What are your key performance questions?

Three steps to creating an insight-driven digital marketing report

Monitoring, tracking and reporting on marketing campaigns is both an essential and valuable process that enables marketers to understand what works, what could be improved, and the overall impact on the business. What are the key performance questions in your digital marketing report that you need to drive your data-driven marketing strategy?

Introducing key performance questions

In 2014, marketing consultant Bernard Marr felt that organizations were often jumping straight into designing indicators before being clear about what they really needed to know. As a response to this ongoing challenge, he introduced the concept of key performance questions (KPQs) to bridge the gap between strategic objectives and KPIs.

According to Marr:

“Formed as a short, forward-looking and open question that directly relates to a strategic objective, a KPQ enables senior leaders to fully understand what data and information they need in order to assess performance to that objective.”

Key performance questions allow you to take a step back and reflect on the overall goals and objectives you’re seeking to accomplish as part of your analytics reporting.

Our popular RACE Framework structure empowers marketers and managers to manipulate data and customer insights to understand and prioritize key customer journeys within their marketing strategies.

Integrated across reach, act, convert, and engage, you can use the RACE Framework to plan, manage, and optimize your marketing funnel.

Looking for digital marketing strategy advice?

If you’re looking for a winning marketing strategy to acquire and retain more customers, why not book a free 1-2-1 consultation call? Book to speak with a RACE Framework expert today and take the opportunity to discuss your marketing strategy within the context of RACE.

Identify strengths and weaknesses in your marketing funnel, and discover opportunities to grow your business through RACE. Book your call to get started today.

By starting with a KPQ, you can develop a very useful framework to structure your campaign measurement reports. There are three steps to producing a KPQ-based measurement report, which we will discover today.

Step 1 – Key performance questions

From the beginning of the campaign process, bring together the core group of stakeholders involved to agree on what you’re looking to achieve. This exercise is useful as it will help you form a joined-up vision for the campaign and will inform your approach to measurement and reporting.

It’s useful to have five or six KPQs in total, so the kick-off session should be used to understand the questions stakeholders will be asking in order to judge the success of the campaign. For this type of meeting, ask people to bring along the following type of information:

• Business objectives (business group or division)
• Marketing objectives
  • e.g. educate on product usage
• Campaign objectives
  • e.g. promote webinar to educate prospects

Questions should be clear, simple and in plain language so everyone can understand. If you can get everyone on board and achieve consensus, you’ll have an aligned vision going forward.

Once all your objectives have been agreed, make a list of your KPQs against the different areas of activity you will be executing as part of the campaign.

Step 2 – Key performance indicators

The KPQs will provide an overarching view of what you’re looking to achieve. The next step is to consider what key performance indicators (KPIs) you believe relate best to each of the questions.

In the context of this report structure, a KPI is an indicator of the success of a question. As with objectives, KPQs have to be SMART and cannot be vague, and a strong set of KPIs will help keep you on track.

It’s common to see a whole host of different KPIs being used within a campaign report but, as with the KPQs, it’s much more effective to be selective about which KPIs you use. Go with those that you feel will give you the best opportunity to communicate how aspects of the campaign have performed.

In our example above we’ve gone with one KPI to ensure we really concentrate on delivering performance related to the KPQ. It may be that more KPIs should be added to the digital marketing report at a later stage but for now, this one will focus the mind.

Plan, manage and optimize digital marketing KPIs to achieve your marketing goals

Use the RACE Framework to track your customers’ omnichannel journeys. You need a marketing strategy that streamlines your marketing activities so you can focus on efficient, effective, customer-centric marketing.

As you can see in the customer lifecycle below, tracking your customers’ experiences of your brand across reach, act, convert, and engage, means you can use data and analytics to improve your omnichannel marketing strategy and win more customers.

If you’re looking to optimize your marketing strategy, integrate your digital activities, or just need some help prioritizing next steps to grow your business, there is no better time to get your consultation call booked in with a member of the customer team.

Our free 1-2- consultation calls are designed to put you in the driver’s seat and talk through your opportunities using the RACE Framework, so you can make an informed decision about the best strategy for your business. Book your call to find out more.

Step 3 – Success benchmarks

The final stage in the process is to consider what ‘good’ looks like. Digital marketing report success benchmarks help put the campaign’s performance into perspective and provide a meaningful target.

It’s useful at this stage to take a look at previous campaigns and make a judgement as to what worked previously, as well as what resonated with different stakeholders. For example, whilst the number of likes and comments may appeal to some members of the marketing team, senior management may not be as impressed, preferring instead more solid data around sales or revenue achievements.

Bringing it all together

Once all three areas are complete, the final one-page digital marketing report can come together, showing a clear link between the KPQs, KPIs and success benchmarks.

To provide additional clarity and information, consider adding in graphs/ tables to visually represent how different channels are performing/ have performed against your targets. This one-page dashboard should be able to summarise the campaign all on its own, with the rest of the report breaking these sections down into more detail.

How to use your digital marketing report to improve your marketing strategy

The KPQ framework provides a useful structure in which to set a digital marketing report. The simplicity of the approach helps keep things simple and present data that can generate actionable insights and purposeful conversations about performance and next steps.

Our example provides a top-level overview, a dashboard to summarise the overall performance on one page. Commentary about each of the areas can be explored in more detail later in the report, however, this is also something that could be included within the one-pager, too. The example we’ve provided is only a template and there is scope to develop and refine this further based on your own brand and campaign objectives.

Book your free 1-2-1 consultation call today to discuss your marketing strategy, find opportunities and solutions, and put your plans in place to win more customers, in the context of the RACE Framework. Find out more.