In part one, I discussed the reasons AR programmes fail and what you should do before speaking to analysts. In this post, we examine some metrics you should consider measuring. We also look at a few questions you should ask yourself to maximise AR’s impact on your marketing. This should help create the right foundation for effective AR programmes.

AR programmes: Metrics to measure

If you don’t know your key marketing and sales metrics, how do you know what needs to improve? And if you don’t know what needs improving, then what is the point of doing AR?

Typical metrics you need to know include:

1. Number of enquiries for a product or service
2. Number of referrals made by existing customers or partners
3. Percentage of enquiries and referrals converted into RFPs
4. Typical lead response times
5. Number of RFPs that convert into actual sales
6. Number of active customers
7. Total spend per active customer
8. Customer churn rates
9. Gross revenue
10. Gross profit
11. Marketing costs
12. Marketing costs per enquiry
13. Marketing costs as a % of gross profit
14. Cost of sales (i.e. cost of converting RFPs into actual clients)

Once you pass this information to your analysts, they will be able to compare you with your competitors and identify specific activities or messages that need improvement.

Tap into their knowledge of industry go-to-market, partnership, and channel strategies.

Use their unique insight into competitor or industry-wide metrics to test how well you are doing.

You must position your company more clearly in your target markets most of the time. If the analysts don’t believe your messages resonate with your prospects’ needs, you will need to keep tweaking.

The key marketing metric takeaway is that analysts can only help you improve your marketing and sales metrics if you measure them properly in the first place.

Is what you say you do what people think you do?

To develop an accurate representation of your company’s technology or services, you must first get the correct feedback from customers, independent influencers, and your employees.

You need a well-defined process for asking the right people the right questions, storing the answers, and providing easy access to anyone developing marketing strategies.

When approaching customers for feedback, you need to get them to do so based on a full understanding of the key competitive options available. You need to understand why they bought from you but might not do so again, or what their biggest frustrations are with vendors in your sector(s). Finally, you must understand where they look for information and how they make purchase decisions. This can help you direct resources to the most appropriate channels.

Your employees’ feedback should be consistent across the various teams. There is little worse than having the sales and marketing teams disagree on the best action to take to generate leads, or because of internal feuds.

All this feedback needs to be independently analysed or verified. This is where analysts are essential. They should be used to sanity check feedback and company-led competitor research. They will compare it with opinions they get from end-users or your competitors. Based on this, they can advise you on using the feedback to change your product or service strategies.

Are you talking to the right people?

This is all about marketing to specific niches/target markets so that you maximise your marketing resources.

The people you target should want what you offer and be actively looking for a solution to specific problems that you can provide. More importantly, they should have the money to buy from you and be easily reached by your marketing efforts.

Analysts have a good knowledge of potential target markets and will advise you on how best to reach out to them. They know the drivers and trends that impact purchase decisions. Though bound by client confidentiality, their inside knowledge should be tapped to re-focus your marketing messages and tactics. Analysts also monitor regulatory and industry trends and will suggest markets to consider that you might have ignored.

Part three, we’ll look at some thorny marketing problems AR can help solve.

Postscript: These three AR posts have proved pretty popular. So we’ve put them together, ripped out the fluff, given it a bit of structure and turned them into a whitepaper, which you are welcome to download here: