What Are Marketing Metrics?

Marketing metrics help a company measure its marketing performance. CMOs, marketing executives, brand managers, and product managers can use marketing metrics to assess and demonstrate marketing's contribution to a company's sales and profitability.

Financial versus Marketing Metrics

Most executives are familiar with financial metrics related to revenues, profits, expenses, and assets. They are less familiar with marketing metrics which include customer, market, and brand positioning metrics. While financial metrics are more internal and backward-looking in nature, marketing metrics are more external and forward-looking in nature.

Three Types of Marketing Metrics

• Customer Metrics: Based on customer behaviors and perceptions of a brand. Examples are customer satisfaction scores and retention rate.
• Brand Positioning Metrics: Measure performance relative to competitors. Examples are own and competitor measures of service quality, brand image, or price.
• Market Metrics: Gauge the performance of a business or product based on objective measures such as sales, sales growth, market share, and profit.

Classifying Marketing Metrics

Forward-looking metrics help companies predict future customer behaviors such as repurchase, positive word-of-mouth, and recommendations—behaviors related to future cash flow. Customer satisfaction is one of the most important forward-looking metrics because it reliably predicts a company's sales and profitability.

Backward-looking metrics, such as pre-tax net profit and market share, measure past performance and are applied at the end of the reporting period. They allow executives to take stock of how the company has performed, but do not provide insights on future performance.

Conclusion

Marketing metrics complement financial metrics and provide deeper and more useful insights for future planning. A marketing metrics dashboard can help executives develop marketing strategies and better explain and understand financial metrics.