Marketing Metrics

Leverage Analytics and Data to

Optimize Marketing Strategies
Christina Inge
©2022 by Christina Inge
Adapted by permission of Kogan Page Limited
ISBN: 978-1-3986-0661-6
Estimated reading time of summary: 7 minutes

Key Takeaways
• Data should be used to develop new approaches rather than validate existing strategies.
• Branding isn’t just your logo. It’s important to develop a well-rounded understanding of how your
customers view your brand.
• Product development succeeds when you have a complete understanding of your company, your
customers, and your competitive landscape.
• Modern customers are increasingly sensitive about their privacy, making responsible data manage-
ment and security paramount for successful businesses.

Overview
Business marketing is increasingly relying on data-driven approaches to find success, but the metrics
used are often too limited in scope and poorly utilized. In Marketing Metrics, Christina Inge goes
beyond superficial practices to outline practical techniques for identifying the most important data
for your organization, developing accurate collection methods, and finding ways to utilize that data to
succeed.

Forming a Customer-Focused, Data-Driven Strategy

Data-Driven Strategy
Modern organizations often use data collection as a tool for validating existing marketing strategies or
investigating past decisions. The real potential for data lies in planning for the future—new strategies,
new approaches, and new opportunities. Effectively using data to plan for future strategies requires

Business Book Summaries® • Copyright © 2023 EBSCO Information Services • www.ebsco.com • All Rights Reserved 1
Marketing Metrics Christina Inge

cultivating a metrics-driven culture and a metrics-driven mindset within your organization, and empow-
ering your people to make decisions with that data. Try the following strategy shifts:

• Open yourself to experimenting with data, from encouraging new ways of looking at things to
combing through metrics to develop different scenarios.
• Instill empathy in your data use. A successful data-driven strategy lies in a complex human approach
that predictive algorithms can’t fully replace.
• Engage in systems thinking, the process of looking at problems and opportunities as part of a larger
whole.

Customer Data
Optimize your marketing campaigns by using customer data to inform your approach, from delivering
personalized content and offers to building data-informed personas that guide the customer journey.
Customer data can also be used to inform customer potential for your brand, predict customer lifetime
value, and clarify customer segmentation. Refine your customer data usage by focusing on collecting
and targeting these four core metrics:

1. Revenue. Identify which customers and segments drive the most revenue. Look for patterns in where
people are coming from and what they’re buying.
2. Conversion. Retrace your customers’ journeys from awareness to conversion, including acquisition
channel and message, number of touches, and conversion path.
3. Communications. Monitor customer interaction rates with email, social media, reviews, and so on;
identify preferred avenues of communication; and customize your approach.
4. Customer loyalty, value, and retention. Track average customer retention by segment, indicators of
customers preparing to leave or increase loyalty, and frequency of purchases. Loyal customers are a
sign of quality products, good service, and genuine company values.

Metrics-Driven Customer Journeys and Personas

Robust data collection can also help in building broad strategic insights about your audience in general,
as well as in developing data-driven profiles of your audience members. By building a solid foundation
of customer data, you can begin to create a customer-centric marketing strategy that excels at keeping
your customers engaged. Implement the following strategies to build customer understanding and
refine your marketing strategies:

• Segmentation. Identify segments of customers according to behaviors, demographics, acquisition

channels, and more.
• Persona development. Utilize your customer data to build personas based on data rather than audi-
ence assumptions, and ensure that these personas are updated as reality changes.
• Customer journey mapping. Create a clear map of each customer’s set of activities within a specific
encounter, from the way they use a product to their engagement with customer service.

The Keys to Content Marketing

Content Marketing Metrics Frameworks
Modern marketing can’t succeed without content creation; it’s the glue that holds marketing efforts
together. Unlike traditional marketing, which is focused on driving sales, content marketing is focused
on establishing brand awareness. While advertising tends to provide only a temporary sales boost, a
Business Book Summaries® • Copyright © 2023 EBSCO Information Services • www.ebsco.com • All Rights Reserved 2
Marketing Metrics Christina Inge

long-term commitment to producing high-quality content can provide steady growth and engage-
ment. Successful content marketing requires accurate data that measures the following key activities:

• Content marketing: Content produced or repurposed with the intent of directing traffic to a website,
from videos and infographics to blog posts and white papers.
• Inbound marketing: Uses online content to engage consumers with the intent of converting them
into leads and customers. This can include social media posts, email campaigns, and website opti-
mization.
• Outbound marketing: Information sent to prospects through email, social media, flyers, or any other
means with the intent of persuading them to click a link or make a purchase.
• Pillar pages: A website’s main page that focuses on one key content topic.
• Evergreen content: Content that isn’t tied to a specific season or event and can be consumed at any
time. This content can be leveraged as a resource for other marketing initiatives.
• Hub-and-spoke content strategy: Pillar pages on a website that are used to feed evergreen content
blog posts.
• Keyword targeting: Keyword optimization to ensure pages are relevant for the topic.
• Landing page: The page where users are sent when they click an ad or follow a URL. The goal is to
have people who land on this page become customers.

Content Marketing’s Essential Metrics

Once a framework for content marketing is established, it’s possible to dig deeper into the metrics and
further refine content marketing efforts. Measuring your content marketing impact is about more than
just a simple return on investment (ROI) calculation. Your measurement shouldn’t just focus on revenue,
but also on understanding how your efforts contribute to awareness of your organization, branding,
and lead generation. Optimize your content marketing metrics according to the content type in use,
using the following as examples:

• Blogs. Pay close attention to the rates of new visitors versus returning visitors, your rate of page
views versus session duration, the success of your top organic keywords, and the use of your blog-
originated leads.
• Social media. Monitor your engagement by theme, and use tools to track who’s sharing your con-
tent and how often. Aim to gain insight into the types of people sharing your content and build
relationships with the most popular sharers to encourage further engagement.
• Gated content. Share content such as research papers, e-books, and other content marketing with
prospects only if they share their contact information. Track conversion rates, genuine leads, quali-
fied leads, and the total number of conversions.

Driving Product Strategy Through Data

Data-Driven Product Strategy
Business development has seen product strategy rise to the top of the list in increasingly data-driven
disciplines. It’s important to understand that products don’t exist in a vacuum but are part of a larger net-
work, including your organization, your customers, and the competitive landscape. Creating successful
products within this network requires maintaining an accurate understanding of product development,
aided by focusing your metrics on the following phases of development:

Business Book Summaries® • Copyright © 2023 EBSCO Information Services • www.ebsco.com • All Rights Reserved 3
Marketing Metrics Christina Inge

• Introduction phase: The beginning of the product’s life cycle, where the focus should be on aware-
ness of and interest in your product.
• Growth phase: Where interest in your product starts to increase and sales are growing. Aim to track
engagement, conversion rates, and customer lifetime value.
• Maturity phase: The point at which your product becomes well established and sales are slowing.
Focus on market share and profitability, and track revenue growth, gross margin, customer satisfac-
tion, and churn rate.
• Decline phase: When sales of the product are dropping along with its popularity. Track early warning
signs such as market saturation, declining sales, and reduced profits, as well as market share and
brand equity.

Price and Place Metrics

Marketing education typically focuses on the importance of price, place, product, and promotion, but
too often price, product, and place are neglected in favor of promotion alone. All four are essential in
developing a successful marketing mix. Proper use of analytics can aid in making decisions on pricing
models and distribution strategies, from unit economics and gross margin percent to average selling
price. Use metrics to develop a full understanding of your unique market position, then consider which
of the following pricing strategies best suits your position:

• Penetration pricing. Charge a low price initially, then increase the price over time. This strategy is
well-suited for new products entering a competitive industry.
• Good-better-best pricing. Offer both a high-end and economical version of a product. If you have a
moderate price elasticity of demand, or the change in demand given the change in price, this strat-
egy can be a good fit.
• Freemium pricing. Give your product away for free to drive awareness, then add paid features. This is
most effective when there are a significant number of differences between free and paid features,
when the market size is large, and when there’s a low-friction payment process in place.
• Premium pricing. Market an item as a luxury purchase by increasing its price. This strategy is best
used when there’s a level of novelty, demand isn’t elastic, and you can prove that your product is
unique.
• Market-based pricing. Set your prices based on what the market will bear. This is suited for companies
with a low margin on the product or if you have a unique product that can’t be found elsewhere.

Using Data Responsibly and Effectively

Data Governance and Privacy Laws
As modern life becomes increasingly entangled with the digital world, customers are more sensitive
than ever about their digital privacy and the safe use of their data. Organizations must balance the need
for data to inform marketing efforts with this desire for privacy and safety. Aim to cultivate a clear and
respectful framework for data management using the following principles:

• Understand what data your organization collects, where it came from, where it’s stored, and who
has access to it. Take proactive steps to identify potential privacy risks and mitigate them.
• Create a clear policy on how data will be used, as well as firm rules on who can access data, how it
can be used, and what must be done to protect it. It’s paramount to outline your organization’s com-
mitments to privacy and data protection.
Business Book Summaries® • Copyright © 2023 EBSCO Information Services • www.ebsco.com • All Rights Reserved 4
Marketing Metrics Christina Inge

• Ensure that your policies and actions remain compliant with government regulations, and be will-
ing to go above and beyond. Don’t settle for enforcing the bare minimum.
• Enforce your data governance policies to ensure the safe use and storage of your customers’ data.
Act with integrity and responsibility, and hold others to the same standard.

Data Evangelism
Organizations looking to succeed are increasingly turning to data-driven decision making, but many
struggle to find the right tools to make optimal use of that data. Data evangelism is the necessary pro-
cess of spreading knowledge on effective data use, defining leadership roles in data-driven decision
making, and nurturing a data-driven culture within an organization. Cultivating a data-driven culture
starts with democratizing the use of that data with the following steps:

• Decentralize your data. Let go of departmental centralization of data and make it available for use
throughout your organization, guided by your data governance principles. A successful data-driven
culture demands the democratization of data and analysis.
• Identify self-service tools. Identify the tools that are available for your team to explore data on their
own and adapt your toolset to the needs of users with differing skills.
• Train your team on tool use. Teach basic training on tool navigation as well as in-depth instruction on
finding insights in data.
• Create datasets that can be explored. Prioritize making the data accessible and easy to use. Include
both internal data and data from external sources.
• Maintain an open door. Treat self-service data as a continual process by constantly updating datasets
and routinely offering training on new or updated tools.

About the Author

Christina Inge has two decades of experience leading digital strategy and managing complex marketing
technology projects. She specializes in articulating effective, efficient digital strategies for organizations
using the latest channels to drive results. Inge is the founder of Sleek Marketing, which offers hands-on
education on digital marketing in the Boston area. She’s a frequent and sought-after speaker on web
analytics, content strategy, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Purchase the Book

Copyright of Business Book Summaries, Business Book Review, and BusinessSummaries is property of EBSCO Information Services and its content may not be 5
copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder’s express written permission. However, users may print, download, or
email summaries for individual use. Business Book Summaries® is a service of EBSCO Information Services. For more information, to subscribe, or to send us
feedback, visit www.ebsco.com
www.ebsco.com.. EBSCO Information Services, 10 Estes Street, Ipswich, MA 01938 USA
Copyright of Marketing Metrics: Leverage Analytics & Data to Optimize Marketing
Strategies is the property of Great Neck Publishing and its content may not be copied or
emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. For
reprints and permission requests, contact [email protected].