Measuring Growth – Are You Being Vain?
When tracking the growth of your business, there are a number of different Key Performance Indicators and metrics you may choose to focus on.
A key area (particularly for newer business) is Growing Your Lists (for email and social media marketing) and this is what I’m going to focus on here today.
Having a big list of people to share your messages with is a common (and sensible) goal for most business owners. Marketing is partly ‘a numbers game’, and you do need to reach a certain number of people to get the level of conversions to sales required. This is just a fact.
However, the QUANTITY of people on your marketing is not the ‘be-all-and-end-all’ as this needs to be balanced with QUALITY. You don’t just want anyone on your list if they don’t fit with your ideal customer profile and are unlikely to ever want to buy from you.
Measuring how many followers you have on social media, and the volume of sign-ups to your email list may therefore be considered by many to be VANITY METRICS. These are numbers which might make you feel better about your business (ooh look – we’ve got loads of interest on our Facebook page!) but they don’t necessarily have any impact on your bottom line.
But I would argue that it IS important to track the growth of your lists, particularly in the early days of a business (say the first 2 or 3 years) as you get yourself established. You just need to make sure you are measuring sales conversions and keeping an eye on the quality of your leads as well.
To this end I have created a free downloadable tracker sheet (which I’ve been using for my own business) to help you focus on sustaining growth for your own marketing lists.
Feel free to adapt this to suit the particular social media channels you are using and set a regular time each month to fill it in as part of your ongoing marketing monitoring.
Hope you find this tool useful!
