This week, we’re in Utah at the Adobe Summit – the biggest digital marketing conference in the world! The keynote’s theme was ‘Reinventing Marketing’. You can watch the whole thing over at the Adobe Summit website.

Team Adobe presented a challenge to everyone in the audience, which was: REINVENT

Forget the limitations your marketing currently faces. What if these limitations didn’t exist? How should your marketing be?  How can you reinvent your marketing?

We live for innovation, so naturally this kind of question appeals to us. One way that we reinvent marketing is through redefining KPIs.

How KPIs Should Be

KPIs are typically siloed according to marketing funnel, and across business units. A brand awareness marketer tracks to share of voice and engagement metrics. A direct response marketer tracks to conversion rates and ROI. A product manager tracks to product users and engagement. A website manager tracks to visitors, time on site, conversion rates and average order value. All these people are managing some aspect of the customer journey according to different KPIs.

Overall, businesses need to track to growth and profit. Period.

Now add in the external ecosystem that the business operates in – as a product, a website and within each channel it participates in. That ecosystem consists of direct and indirect competitors who are constantly changing and impacting the dynamics of the overall ecosystem.

It’s complicated, right? Well, yes – but that’s exactly the kind of problem we love to tackle.

So what’s our answer? KPIs should be tracked using the overall business metrics and attributed according to their value within the customer journey.  Not only does that mean attributing the value across marketing initiatives, it also means integrating other, internal business initiatives into the model. It means monitoring the competitive landscape and attributing revenue impact to changes there.

Instead of just focusing on your current KPIs, you should open up the whole can of worms and look at what’s inside.  For example, many of our clients didn’t consider the inflection points of top-of-funnel campaign engagement that caused their lower-funnel activity KPIs to fluctuate.  They were focused on the end result and not looking at the engagement factors in the funnel.  If you start breaking it down piece-by-piece and testing at key connection points, engagement factors and intent, you will uncover a whole new set of factors. From there, you can influence the current KPIs you are going after – because it’s not just about simplifying the funnel, it’s about enriching it to the point where your customers decide to engage.

What are we doing to solve this problem? We are marketing analytics experts, with our own developers, who happen to love tinkering with KPIs. We help our clients understand and measure the impact of the overall ecosystem they are operating in. Interested? Get in touch!