Market metrics
| Market metrics |
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Market metrics are a key indicator of how well the marketing efforts for the single product or service are delivering. Simply stated, marketing metrics are a means to analyze the effort vs results in a qualitative way enabling to make decisions for increasing productivity as well as profitability.
Market metrics are used in business planning and marketing monitoring to keep the marketing programme on track. Marketing metrics are hard to assemble. Different metrics are scattered all over large companies for different time periods, different customer and stakeholder segments and a multitude of purposes. Each market research firm supplies data efficiently, according to its own system. This keeps costs falling and makes the information affordable, but it does not make it commensurate[1].
It may be easier to commission new research than to locate reports that are gathering dust. It's essential to remember that marketing metrics operate across a variety of different channels, from email marketing and social media, to your website, you must make sure that you choose the appropriate marketing metrics for each channel. Metrics help the firm achieve its unique goals. This puts pressure on the board to explain what “success” will look like. Firms need multiple measures and these measures need to be relevant to the company's position[2].
Market metrics used by companies
The most common market metrics that companies use are[3]:
- Acquisition
The cost of acquisition is simply the total marketing spend dedicated to supporting the acquisition of new customers, divided by the number of customers acquired. It should be expressed both as an absolute number and as a percentage of the lifetime value of those customers acquired.
- Customer Satisfaction
The customer satisfaction metric is normally derived from primary research conducted with a sample of customers, where customers are asked to provide quantitative feedback about their overall satisfaction and with various views of their experience with a company. Some companies try to measure satisfaction of non-customers relying on brand image, but technically this is a different measure as it is perception, rather than reality based.
- Employee satisfaction
Employee Satisfaction is measured on an annual basis. The metric is typically derived from research conducted amongst employees, where employees are asked to provide quantitative feedback about their satisfaction with the company as well as with various aspects of their job experience. This includes evaluation of the environment, career advancement opportunities, compensation, executive team leadership, immediate management performance, internal communications, clarity of job requirements/objectives and understanding of the company strategy.
- Market size
Market size is the number or value of units sold to a market in a given period (year). Estimating market size can be difficult. Approaches include surveying manufacturers, surveying the channel/distribution route or surveys of end-users.
- Market share
Market share is the number or value of units sold in a given period for a manufacturer as a percentage of the total market size. It can be defined either as share of units sold or share of revenue. If the market size is known a company can presuppose its own market share based on its own sales data. It is possible to evaulate share of revenue using published accounts, but some care has to be taken as producer sale price is lower than the end-retail price and different businesses may have various channel costs. It is also uncommon for accounts to have disaggregated figures that would make share analysis possible[4].
- Return on Marketing Investment
ROMI is designed to quantify the return on the organization's total marketing spend. It is the equation that is going to take all the numbers (money spent on ads, shipping costs, discounts codes and give an accurate representation for marketing campaign. It should answer the question: for the marketing activities supported by the marketing budget, what would profit and expenses have been? The formula for calculating ROMI is:
ROMI = [(Incremental Revenue due to Marketing Activities * Gross Margin on those Revenues) – Costs of Marketing Activities]/Costs of Marketing Activities
Footnotes
References
- Ambler T. (2000)., Business Strategy Review, Market Metrics, London
- Baker J. M. (2014)., Marketing Strategy and Management, Macmillan International Higher Education, London
- Farris P. (red.) (2017), Key Marketing Metrics, Pearson Education, United Kingdom
Author: Anna Marczyk
