How Is Productivity Measured in Marketing?

As a marketing professional, it can often be hard to figure out how productive you are.

What determines if a marketing campaign is as productive as it can be?

How do you develop a genuinely productive marketing strategy? So many questions spring to mind, and we’re here to answer them all.

Below, you’ll find a guide to measuring marketing productivity.

We’ll explain how to measure the productivity of marketing campaigns, as well as why this is important.

Settle down, relax, and get ready to learn everything about productivity metrics in the world of marketing.

What is marketing productivity?

Marketing productivity relates to the measurement of how effectively your marketing efforts generate revenue and profits.

You need to focus on the efficiency of different marketing strategies, tactics, and campaigns.

Optimizing these elements will improve productivity and maximize marketing ROI.

What’s the difference between marketing productivity and marketing success?

Both terms seem like they refer to the same thing.

Marketing success, however, is more geared toward the outcomes you and your marketing team see.

How good are your marketing campaigns at achieving goals – such as generating sales or raising brand awareness?

On the other hand, marketing productivity is more about assessing the efficiency of individual marketing tactics.

You’re looking at things from more of a cost-benefit perspective.

How good are your campaigns at achieving goals when compared to the time and money spent on marketing?

Therefore, marketing strategies can be successful but not productive.

Yes, you’re achieving the goals you set out, but you’re not necessarily getting there as efficiently as possible.

What are the benefits of measuring marketing productivity?

Why bother learning how to measure marketing productivity?

What advantages do you see when you run highly productive marketing campaigns?

Let’s take a look:

• Better ROI & more profitability – Increasing marketing productivity will mean you see a better return on investment. You should spend less money to get better outcomes. As a result, your business can become more profitable as your marketing overheads decrease but sales figures can go up.
• Improved efficiency – Running productive marketing strategies means you make the most out of all your resources. It should lead to a more efficient workplace that doesn’t waste time.
• Top-tier marketing – Marketing productivity can transform your business model by enabling you to create better marketing content. You discover what’s working and what isn’t, allowing you to make better decisions. Using data to drive your decision-making process, you will create effective marketing strategies that boost engagement and increase customer satisfaction/loyalty.

To sum up, improving marketing productivity is critical if you want your business to grow and be profitable in the long term.

It helps you get a leg up on your competitors, so let’s find out how productivity is actually measured!

How is productivity measured in marketing?

Measuring marketing productivity is all about looking at key metrics and seeing how they shape up.

Plenty of things can be measured or analyzed, but these are the most critical ones to focus on:

ROI

Look at your marketing strategies and see how much money is generated compared to what is spent.

Do this for your overall marketing campaign, but also do it for each individual element, such as:

• Social media
• SEO
• Email marketing
• Digital advertising
• Etc…

According to Marketing Evolution, you should aim for a 5:1 ratio here.

In essence, productive marketing will generate five times more than what you spent.

Conversion Rates

Conversion rates tell you how many people are completing a desired action when visiting your website.

This could be making a purchase, signing up for a mailing list, and so on.

Productive campaigns will generate lots of web traffic and convert a good percentage of it.

Otherwise, you waste money driving traffic to your site without seeing any results.

Lead Generation

Similar to conversion rates, but with a slight difference.

Lead generation looks at the percentage of consumers that interact with your business in one way or another.

Yes, it can include web traffic, but it can also include people making sales inquiries via email.

The more leads a campaign produces, the more productive it will be.

Custom Acquisition Cost (CAC) & Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Acquisition Cost tells you how much money you spend per customer.

There’s a useful article by HubSpot that tells you how to measure this metric.

Productive marketing will have a low CAC as you don’t need to spend a lot of money to gain new customers.

Obviously, this will impact your overall ROI.

CLV tells you the average monetary value of each customer to your business.

Basically, you learn how much money they bring to you over the course of a lifetime.

It’s a necessary metric to look at as it does a good job of figuring out your CAC.

Check out the video below for a deeper explanation, and an example of how to calculate CLV:

Click-Through & Open Rates

CTR is a metric looking at the percentage of people clicking links or call-to-action buttons in your marketing content.

In essence, you see how effective certain strategies are at engaging an audience and getting them interested in learning more.

Open rates can also be thrown in here, but this is more to do with email marketing specifically.

Look at the percentage of emails that get opened when sent out.

A productive email marketing campaign will have a high open rate – and a high CTR on any links.

Time is key when you measure marketing productivity

All of the metrics above will help you measure the true productivity of your marketing tasks/campaigns.

However, there’s one thing you must take into account at all times: time.

Time is a significant factor when looking at marketing productivity metrics.

How much time is spent doing everything?

Look at conversion rates, for example, how long does it take for you to convert people?

Or, how long is it taking to acquire new customers or see improvements in CTR and lead generation?

The overall goal when we measure productivity is to reduce the time spent doing everything.

You want to see improvements in all of the productivity metrics shown above, but you also want to do everything faster.

Top tips to improve marketing productivity

Knowing how to measure productivity is the first step; you need to learn how to increase marketing productivity as well.

This is how you get the most out of your marketing investment.

So, here are some tips that you and your marketing team can follow:

Set goals from the beginning

Make it clear what your main marketing objectives are when planning a campaign.

From here, you can prioritize tasks in order of importance relating to these goals.

Focus on investing money into things that’ll actually help you hit your objectives and decrease funding in areas that don’t bring the same level of value to the table.

Implement marketing automation

If we go back to the point about time being the most critical element of marketing productivity, this tip will help you speed everything up.

Marketing automation is the practice of using technology and tools to do jobs for you.

It prevents you from spending precious minutes, hours, or days focusing on mundane and repetitive tasks.

Campaigns can kick into action faster, more content can be generated, and this helps you move towards your goals more productively.

There are countless examples of marketing automation, and Optimo is one of them.

Our AI tools can help you complete endless marketing tasks in a matter of seconds.

What’s that?

You need to create some social media content for an upcoming campaign?

No worries, our Social Media Post Ideas tool will give you 10 ideas to edit and post right away.

Or, our Keyword Research tool provides you with dozens of related keyword ideas that you can use as part of your marketing content.

It saves you from physically doing the research and finding them yourself.

There’s even a Marketing Campaign Ideas tool that gives you different campaign ideas in an instant.

Think of how much time this saves instead of you and your team sitting around a table brainstorming for a whole day!

This barely scratches the surface of what automation can do for marketing productivity.

You also have platforms that let you schedule social media posts or automatically send out marketing emails.

In essence, marketing automation lets you do things a lot faster, so you achieve the results in a shorter time period.

Thus, you are way more productive.

Analyze and test

Analytics should form a crucial aspect of your overall business model.

It’s how you make better decisions – especially when marketing productivity is concerned.

Use different types of software – like Google Analytics – to make sense of your marketing efforts.

Yes, this is technically a type of automation software, but it deserves its own point.

Analyze data to learn about things like:

• Your website conversion rate
• The number of leads generated per day
• The number of qualified leads generated per day
• The amount of web traffic you receive
• Click through rates
• Social media post engagement

Google Analytics won’t do all of this, but it does a good job of measuring data for your website.

Check out the guide here for all of the best marketing analytics tools to use across different platforms.

After looking at the analysis, you can make changes based on what you see.

The data will show you where you stand a better chance of generating qualified leads or making sales.

It also indicates which areas of your campaigns just aren’t working.

Make changes, and then test them out to see if things improve.

Run more analysis and make more changes until you reach a point where your marketing strategy is incredibly productive.

Outsource different marketing tasks

It’s hard to be productive when you’re juggling so many things at once.

In one hand, you’re trying to manage a social media marketing strategy, an email marketing campaign, and you’re creating content for your website.

In the other hand, you’re juggling digital advertising, influencer marketing, and many other things.

There is no way you can achieve peak productivity with so much on your plate.

Basically, every day is spent multitasking – which isn’t a good thing.

It’s been discovered that multitasking can hinder performance as only 2.5% of people do it effectively.

Everyone else just switches between tasks and never actually completes any of them on time.

Marketing automation can aid with this by taking some tasks out of your hands.

But, you should also consider outsourcing.

Hiring companies/individuals to do specific marketing tasks will give you more free time to focus on your strengths.

Outsourcing also gives you access to talented individuals that spend all of their time working on your tasks.

In theory, more can get done in a shorter period.

Boost your marketing efforts by increasing productivity

The biggest thing to take from this guide is that you can increase marketing productivity with relative ease.

First, you have to learn how to measure it – think back to the earlier section and all of the key metrics you should focus on.

Continuously measure them and think about how long it’s taking you to achieve your overall marketing goals.

The aim is to reach your objectives without spending too much time. After all, time is money!

Follow the tips above to boost marketing productivity by utilizing automation and technology, analyzing your strategies, making changes and testing, and outsourcing some of the heavier tasks.

This will help you create better marketing campaigns that cost less but generate more money.

Of course, you can get started today by using any of Optimo’s free tools to automate different repetitive tasks.

Try them out, and save time throughout your marketing efforts.