Marketing technology has become widespread. Many companies are adopting of litany of tools and technologies from analytics to data management, from automation to CRM and AI platforms. All these tools can add up to a big tech stack with far-reaching implications for your marketing technology ecosystem. Scott Brinker, co-founder and CTO of Ion Interactive reminds us that “there are two dimensions to the challenge of making marketing tech (MarTech) effective. There is the technical challenge of selecting, integrating, and operating all these systems and the bigger challenge of transforming the way Marketing uses these tools.”

This focus on technology has made Marketing an increasingly technical function. Improving customer engagement and experience is one of the primary reasons companies are adopting many of the technologies available today. Therefore, customer measures must somehow be considered when measuring the success of any marketing technology deployment.

Reaping the greatest benefits from your MarTech initiatives includes knowing how to measure the success of your technology deployment. At the start of any MarTech deployment initiative, it is important to identify all potential impact areas along with the metrics and personnel needed to quantify them.

Tie Your Marketing Technology Metrics to Customer Measures

In addition to traditional measures associated with technology investments such as usage, business continuity, impact on revenue, and responsiveness to market demands and opportunities, measures such as innovation, time to problem resolution, and customer-focused metrics should be developed to measure the success of any Martech implementation. Why? Marketing’s sole purpose is to find, keep, and grow the value of customers. Therefore, customer-related metrics must be part of the equation. These metrics might include financial measures such as impact on customer churn rate, average revenue per customer, up-sell, and attach rates.

Customer-centric organizations know they must also incorporate customer measures into the success of any marketing technology implementation. The process below assists you with creating customer measures for your three primary customer-facing functions: Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success and Service.

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Create Customer Measures

Ready? Follow these three steps to jump-start defining customer-centric measures you can use to measure the success of your technology deployments.

Step 1: Draw your vertical and horizontal axes. On the horizontal axis, create three columns: Acquire, Grow, and Retain. These represent the three primary customer-related efforts associated with any Marketing initiative. On the vertical axis, create three rows: Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support/Service. These represent the three primary customer-facing organizations within your company.

Step 2: You now have a nine-zone grid. Your mission is to identify at least one customer metric for each zone. Hold a brainstorming session to answer what seems like relatively simple and redundant questions. We have found that this generally isn’t the case. The measures for each group have nuances and as a result, are different. Be specific and concrete in your measures. Log the answers in the appropriate zone on your grid.

How will we measure the success of the initiative in terms of how it will help Marketing
- acquire more customers?
- grow the customer base?
- retain our most profitable customers?
How will we measure the success of the initiative in terms of how it will help Sales
- acquire more customers?
- grow the customer base?
- retain our most profitable customers?
How will we measure the success of the initiative in terms of how it will help customer service support
- acquire more customers?
- grow the customer base?
- retain our most profitable customers?

We found it common during the brainstorming session that there are several possible measures for each zone. Aim to winnow your measures down to one per zone.

Step 3. Once you have you have the measures for each zone use criteria to select the best option. We recommend evaluating each measure against these three criteria on a high, medium, and low scale.

how obtainable the data is going to be for each metric
how tightly linked the metric is to the company’s business outcomes and
the estimated financial impact of each metric.

Those measures that score highest on all three of the criteria become your metrics for measuring the success of the technology implementation.

Want to move your efforts forward faster? Consider having us facilitate one of our popular and result-oriented workshops.

FAQ:

Q1: Why is measuring the success of MarTech deployments challenging?
A: MarTech effectiveness involves both technical challenges—selecting, integrating, and operating systems—and transforming how Marketing uses these tools. Success measurement must go beyond technology usage to include customer impact.

Q2: Why must customer measures be included in MarTech success metrics?
A: Marketing’s core purpose is to find, keep, and grow customer value. Customer-centric metrics such as churn rate, average revenue per customer, up-sell, and attach rates reflect the true business impact of technology deployments.

Q3: How can organizations create customer-centric measures for MarTech success?
A: Follow a three-step process:

Map a 3×3 grid: Horizontal axis—Acquire, Grow, Retain; Vertical axis—Marketing, Sales, Customer Support/Service.
Brainstorm metrics: Identify specific, concrete customer metrics for each of the nine zones, reflecting nuances for each function and effort.
Select metrics: Evaluate each metric by data availability, linkage to business outcomes, and financial impact. Choose the highest-scoring metric per zone.

Q4: What are examples of customer-centric metrics to consider?
A: Metrics might include customer acquisition rates, growth in customer lifetime value, retention rates, churn reduction, up-sell success, and customer satisfaction scores tied to technology-enabled initiatives.

Q5: How can organizations accelerate defining and implementing these metrics?
A: VisionEdge Marketing offers facilitated workshops designed to help teams rapidly identify, prioritize, and operationalize customer-centric MarTech success metrics for measurable impact.