The best thing about a business is that success is measured. You can’t be uncertain about the status of your work when there are so many metrics indicating the exact position of your business on the market. Professionals should check these numbers every single day, ideally. Even though you know how things stand on a regular day, these metrics will let you know about the existence of some flaws that are preventing your business from growth. So, let’s see how you can take the pulse of your organization through the following performance metrics and understand if your business growth is on track.
1. Customer Lifetime Value
Based on this measurable value, a company with 100 customers can outperform another that managed to gather 1,000 clients. The key here that makes the difference between growth and stagnation is the quality of its clients. If they are loyal, your business can focus on improving relationships with the existing customers. This activity is a lot easier than constantly finding new leads, as they are already familiar with the brand and they appreciate its services.
So, the customer lifetime value can be measured by multiplying the average sale value by the number of repeat transactions. Then, you ought to multiply the result by the mean retention time of your customers.
The result will fluctuate over time, but you should focus on strategies for increasing its value. You can measure the client loyalty through several methods, like asking for feedback and purchase analysis.
The best one yet is the customer survey. Every company should have a regular system in place to ask their clients about the quality of their services and products, and how they can improve their brand. The guys from Burger King, for example, organize this kind of activity frequently. To this day, they are one of the most successful fast food chain in the world. To preserve the loyalty of their customers, they offer a BK survey code. Participants can redeem this reward in exchange for a free meal at one of their restaurants. It encourages consumers to leave their feedback in exchange for a reward.
2. Your Own Growth Goals
If you want your business to head from ground zero to success, you need to come up with your own growth goals. These can contribute to the primary purpose of your company. Some examples would be to raise awareness about your product or to find new waves of leads to turn them into customers. These two will greatly get you closer to success. One will make your product popular, so it will become desirable while the other will get you more customers and, thus, bigger monthly revenue.
Now, growth goals will help you determine the success of your business purposes. Think about it. If you convince one person of the quality of your product, it looks like you have achieved your goal, but it won’t help your business much. You have to determine what is the right number of people you need to interact with your business in order to make it grow bigger.
A secret to obtaining the ideal growth goals is to make them SMART. This is an acronym that describes them as specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. So, your goals to business growth should be based on a clear statement such as “There will be 2,000 social interactions with the new marketing campaign by the end of the month.” This goal can be measured, your marketing team can achieve it, it is far from an exaggeration, but it is still a challenge and it has a deadline.
3. Use KPIs for Growth Tracking
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) will tell you if you have achieved your goals or not. First of all, you need to identify the metrics that are important to your business. For example, if the marketing activity is not focused on any kind of affiliate channel, you don’t need to monitor this field.
Once you identify your KPIs, you need to install a system that will enable you to register these numbers on a daily or weekly basis. Usually, professionals resort to an Excel sheet where they note them down. After some time, you will be able to tell when the peak of your business was, what campaigns were running at that time, what went good and what went bad. This will allow you to polish some strategies you already used and rerun them to outperform everything you did until that day. This is how to improve your business and help it grow. There are several tools that can help you track your KPIs automatically.
So, KPIs are one of the best metrics to track your professional performance. These can be hourly, daily, monthly, and annual sales. But not everything is about sales. Usually, a business needs to keep an eye on profit margin (which is net revenue/gross revenue), conversion rate, site traffic, newsletter click through rates, newsletter subscribers, time on site, social media followers and interactions, the number of opened chat sessions, and many other numbers and rates. Once you start monitoring them, you will know exactly where you stand, what needs to be improved, and where you should head for in the following month.
So, these are the best methods to measure the growth of your business. Without solid numbers, your teams of experts might as well work blindly towards an unknown direction. These metrics will guide you through the maze of seemingly important activities towards the only measures you need to ensure that your business goes up.
