Why Measuring Marketing Performance is the Key to B2B Success

Why Measuring Marketing Performance is the Key to B2B Success:

When speaking to marketing directors and business owners, one of the most common questions I am asked is – ‘Is all of this measurable?’ We are living in a world where ROI is at the heart of every business process and marketing is not an exception.

With the availability of tools such as Google Analytics and HubSpot there is a whole host of things that you can drill down and report on. You do, however, run the risk of information overload so what are the top three things you should be tracking in addition to measuring leads generated and customers won?

Are you getting found? Gauging SEO performance

SEO is at the heart of helping organisations getting found. But beware of the ‘snake oil’ SEO practioners out there who may bamboozle you into believing that they will get your website a first page ranking in no time. You should make sure they are delivering the goods so here are a few things you should watch over time:

1. Keyword position

After determining your most important keywords through keyword research, identify, say, your top 10 keywords. Track how well they are performing on a month by month basis. Are they generating the traffic numbers you would expect? Is this traffic converting to leads on your website? If you are getting a heap of views but no conversion, maybe you need to rethink your keyword strategy.

2. Branded vs. non-branded terms

Getting found for your brand name is important. However, people searching for your brand already know who you are and the aim of the game is to be found by new people. To grow you business you need to work on getting found for the following:

• Core industry terms
• Long-tallied terms
• Problem solution terms;

That is, in addition to branded terms.

Are you converting, once found?

So, you have a well optimised website and are getting found by new people all the time. This is when you need to work towards converting these visitors to leads. This is achieved by strategically placing calls to action on your web pages linking to landing pages that have conversion offers and forms. So how do you measure the performance of these?

- CTA performance

You can assess the effectiveness of each of your calls to action by placing a specific tracking URL on each CTA, which will allow you to determine how many clicks each CTA has had and understand at what rate these clicks are leading to conversion. This will show you which offers are best received by your audience, something that can play a big role in defining future campaigns.

- Landing page conversion rates

Landing pages are the gateway to converting visits to leads. Each landing page should have a concise summary of what it is on offer for filling in an attached lead conversion form. To understand whether or not your landing pages are working, you need to understand their conversion rate.

There are a variety of different conversion rates you can measure:

• Visitor-to-lead conversion rate: the percentage of visitors who become leads
• Lead-to-customer conversion rate: the percentage of leads who become customers
• Visitor-to-customer conversion rate: the percentage of visitors who become customers

For B2B marketers with longer sales cycles you’d probably want to focus on visitor-to-lead, whereas ecommerce landing pages should focus more on visitor-to-customer conversion rates.

In a B2B environment I would suggest that you aim for a conversion rate of at least 15% visit to lead. If you are not achieving this rate of conversion, a few things you should consider are:

• Messaging – it is clear what the visitors are getting in return for completing the form.
• Page length – is you page too long? People will turn off if they see ‘War and Peace’! Keep it short and use bullets to break it up.
• Form length – the longer the form, the less the conversion. Only ask for the details you really need!

There are a host of other elements that you can analyse in addition to the ones laid out above. By using the pointers below you can really understand what makes your marketing engine tick. And by constantly refining your campaigns based on insights garnered from Analytics, you will soon be making informed changes to campaigns that will generate even more customers and leads.

So remember, knowledge is power and marketing analytics is an essential part of lead and customer acquisition!

Image source: Mason Bryant, Flickr/Creative Commons