Forbes recently released a list of the 10 trends that will dominate in 2017. The list comes from applying the four metrics of interest to marketing performance: growth, flexibility, scalability, and profitability.

1. Growth

Growth is the ability to attract new users and develop a large audience quickly. Marketers use various tactics to achieve growth, such as getting on the right side of social media or SEO, creating compelling content, running highly targeted ads, and building brand awareness.

2. Flexibility

Flexibility determines how readily a marketer can adjust to fast-changing conditions and new opportunities. A flexible marketer is someone who is agile and quick to react to changing trends and circumstances. When it comes to marketing, flexibility will be critical as clients, customers, and technologies evolve.

For example, if video is currently used in a heavily siloed way within an organization, that marketer will be more flexible than someone who hasn’t embraced video yet. Likewise, an SEO specialist who has developed strategies for large, global corporations may be more flexible than someone who has only worked for local businesses.

3. Scalability

The ability to expand to more locations, countries, and markets while maintaining quality is scalability. To achieve scalability, marketers must be able to analyze and understand customer behavior, identify micro-markets, and develop effective strategies for each market they operate in.

4. Profitability

Profitability covers the aspects of a business that contribute to its financial performance, such as sales, market share, and margin. When it comes to marketing and advertising, marketers must be able to prove the effectiveness of their efforts to executives, shareholders, clients, and potential customers.

Profitability measures how effectively a marketer is utilizing the available resources to generate revenue. The metrics considered here include:

• ROI (return on investment)
• CF (cost per acquisition)
• CVR (conversion rate)
• LTV (lifetime value)
• Pricing (marketer’s ability to charge what the market will bear)
• Segmentability (the ability to track and analyze behavior across different groups of users)
• Analysis (the ability to gather and present data to understand consumer behavior)
• Optimization (the ability to constantly find the best way to approach a marketing problem)

Not all flexible marketers will be equally successful.

For example, a marketer who has developed a strategy for attracting millennials to a brand will likely have greater success than someone who has focused on attracting Baby Boomers.

To determine how successful a marketer has been, consider examining their ability to generate revenue, prove their strategies through analysis, and ensure their efforts are reflected in the right metrics.