Key Sales and Marketing Metrics for Every Business

I wrote before about the fallacy of measuring Marketing ROI.

So what should all businesses be measuring?

Well that partly depends on your business. But here are some key metrics that should be relevant for nearly every business that also relate closely to your business finances.

Sales Metrics

• Volume and Value % compared with plan and prior year
• Volume and Value % compared with competition

Marketing Investment Metrics

• Marketing budget % expenditure compared with plan and prior year
• Share of Voice % compared with competitors: could be in actual advertising spend or equivalents if PR coverage. One could also measure Social Media coverage as well here?

Bottom Line

• Profit by business/marketing unit or brand % compared with plan and prior year
• Share of market profit % compared with competitors

Getting marketing metrics for competitors

If you are a big business  then there will be whole teams, agencies and market research companies dedicated to this kind of analysis. But if you are small, perhaps with just a handful of marketing staff, what do you do?

Rather than ignoring competitors altogether there are some quick and easy ways to get the above data:

Competitor Sales Data:

Do a survey of mutual or prospective customers to establish their purchasing of competitor products. You don't have to survey the whole market - a reasonable sample of between 50 and 100 will do if you compare with your own products.

Competitor Share of Voice:

You probably know which outlets will act as advertising or PR mediums for your product. Simply survey these for a period (depending on publication frequency) and note details of your competitors adverts and editorial copy. If you can also monitor social media and channels such as events as well. By spending a bit of little bit of effort you should be able to get a good snapshot of your competitors' marketing activity and how much they are spending. It's probably worth maintaining this ongoing to see what they change. For instance it would be useful to see if they are investing more in marketing a product that directly competes with yours.

Competitor Share of Profit:

A really difficult one to do, but in the UK you can get copies of accounts from Companies House and these will give broad brushstroke data on profitability for any Ltd company.