By: Grant Johnson, 6x Public and PE-backed CMO & Chief Marketing Officer of Chief Outsiders
With tariffs and trade tensions increasing the odds of a near-term recession, it's more important than ever to increase marketing performance and the ROI of every marketing dollar spent. I created the Marketing Performance Index and Assessment in 2024 to help CMO’s and their organizations quickly assess relative marketing performance. The Marketing Performance Assessment is an objective way of quantifying the impact of Marketing. It tracks the key metrics for assessing a company's relative brand, demand and market strength, and provides a standardized marketing effectiveness score. Over the past year, I’ve written several blogs that provide insights into how the assessment is constructed each of the key performance areas along with top 10 performance improvement ideas and strategies to drive better performance and continuous improvement.
Today, I'm introducing an even faster way to assess and speed marketing performance. The Marketing Performance Assessment tracks the key metrics for assessing a company’s relative brand, demand and market strength, and provides a standardized marketing effectiveness score between 1 and 100. Having conducted dozens of assessments for tech companies from $10 million to over $1 billion in revenue, with most companies scoring in the high 60s to high 70s, it became apparent that every company can rapidly improve marketing performance by concentrating on a few key metrics. While the key metrics can vary somewhat by company size, industry segment and go-to-market motion (e.g. PLG vs. SLG), there are generally six key Performance Indicators and metrics that can drive faster Improvement in marketing effectiveness.
The six key performance indicators are reach, share, engagement, loyalty, pipeline, and progression. And while the MPI incorporates four metrics for each of the performance indicators,the rapid Marketing Performance Assessment that I'm introducing today focuses on one key metric for each of the six performance indicators.
🎯 For Reach, growing your website visitors on a month-over-month basis is the key metric you should focus on. Of course conversion (including CRO), bounce rate, time on site, new visitors, and other web vitality metrics are also important; however growing web traffic has proven to be the most consistent leading indicator for improving Reach.
📊 For Share, site visitors based on key terms - paid or organic (SEO), have proven to be the most consistent indicator for increasing the share of your target market, especially if the searches are related to any of your products and services that meet customers need (i.e. demand-related).
🤝 For Engagement, the level of engagement in Social Media sites is key to improving relative marketing performance. If, for example, you have 10,000 followers on Linkedin, and a 6% engagement rate, and a competitor has 20,000 followers, but only a 2% engagement rate, you are outperforming them, and over time this momentum will help improve lead generation effectiveness.
🔄 For Loyalty, the most important metric that every company can measure is customer satisfaction. The industry standard benchmark for top performers is 90%. If you're retaining over 90% on a continual basis, you have a very healthy business. Companies retaining less than 90% of their customers are at risk of not only losing share but also falling behind their competitors.
🎯 For Pipeline, the most important metric is conversion on your website. Conversion can mean one of several things to various businesses such as: a form fill to access gated content, booking a demo, contacting sales or starting a free trial. Just increasing top of funnel leads will not make a difference if they don't convert to the next stages in the Sales funnel.
🚀 For Progression, the most important metric is the percentage of Marketing or Sales-generated leads that progress to opportunities. A healthy pipeline and Sales funnel is able to consistently produce an adequate number of qualified opportunities so that a company can achieve its target bookings on a regular, quarterly basis. Whether that pipeline needs to be 3, 4, or 5x depends a lot on market segment relative competitive strength, customer demand and overall sales execution.
So, there you have it, if you want a proven, straightforward way to rapidly assess relative marketing performance, take these six metrics articulated above and implement strategies and tactics to drive continuous Improvement in month over month measures. See comments for link to the entire blog and how to take a fast, free assessment of your relative marketing performance.
And if you want a simple summary takeaway from this blog, you can use this table.
TOP 6 Marketing Performance Indicators and Metrics
| KPI | Key Metric | Highlight / Insight |
| Reach | Website visitors (Month-over-Month growth) | Growing web traffic is the most consistent leading indicator for improving Reach. Other metrics (bounce rate, time on site, etc.) support but are less correlated with reach. |
| Share | Site visitors via key search terms (SEO or paid) | Visibility in search related to demand-related terms is the best indicator of market share. Key terms must align with customer needs. |
| Engagement | Social media engagement rate | Engagement rate is more valuable than follower count. Higher engagement indicates stronger brand momentum and lead generation effectiveness. |
| Loyalty | Customer satisfaction (Retention rate) | 90%+ customer retention is the benchmark for strong loyalty. Falling below this puts market share and competitive standing at risk. |
| Pipeline | Website conversion rate | Conversions (form fills, demo requests, trials) are critical. Simply increasing traffic or leads doesn’t help unless conversion into funnel stages improves over time. |
| Progression | % of Marketing and Sales-generated leads progressing to opportunities | A pipeline producing sufficient qualified opportunities consistently enables hitting bookings targets. Target pipeline size varies by market factors. |
If you’d like to learn more about what benchmarks and metrics I include, here’s a 2 minute overview of the Marketing Performance Index and key measures.
In my next blog, I'm going to examine some recent Marketing Performance Benchmark studies and various strategies you can plan and implement to improve your performance.
If you’re interested in a free diagnostic to see how your marketing performance compares to industry benchmarks, just send me a note and we can schedule a call. It takes about an hour to compile your confidential score. Happy performance improvement!
For more blogs about measuring and improving marketing performance, be sure to bookmark this link: CMO Mentor – CMO Coach and Growth Advisor