Digital marketing strategies are often overlooked when it comes to impressing investors. Yet how effectively you market your brand can hold the key to meeting many investor priorities – from how successfully you’ve understood your market, to how well you’re attracting new audiences. Monitoring the right digital marketing metrics can ultimately help you do a business health check and then communicate its growth confidently.  

Here are some of the factors that investors consider before adding a business to their portfolio, and which digital marketing performance metrics to monitor to strengthen your chances of securing funds.

The demand for your business  

How can you demonstrate to investors that there’s enough room for your business to keep growing past scaleup stage?  

First, you’ll need to conduct a thorough analysis of the market – including how much you could earn if you captured your entire target audience (total addressable market) – plus your projected sales revenue. But there are also some digital marketing metrics to help shape your understanding and evidence your potential. These include: 

• Monthly organic searches related to your offering. If keyword research tells you that thousands of people are searching for the services and products you offer, it’s a good indication that there’s strong demand. 

• Share of traffic, which considers how much traffic you’re capturing from your digital marketing (e.g. your website, social posts, emails, and so on) compared to your competitors. 

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How aware audiences are of your brand 

Investors will want to know that you’ve got a good understanding of your audience, and one way to demonstrate this is to show that you’re able to attract their attention. A great way to quantify your brand awareness is to take a look at digital marketing metrics like these: 

• Website traffic from all sources. This tells you that people are being driven to your website, whether it’s through organic searches or your social activity.  

• Social impressions, which tell you how many people are viewing your posts. Don’t forget to look at the percentage of these that have come from non-followers so that you know you’re continuing to broaden your reach. 

• Branded search volume. If you’re getting a lot of people actively searching for your business, it’s a sign that you’ve captured a wide audience. 

How successfully you nurture leads 

Attracting your target audience is one thing, but can you show investors that you’re converting them from viewers into prospects? This demonstrates that your marketing is not only a good investment, but that you’re using it to grow.  

Your marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sales qualified lead (SQL) conversion rate will be one of the strongest indicators that your lead nurturing processes are working. For a more detailed understanding of this, however, you can also consider these performance metrics: 

• Engagement rates, such as website events or social media likes, comments, and reshares, to show you’re giving your audience a reason to engage. 

• Click-through rates (CTR) on your lead generation ads and emails, which show that your audience is willing to engage with you further. 

• Discovery calls or free demos booked, demonstrating the demand from potential customers to complete a desired action, and move forward in their relationship with you. 

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Customer acquisition and loyalty levels 

Showing that you’re able to convert your pipeline into loyal customers is key to building investors’ confidence in your brand, so you’ll want to look at metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLTV) and net promoter scores (NPS).  

Don’t forget, though, that more granular marketing metrics can hold the key to why your customers are staying or going, and when in the journey they’re doing so. For instance: 

• SQL to customer conversion rate. Is the marketing to sales handover working properly, enabling you to convert leads into customers? 

• Customer to review or referral rate. How many of your customers are advocating for your brand, either by providing a positive review or by recommending you to their networks?

Your business profitability 

All investors want to know that they’re funding a profitable business. Long-term profits can be difficult to forecast when a business is in its early stages, so it’s even more crucial to avoid overspending on areas that aren’t providing returns. 

Fortunately, you can make sure that your marketing is paying off by tracking the following metrics: 

• Return on ad spend (ROAS), which helps you figure out the financial returns on your paid ad campaigns. 

• Cost per lead. A low cost per lead shows that you’re using your marketing budget effectively to generate prospects. 

• General marketing ROI, which looks at the profit you can attribute to your marketing initiatives. 

Don’t forget to consider attribution, which will help you identify your best-performing channels and activities. 

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Strengthen your brand with our KPI reporting template 

If you want to get the best from your marketing, reporting on your chosen KPIs consistently is essential.  

To help you get started, we’ll soon be sharing a Marketing Report Template and Guide, featuring a downloadable and editable KPIs spreadsheet. We’ll be sharing it here and via our socials when it’s ready, so stay tuned to start refining your marketing, achieving your growth goals, and positioning your brand for investment.