Successful businesses are built on exact, timely, and relevant data. You can only hope to make the best business decisions if you have the information and insights necessary to support your strategy and your approach, or even to help you adapt and optimize your strategy for the latest trends in the industry and keep pushing the company forward. Whatever the case may be, there is no denying that there can be no long-term success without actionable data. Which means that monitoring the most important business metrics and KPIs should be one of your top priorities.
If you don’t acquire the right data at the right time, then you’re just shooting in the dark. And the only thing you’re going to hit is a dead end. This can cost you money and your brand’s reputation, and it can set you back significantly. Especially in the current competitive business climate. To avoid this, you need to monitor your essential and key business metrics. Today we’ll be taking a look at the KPIs that can make or break your business in the long run.
Put Customer Experience First
Good customer experience is the foundation of every successful company nowadays. As consumers want and need to interact and communicate with their brands before, during, and after a purchase. In other words, you have to support the customer throughout their conversion journey. Which means that you need to measure the effectiveness of your customer experience efforts.
To that end, start by keeping track of brand mentions across the online world and check the context that your brand is mentioned in the most. Next, keep a close eye on your customer effort score, because your goal should be to make this journey as stress-free as possible. Customer satisfaction is also important. You can monitor it through your net promoter score, surveys and questionnaires, and other CX tools.
Focus on Your Sales KPIs
To sell more is probably the fundamental goal of any company. However, long-term success is not just about selling more. It’s also about understanding the sales cycle, the customer’s journey, and optimizing both for maximum gain and minimal financial waste. After all, selling also requires you to invest time and money into customer acquisition and retention. Both of which need to cost less than you’re making from every sale.
With that in mind, you need to monitor your cost per lead, your cost per acquisition, your customer retention, as well as your overall sales revenue vs expenditure. These are the essential metrics that will give you a clear overview of the effectiveness of your sales strategy, and will allow you to adapt your approach on the go in order to stay competitive. Be sure to focus on customer retention, as acquiring a new customer can be significantly more expensive than inspiring an existing one to buy from you a second time.
Monitor Your Payroll Metrics
Payroll metrics are among the most important metrics. They can give business leaders meaningful insight into the performance of their company. Yet not many leaders devote enough attention to these KPIs because they are occupied by monitoring their digital marketing, sales, and CX metrics instead. In reality, though, monitoring all processes pertaining to your payroll department can give you valuable insight into where you might be leaking money, and how to seal these financial leaks.
For example, by monitoring the cost of payroll per employee, you can find out that you’re wasting money on paper checks and fees, which can prompt you to adopt personalized payroll cards in order to save money and elevate employee satisfaction over the long term. Likewise, calculating the cost of overtime can inspire you to redefine workflow and reorganize your teams to improve productivity and bring overtime work to a minimum, which will also result in improved employee satisfaction and better financial savings.
Important Digital Marketing Metrics
Of course, it’s also important to keep in mind that marketing is another pillar of long-term success in the modern business world. As there is no other way to stand out in the competitive industry without a strong marketing campaign. With that in mind, it’s imperative that you utilize your digital marketing tools, such as Google Analytics, to monitor crucial KPIs. Such as organic traffic, paid traffic, and keyword rankings, to name a few. It’s also important to monitor your marketing qualified leads (MQL), search trends, your bounce rate and average time on page. And let’s not leave out conversion sources, brand sentiment, new vs returning visitors, SEO performance, and more.
Essential Financial KPIs
And lastly, money makes the business world go ‘round. So monitoring your finances should always be a priority for a growth-oriented company. Be sure to keep a watchful eye on trends like your overall revenue growth in a specific timeframe. Your individual income sources and their long-term ROI (you should have more than one income source), shouldn’t be overlooked. Also, your revenue concentration (your revenue should be evenly dispersed across multiple sources), and your working capital numbers are key. As is the customer lifetime value. Don’t forget to calculate your profitability over time too. By comparing your expenses with your revenue and factoring in your long-term goals and their financial requirements.
Wrapping Up
Running a successful business means having the right information at the right time to support your strategy or help you adapt to new industry trends. By monitoring these essential business metrics, you will have no problem achieving better results while setting the stage for growth in the years to come.
