If you are in marketing, the most important conversation you can have with your boss or superior is to discuss your goals and key performance indicators, or KPIs. Your goals are the outcomes you hope to achieve and your KPIs are the metrics to track to ensure you’re on pace to hit your goals.
Goals are like a broad milestone that you want to hit within a certain period. For example, maybe you want a 20% increase in revenue across the board, or 30% growth of a certain service or division within the company.
KPIs are the marketing metrics we use to determine if we’re on the right path to achieve the goal. Some examples include website visits from certain cities, the amount of new vs. returning website traffic, an increase in email list subscribers, an increase in phone calls from new individuals, etc. Those are all things you can track and are performance indicators on whether you’re working towards your goal.
All companies will have different goals, and your goals will determine the KPIs you need to track. And then depending on the KPIs you need to track, you can reverse engineer and decide which digital marketing initiatives you should start. Perhaps it’s Google search ads, display ads to build brand awareness or increase your social media footprint.
You should not move forward with marketing without first establishing clear goals and then coming up with a list of KPIs that both you and your boss deem important.
The KPIs are so important because you’ll be tracking them month after month to determine if your marketing initiatives are performing the way they need to be to hit your goal. KIPs tell you the story on where and how you may need to change your strategy, and where within your marketing funnel and channels you need to change your message to improve results.