As a marketing company that has been working in this industry and servicing clients across a wide variety of fields for years, we feel we have some pretty decent insight as to what the average client expects. One thing we’ve heard repeatedly through the years in the common complaint that the last marketing company the client worked with failed to produce timely or practical key marketing metrics that proved their program was really working. No one wants to feel like they’re being taken advantage of and while many marketing companies out there are probably doing great work, they’re not proving it to their clients. So they’re losing them.

“73% of executives don’t believe that marketers are focused enough on results.”

What Are the Key Marketing Metrics Clients Really Care About?

Well, there are plenty of different stats and measurements you could spend time researching and digging up, but when it comes down to it, clients care about the key marketing metrics that indicate your program’s impact on their bottom line. Here are a few simple, but important examples that many marketing companies forget to include in reporting.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

This all-important metric determines the average price spent by a company in order to acquire one new client or customer. This can be calculated by adding marketing and sales costs together over a 1 month period and dividing by the number of new clients accumulated in the same period. Because numbers can fluctuate significantly from month to month, it is helpful to keep track of this metric regularly in order to get a more accurate average over a longer time span – something more like 12 month’s worth of business. Obviously, the goal for any company is to keep their CAC as low as possible, while still maintaining a good rate of customer acquisition.

YOUR Percentage of the CAC

In other words, take the total dollar amount your client pays your company to do their marketing and divide that by their total marketing/sales costs (as calculated above). This will give you the percentage of the CAC that your agency is responsible for. Be careful with analyzing this metric. It is an important one to honestly be able to share with your client, but be sure to also inform them of what the results might mean. If your company’s percentage of the CAC is high, it may mean that your client is spending too much with you on the marketing services you’re providing. However, it could also simply mean that on their end, your client’s company is failing to perform well in their sales division. Or, it could simply show that the client is at a unique phase in their company’s growth where investment in new marketing techniques is important for future plans.

Marketing Driven Client Percentage

This metric is even more helpful in really being able to prove the success of your company’s marketing efforts. Since you more than likely have a detailed tracking system that reports on leads generated, you can determine the number of new client acquisitions that were directly originated by the work of your team. Develop a ratio showing the number of new clients you’re responsible for a period of time over the total number of new customers your client gained overall through all means available. This percentage will vary depending on the nature of the client and what kind of internal sales process they have in place, but the bottom line is that you want to be able to show your agency’s significant impact in the overall efforts.

The purpose of researching and showing your clients key marketing metrics is to #1) develop a long-term, trusting relationship with them and #2) prove your value as a marketing tool that your client simply can’t survive without!