Implementing a marketing strategy is more than necessary to make your business flourish and KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are important factors in the success of this action. These are tools for measuring and optimising the performance of actions taken.
What are KPIs really for?
In addition to marketing, communication, management and commercial areas also use KPIs. These are effective performance indicators for measuring the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, a device or an action in real-time. Thus, one can optimise one's actions to reach the objectives. The main action to scrutinise is the reaction of the target.
Note that there are two types of performance indicators: the campaign indicator and the company indicator. Corporate performance indicators should be measured continuously during campaign and non-campaign periods as they provide an overview of the overall health of a corporation and useful benchmarks for assessing the impact of a marketing initiative. Campaign indicators are used to assess the effects of a particular marketing initiative.
Starting by establishing performance indicators
Before launching a campaign, it is essential to define a performance indicator at the same time as the objectives. It is therefore necessary to associate one or more KPIs with each campaign objective. The first thing to do is to define the latters, including the overall strategy, the departments involved and other factors. Once they are well established, it is necessary to choose the KPIs that will help know if the investments made will generate the desired results. By determining the exact criteria for assessing the performance of your actions, it becomes possible to identify the campaigns that work best and understand the success factors to be applied to future campaigns.
How does one know which KPIs are relevant?
There are several KPIs, each responding to a specific action and having different objectives. That said, a relevant KPI guarantees success! KPIs can be adjusted during or after the actions in order to refine the results and make improvements in the performance of future moves.
The main classes of KPIs are the following
- Quality indicators: to assess the quality of services, and customer satisfaction;
- Quantity indicators: average stock over a while and number of orders;
- Productivity indicators: productivity rate, overall efficiency rate and production level;
- Strategic indicators: to measure the achievement of a company's, department's or employee's objective.