3 Marketing Performance Metrics that Measure the Quality of Marketing Materials

When it comes to metrics for measuring marketing performance, how do you know which ones are truly insightful?

What do you use to understand where more resources or collateral are required?

Where can you save costs?

As marketers, we’re no stranger to the importance of measurement. It’s a critical component of managing performance, improving results year over year, and optimizing our output to the business.

While marketing materials may seem like a default “must have”, marketers need to understand clearly which materials are performing, and which are unnecessary. Tracking these key performance indicators can lead to a better understanding of resource allocation, and paint a full picture of campaign effectiveness.

Here are three metrics that can illustrate the performance of marketing materials:

How To Measure the Effectiveness of Marketing Materials

1. User activity / number of downloads

What are field reps using most often before going into a customer meeting? What content formats are preferred by branch locations or franchises? What tools are your teams relying on most heavily?

From a national office, understanding what’s needed from all of your distributed locations is nearly impossible without tracking usage. By offering all marketing materials in a centralized online portal, it’s possible to understand, in aggregate, what’s being used. Managers can dig deeper into specific regions or asset type to understand which are getting traction – and which are not.

To accomplish this, an individual on your marketing team can run regular reports to track the number of downloads of particular assets. With this information they can expand and further develop the top performers.

2. Customization

What are the most effective customized content assets in your organization? Which fields are your users using most often to customize their materials?

With a tool like MarcomCentral, administrators can understand which fields are most popular for users to customize, giving insight into where to optimize future assets.

Example of Using Customization as a Metric for Marketing Materials

One brand leveraging this type of information is the Boys and Girls Club of America. Given the variety of communities served by this organization, it’s no surprise that a logo creator tool became the organization’s most loved asset. Making sure logos across 4,100 clubs are aligned to brand standards is key to ensuring brand consistency across the country. With the tool, 36 variations of the logo can be created and downloaded, allowing club professionals to create logos to suit their needs. For example:

Learn more in the full case study or on-demand webinar about how MarcomCentral maintains brand consistency at the Boys and Girls Club of America

3. Revenue and campaign results

Beyond activity-level insights such as usage and download information, the true impact of a marketing asset is best measured by its ability to create growth. When marketing asset usage is integrated with a CRM like Salesforce, it’s possible to close the loop and understand which campaigns and assets are directly affecting metrics such as opportunities, and more importantly, revenue, so that you can hit your goals.

For example, with MarcomCentral, a field sales rep can access their organization’s marketing asset portal from within a CRM, and build customized campaigns that draws on unique contact-level insights such as product interest, title, name, address, and more. Physical assets can be ordered in-house or through approved vendors, with a personal URL to generate and track online activity.

Because this process, and all related activity, is captured within the CRM, the field rep understands at a glance what’s happened with each of their contacts historically. More importantly, it gives a greater visibility for managers and admins into what’s contributing to pipeline, and deals, company-wide.

With such integration, the dots are connected between activity and results. Without a tracking tool in place, assets are lost in a marketing black hole – forgotten once delivered.

Understanding these marketing performance metrics can empower marketers to help their distributed brand stewards – from field sales representatives to franchisee or branch managers, to local affiliates and clubs – improve access to top-performing assets, eliminate low-performers, and measure the results of their activity.

A tool like this will also assist with higher customer acquisition and customer conversion rate, as the marketers will be able to adjust their marketing efforts through the performance measurement of campaigns. Additionally, due to the consistency across platforms and management, your company will quickly and easily be able to make any needed corrections or decisions pertaining to the brand and marketing endeavors.

This not only reduces costs, it improves efficiency, ROI, and the overall success of your business.