Business owners and marketers are told to measure and quantify everything. The problem is this practice alone can lead to false assumptions and a fixation on things that simply don’t matter that much.

It’s a lot like having a bunch of puzzle pieces without the box top picture that gives the pieces context.

The trick is to set all the measurement and analysis aside for a bit and determine your own unique and overriding “macro metric” of success. This is the one thing that you measure above all as a signal of the health of the business. This is the measure of the success of your overriding marketing strategy.

Once you do that you then you can use other data that measures things like awareness, engagement, sharing, loyalty, relationships, referrals and revenue as way to refine your focus on what matters most.

The macro metric is the core measure of “who you are” or “how you want” the brand to be perceived. It’s the one tangible or intangible signal that you’re being true to why you do what you do.

I’ll warn you, finding this one true measure isn’t always the easiest task and there’s no marketing analytics book that can shortcut this idea for you. You discover it when you decide the higher purpose your business serves and when you then listen to how your community describes that higher purpose.

I determined my macro metric years ago and I’ve used it as a guide for a great deal of what we do. For Duct Tape Marketing the metric is usefulness.

We go to great lengths to determine if what we’re doing is useful to our community and to the market as a whole. This thinking influences our content creation, our education, our products, our follow-up, our strategic partnerships, our analysis of revenue per customer, our traffic building, our lead generation, our lead conversion and even our internal processes to a large degree.

We ask our customers to share what they find useful. We track the number of times that people volunteer that something we’ve done is practical and useful. We get nervous when we don’t hear that word from our community during the course of any given day.

Find your macro metric and tie every other key performance indicator you can track and perhaps a few that you can simply feel to this metric and your brand will flourish.

Oh, and I sincerely hope you found this post useful.