[Updated for 2023]
What if you could see how your campaigns are doing to ensure you’re meeting your KPIs (key performance indicators)? What if there was a way to instantly see the success of your marketing plan? This is exactly what you can achieve with an updated marketing scorecard.
In this post, we will be defining what a marketing scorecard is, as well as its elements, so you can create your own for 2023. You will also learn how to update your scorecard, and why it’s so valuable for your marketing plan.
What Is a Marketing Scorecard?
A marketing scorecard is a data-driven marketing analysis tool that allows teams to track and improve their marketing activities over time by aligning operations with company strategy. Scorecards often take the form of a spreadsheet, allowing for the storage of massive amounts of past data while remaining focused on the present.
Elements of a Marketing Scorecard
The four core elements of a scorecard include:
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), broken down by major objective
- A goal or target for each KPI
- Performance, broken down by a set time period (week, month, quarter, etc.)
- (YTD (Year To Date), Monthly, YOY (Year Over Year))
Related: Scorecards and Dashboards
How to Update Your Marketing Scorecard for 2023
Step 1: Create and Update the Scorecard
Use your go-to tools, such as Google Analytics, to track success on a daily basis, and update your scorecard spreadsheet at a cadence that makes sense for your company and/or clients with the preceding month’s data. Build more visually-engaging reports for the management team using the scorecard data. Make sure to include sections for the following:
- KPIs
- Goal performance
- Analysis and Strategic Recommendations
- Key findings
- Snapshots of Campaigns
- Actions items for the coming month
Step 2: Create Strategic Recommendations AND Strategy In Response to Results
Each month, you will take a look at the KPIs and start to take a more strategic eye to it. This is when you start looking at the data and asking yourself more questions. What can you change? What can you do better? Should you pivot to a different strategy? Is there something else we should focus on? What’s working and what’s not?
These questions, and more, should be asked every month to ensure you’re on task and the campaigns are looking as they should. Once the questions are asked, you will want to create strategic recommendations that can be implemented to accomplish your goals.
- Create strategies that are in line with the most important KPIs
- Provide insight and key takeaways
- Tweak campaigns based on their success
Step 3: Know The Metrics To Include
The exact metrics that you measure to gauge your marketing performance are known as KPIs (key performance indicators). The most important KPIs are those that can be directly tied to your main goal. You don’t need to improve each and every KPI in order to achieve your core goal. In fact, you’re better off staying laser-focused on just a few at a time.
RELATED: PROVE ROI AND ROAS WITH THESE 12 DIGITAL MARKETING KPIS
Step 4: Implement Data-Driven Goals
Make it a goal for yourself, and your company, to become more data-driven. Data-driven decisions are a great way to implement a strategy. Begin by doing a marketing evaluation to discover your present strengths and weaknesses, and then create a marketing scorecard to track success and drive a more agile marketing plan.
To scale your marketing efforts, you should:
- Increase the variety of your content
- Examine your current SEO strategy
- Segment your target market
- Leverage data
The Value of a Marketing Scorecard
A marketing scorecard allows you to get a picture of your marketing efforts by comparing KPIs to your data-driven goals and overall vision. This is a tool that can be used to measure performance in the short, medium, and long term. Executives often need to have measurable indicators that the goals they set are being addressed. A marketing scorecard gives you real-time insights into those indicators.
Having an up-to-date marketing scorecard means that you’ll be well on your way to being a data-driven, highly accountable business that focuses on exceeding goals and delivering outcomes. If you’re wondering how to get started with a marketing scorecard, or you want to know how to make the most of your existing scorecard, check out Ironmark’s downloadable guide for answers.
