What is Marketing Productivity? Metrics, Best Practices

Marketing is often associated with promotions, market research, and advertisement but seldom with productivity analysis. Do you ever wonder whether marketing alone is sufficient to attract customers and increase revenue?

What if your marketing campaign needs a fix?

You’d be at a significant loss- in terms of revenue lost and missed opportunities- if the marketing strategy got implemented incorrectly. Therefore, it is essential to keep track of a marketing campaign’s efficiency, which is what marketing productivity is all about.

Let’s dig a little deeper and understand marketing productivity, how you measure it, and how one can improve it.

What is Marketing Productivity?

It is the quantifiable version of the performance and efficiency of a marketing campaign. 

For example- Say, your marketing campaign aimed to launch your brand over social media. Typically, you would measure the success of the campaign based on a few factors, such as:

• By the number of people who viewed your launch
• The number of users who followed you 
• The number of shares you got on social media

But a marketing campaign has more than 1 goal to be achieved. Hence it becomes imperative that marketers analyze KPIs, social media metrics, ROI, and overall productivity to get the hang of the success status of each aspect of their campaign.

Metrics for Measuring Marketing Productivity

The idiom “What gets measured, gets managed” doesn’t fall off the tree here. There are four basic components of marketing around which the entire productivity metrics revolve- 

• Input (includes content, backlinks, and traffic on the webpage)
• Quality (has engagement, conversion rate, and customer lifetime value)
• Cost (includes hiring cost, customer acquisition cost, and cost of the tools)
• Output (includes revenue, social media shares, and leads)

Quantitative data like sales and returns alone do not necessarily convey the actual value of the organization. It is essential to measure productivity aspects and answer questions, such as:

• Am I targeting the correct audience?
• Am I getting desired conversions? 
• Is my ROI strong enough? And so on.

The productive marketing metrics you want to measure depending on the specific business context, company domain, business model, company growth stage, and market condition. However, some standard metrics include

• Lead Generation from Organic Users
• Total Website Traffic
• Customer Service Reports
• Marketing Cost per Lead
• Customer Retention Rate
• Return on Investment
• SEO Keyword Rankings

You can use these productivity metrics examples individually or collectively to get a more holistic view of your marketing campaign.

Factors that Impact Marketing Productivity Tracking

Tracking is essential 100%, but tracking the ability to track is also important. And if you think monitoring marketing productivity is simple or there is an ongoing strategy for all campaigns, you are mistaken. 

Various factors could affect measuring productivity, like demographic changes, delayed approvals, a new legal regulation, and changes in customer buying patterns or behavior. While external factors are unforeseeable, they are not very significant, thankfully. 

What remains inherently critical in every situation is time and business model. For example, if you have a seasonal business, you need to wait until the active season gets over, and only then will you be able to measure the metrics. 

The Benefits of Optimizing Marketing Productivity

Optimizing productivity tracking simply means tracking avenues your business utilizes and making changes accordingly.

Suppose you need to fix a problem, and you have two options:

1.  You guess the problem and then fix it.
2.  We tell you the problem per se, and then you invest all your time fixing it instead of first assuming it.

Which one would you prefer?

Option 2, right?

Optimizing marketing campaigns does the same thing. They take the guesswork out of the picture, identify the problem area for you, and let you focus entirely on fixing it. And optimizing will not only provide actionable insights but will also improve market ROI by giving visibility into what’s working and what’s not.

7 Ways to Increase Marketing Productivity

With an effective marketing dashboard in place, you’ll be able to score such things as new growth opportunities, enhanced ROI, a clear view of good investment opportunities, more potential customers, and excellent existing customer retention. 

There are many ways to increase marketing productivity, but we have shortlisted seven strategies that can be considered. 

1. Integrate Automation

Have you ever heard of Work Smarter, Not Harder?

Integrate automation as much as possible to eliminate repeated tasks that don’t require human assistance—for example, scheduling meetings and social media posts. That way, you can show relevant content to your audience on different channels. If TikTok is your preferred channel, get views initially to boost the brand reach and build traffic for your page

It is about looking at the bigger picture in the long run and scaling your time and efforts to something more productive. The recommended action plan involves listing all the activities, segregating and focusing on the ones you can do, and delegating or automating the others. 

You can use a CRM alongside project management software to manage marketing and sales tasks and track results.

76% of the companies generated ROI within the first year per se using automation for marketing. Additionally, automation improves marketing productivity by 29%.

(Source)

2. Bid Goodbye to Digital Clutter

Have you ever tried searching for important mail but needed help amidst the extensive volume? If yes, it’s time you organize and clean up the digital clutter. Of course, individual instances of looking for 2-3 minutes don’t matter much, but collectively they do!

A few common areas to minimize digital clutter are as follows-

Redundant Folders

Start with giving relevant names to the folders still named “New Folder.” Also, delete the folders with nothing saved in them. The underlying aim is to create a good folder structure where a particular type of document is designated to a specific folder. 

Newsletters

One might think of deleting unwanted newsletters, but a better and long-term solution is to unsubscribe to newsletters that are no longer important to you. But when sending newsletter emails to your audience, you have to ensure that you’re not spamming them and that nobody is misusing your email domain. Perform a quick DMARC lookup to safeguard your email domain or similar domains that are not used for fraudulent activity or spam.

Wrong Contact Information

Update the old contact information with the currently active ones, and delete the contacts that you no longer need. This will help in efficient retrieval by the team members.

(Source)

To simplify this process, Integrate a digital business card for easy edits in contact numbers and name changes.

3. Engage Resources that are more efficient

With technological advancements, programs and software that function faster and simplify tasks are readily available. We recommend employing these resources to increase the effectiveness while reducing the time for uploading the input. 

For instance, you can fix a timeline for all your goals and keep the whole team aligned using Nifty Milestones. It automates progress when tasks are complete and allows a timeline view, Swimlane view, and bird’s eye view of all your projects.

(Source)

4. Set Your Goals Strategically

Productivity directly depends upon the marketing goal. It might be possible that your marketing campaign is super active, but the productivity is negligible. Often, the goal is so unrealistic and unattainable that no matter how hard your marketing team works, productivity is in a pit. 37% of the projects fail because they lack clearly defined objectives and goals.

The key is to make the marketing plan bulletproof by setting specific and achievable goals. 

5. Reallocate Human Resources

Regrouping people or teams to leverage the synergy is another wise option for improving productivity without incurring extra costs.

For example, A is a graphic designer currently allocated to a project where he sits idle. B is a content manager who is also sluggish, working with some other team on a different project. A new project requirement comes your way to make a brochure. Teaming A and B together for the new condition instead of hiring unknown persons is the course of action to improve productivity.

6. Leverage the Learning Curve

The learning curve effect, which links productivity with experience, can be leveraged to boost marketing productivity. In simpler terms, the proficiency and productivity of workers increases as they gain more experience performing a particular task repetitively. 

Make use of this learning curve to improve productivity in marketing. Discourage contextual change in the workforce and encourage experienced employees to take the initiative to supercharge your marketing campaigns.

7. Efficient Time Management

Your marketing campaign has several aspects to be taken care of, and it is easy to feel overwhelmed with so much going around. The rule of thumb here is to plan. A strategic time management plan stating the timelines for different activities will enable better results. And several pieces of research over the period have confirmed that to be more productive; you need to complete the more challenging tasks first. Therefore, the said time management plan should line up complex tasks first, followed by the simpler ones.  

Furthermore, managing the workflow using a project management tool like Nifty that consolidates, streamlines, and automates communication and collaboration, will improve marketing productivity. 

(Source)

Conclusion

Marketing Productivity is the cornerstone of a successful campaign; tracking it is as crucial as marketing.

Tracking marketing productivity lets you see what strategy’s working well for you and what’s not, thus assisting in identifying the bottlenecks and getting rid of them. It is not just about whether you can complete the task faster but how close you are to the set goal and the actual outcome of the work.

But even the most knowledgeable and experienced marketers face productivity blocks. However, with the productivity metrics examples discussed above, you can quickly improve your marketing productivity, optimize opportunities and secure good ROI.

Nifty is an ideal manager tool that manages projects, communications, tasks, and goals, thus increasing marketing productivity.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. Our experts are here to help you.