Introduction
Growing your business’ marketing KPIs can often feel like an uphill battle. Direction can be hard to find, and it’s easy to be disheartened when a big marketing push seems to have minimal returns.
Here’s the thing though: small, sustainable gains add up over time. Aiming for targeted, sustainable growth instead of overly ambitious or (even downright unreasonable) targets is a tiny secret that can have a big and lasting effect on improving your marketing analytics.
What are marketing KPIs?
Marketing key performance indicators (or KPIs) are the numbers that reflect the health and performance of your marketing efforts. They’re a way to quantify the mission-critical metrics that point to the results you’re after.
Exactly which metrics you choose to turn into your KPIs depends on your specific marketing objectives, whether it’s new leads and website traffic when building brand awareness, or ad spend ROI when looking to optimize your marketing budget.
Regardless of which KPIs you choose to focus on, it can feel tough to make any progress whatsoever and drive those numbers up, especially if you make vague grand goals your objective when setting out to improve marketing KPIs.
“Go make more money,” and other terrible advice
A common frustration among business owners and marketers is a lack of direction. When told they need to improve marketing KPIs, the advice hits the same way as being told to get out and make more money.
Of course you want to improve the figures that matter most to your business. However, if it were as simple as people tend to make it seem, then everyone would be rich.
This is a frustration we understand: it’s hard to build strategies and take concrete actions when your mission objectives are vague. “Improve marketing KPIs” is not enough—a specific direction is called for.
The trouble with big promises about your marketing KPIs
The first instinct for many business owners and marketers is to chase after instant improvement everywhere. We are surrounded by plenty of big promises from advice blogs and solution providers. Just sign up for this multi-step program or software service in return for instant results, they’ll say.
While it’s true that you can discover a large pool of leads or even an untapped niche of eager customers almost overnight, these instances can be too rare to rely on. Likewise, these nuggets of gold tend to improve marketing KPIs that are easy-come, easy-go.
For example, it can be easy to find people who might be interested in hearing more, but few of them typically wind up becoming customers. It’s a flash-in-the-pan effect that can be dazzling, but can’t sustain growth for a business in the long term.
Worse still, fixating on instant returns is a good way to waste money and burn yourself out. You risk missing the red flags when they come up. You might also end up setting your expectations unreasonably high, causing undue strain on yourself or your marketing teams.
At the end of the day, long-term gains take long-term thinking. Your gains need to endure, not evaporate.
The Tiny trick to better marketing KPIs: focus on 1 or 2% growth
Our tiny secret to big, long-term improvements to marketing KPIs is simple: focus on incremental growth. Keeping your mind set on making weekly increases of 1 to 2 percent for a small handful of core metrics will take you a lot farther than targeting, say, a 15% increase by the end of a quarter.
Here’s how it works:
1. Identify the KPIs you want to prioritize
Narrow your objectives down to as small of a number as possible. We recommend concentrating on two or three marketing KPIs aligned with your core goals.
By zooming in on a small number of KPIs, your marketing team can stay laser-focused on campaigns that drive specific actions. It also prevents you from being overwhelmed by the workload and the analytics that come with splitting your attention across various metrics.
2. Set manageable targets for each of your marketing initiatives
Focus on manageable objectives. If you can earn 1 or 2% more visitors every week (or 4% more every month), it keeps you from overextending your focus and budgets – also good for keeping your tactics (i.e. specific actions used to pursue a strategy) focused. Mission creep, or trying to do too much with too little, is definitely not your friend.
3. Work at that 1% incremental growth
The best path to long-term success is to chase that 1 or 2% target down like it owes you money (in a way, it does). Small gains add up over time, and when it comes to improving your marketing KPIs, it’s far easier on the mind and morale than scrambling to see big gains happen quickly.
Build slow, build steady, build strong.
4. Watch as, over time, your trickiest marketing KPIs grow at a steady rate
Incremental gains are nothing to sneeze at. Going slow but steady can help you build the momentum that you need to tackle even the trickiest KPIs and objectives. The key is to aim for stable, sustainable gains so you have a stable foundation to build on that won’t just fade away.
The benefits of taking a Tiny approach to marketing KPIs
1. Less pressure on you and your team
A tiny approach to improving your marketing KPIs means there’s less pressure on you and your team to overwork and drive yourselves up a wall. Worktime crunch may seem like a good short term solution to business needs, but it’s usually counterproductive. Overwork can lead to stress and a nosedive in morale and productivity.
2. Clear, periodic targets drive consistent innovation
It’s often the case that large goals inspire large and unwieldy tactics. By viewing the challenge as a matter of slow and steady growth, you’ll quickly find yourself with a clearer mind and more leeway to experiment: cast a wide net and see what sticks—because after all, you’re only after a 1 or 2% bump by the end of the period.
Clear goals make it more sensible to try a diverse range of marketing tactics. It makes even small measures of success worth zeroing in on, and potentially expanding upon in later rounds of planning. This way, you’ll never miss an opportunity simply because it wasn’t “big enough” at the time.
3. Tiny steps are a more reliable guarantee of improvement
Sudden, flashy growth can be an unstable foundation for a marketing strategy. External factors and the changing winds of fortune can easily reverse unsustainable gains.
Conversely, tiny and achievable gains are generally more sustainable. They help you build an appetite for the long game when it comes to business, and put the mental focus on seeing growth happen often.
4. Chasing tiny gains is a great way to scale
Scaling up can be very challenging. Small gains come with the advantage of scalable costs and upkeep. Think of it this way: even if you were to succeed at tripling your conversions overnight, you’d then be faced with the problem of satisfying a glut of demand.
While it’s easy to dismiss as a “good problem to have”, the reality is that failing to keep up with wild and sudden marketing success can be a form of self-sabotage. New leads can very quickly become detractors (read: haters) if your customer service and output quality can’t match demand.
Incremental gains guarantee that (1) you’ll see the next stage of expansion coming, rather than be forced to drive up expenses, and that (2) you’ll be able to tell right off the bat whether your situation is a matter of investment or adjusting to match a temporary spike in customer interest.
Conclusion
The tiny secret to big marketing gains over time?
Small, steady, and stable gains add up to improve your marketing KPIs. Rather than aim for flashy and volatile growth in your numbers, aiming for viable, repeatable and achievable gains can be just as good, and can be healthier and more scalable for your business in the long run.
TinyURL’s link shortening tools can help you keep track of your marketing KPIs, collecting useful metrics from links, such as traffic sources and referrers, geographic locations of your visitors and peak times. Real-time tracking and a streamlined analytics dashboard make each link an analytics powerhouse, perfect for tracking improvements in your marketing KPIs.
Check out how our platform can help with your digital marketing analytics and sign up for a TinyURL account today!
