to be sure we’re moving the right stuff!
The way I like to think about this is with a hierarchy of metrics where all the main numbers ladder up to our North Star metric as a company. Often times this North Star is revenue, but other times it might be signups or feature adoption or active usage. Here’s a snapshot from a freemium GTM business focused on driving a high volume of active free users. (MAUs stands for Monthly Active Users.)
Ideally, all your main KPIs will ladder up. And if they don’t, then at least (hopefully) they’ll make sense in the larger context of your hierarchy of metrics.
Another way I’ve done this is with categorizing KPIs according to the strategic initiatives of my team for a given period. For example, let’s say that my team has the following three initiatives:
Reposition the product for a new target persona
Drive brand awareness to help us earn market share
Get more efficient with our acquisition channels
For each of these strategic initiatives, I can have 1-3 KPIs to help measure success.
Reposition the product:
Win rate — the rate at which our sales team wins deals
Feature adoption — the rate at which our userbase is actually using the product
NPS — how well the product experience resonates with our users
Brand awareness:
Aided recall — how many people have heard about us
Share of Voice — how many times we’re part of the conversation on social media, earned media, search, etc. relative to our competition
“Free” traffic to the website — direct, referral, and organic traffic
Efficient acquisition
Customer Acquisition Cost
Lead → closed/won conversion. The rate at which our leads become customers
Website conversion rate. The rate at which our website traffic clicks through to the product or a demo
In a way, these metrics ladder up as well. Aided recall can be a brand North Star metric that is influenced by share of voice and free traffic.
What I like about this matrix of metrics is that it can make for a cool, easy-to-read menu of performance if you add red, yellow, green stoplights for how each metric is going week to week or month to month.
Over to you
How do you measure success for your marketing strategy? I’d love to see how you do it. Feel free to reply and let me know!
Misc.
4 ways that marketing is different from sales ..
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster. I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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