The marketing indicators management should follow.

Many companies receive monthly marketing reports with dozens of metrics: reach, impressions, clicks, followers, open rates. The information is there, but management still struggles to answer a simple question: is marketing contributing to the business?

The problem is rarely a lack of data. It is the lack of a structure that links each channel's metrics to the company's objectives. A good starting point is to organise indicators along the customer lifecycle.

Awareness

The first stage concerns the company's ability to be known by its audience. The most useful indicators here are not raw volume figures, but those that show progress: branded searches, direct traffic to the website, presence in relevant sector sources and, where applicable, visibility in AI assistant answers. The aim is to understand whether the brand is gaining ground with those who may buy.

Acquisition

Acquisition measures the ability to attract potential customers. In B2B, this usually means leads and contact requests. In e-commerce, qualified visits to the website. More than volume, quality matters: what share of leads meets the criteria agreed with the sales team, and how much each one costs.

Conversion

Conversion shows how many of those potential customers become customers. Lead to opportunity rate, opportunity to sale rate, average order value and average time to close are indicators that link marketing directly to sales. This is also the stage at which many companies lose visibility, because marketing and sales data sit in different systems.

Retention

Winning a new customer is generally more demanding than keeping an existing one. Even so, retention is often the least monitored stage. Repeat purchase rate, purchase frequency, customer lifetime value and churn rate show whether the company is building a stable customer base or always depending on new acquisition.

Efficiency

Finally, efficiency relates investment to results. Customer acquisition cost, return on media investment and marketing's weight in revenue are the indicators that allow management to decide where to reinforce and where to cut.

How to build a one page indicator framework

A useful indicator framework fits on one page and can be read in a few minutes. To build it, we recommend a few steps:

• Choose no more than two or three indicators per lifecycle stage, favouring those that drive decisions
• Set a target, a data source and an owner for each indicator
• Always show the comparison with the previous period and with the target, not only the absolute value
• Separate outcome indicators from activity indicators, which belong in operational reports
• Add a short space for conclusions and proposed decisions
• Review the framework with management every month, always in the same format

Consistency is as important as the choice of indicators. A framework that changes every month makes trends hard to read and reduces confidence in the figures.

The role of management

The indicator framework is not a marketing department document. It is a management tool. It should be discussed at board meetings, as regularly as financial and commercial indicators, and serve as the basis for decisions on budget, priorities and resources.

When management follows a few indicators, well defined and linked to the business, marketing stops being an area that is hard to evaluate and becomes an area with clear responsibilities.