How to Get Started With B2B Marketing Metrics

How to Get Started With B2B Marketing Metrics:from Business 2 Community by Aida Mesinovic
B2B marketing has evolved over the past decade, including a growing emphasis on measurement and analysis. According to a study by DemandGen Report, 40 percent of CEOs are tracking their marketing teams’ impact on revenue, and using that information to determine budgets and other marketing plans. This is where marketing metrics become useful.
Janelle Johnson, director of demand generation at recently presented a webinar in which she shared insight on Getting Started with Marketing Metrics. You can watch the full webinar here.

Marketers have numerous choices and could face a wide variety of metrics daily, but Janelle recommends keeping it simple and taking a straightforward approach. Focus on a small set of clear metrics that you can tie into your business model. For the big picture, you can split metrics into two main categories – revenue metrics and program metrics.
Revenue metrics document marketing’s tangible contribution to revenue growth and profit.
Program metrics are used internally to gauge the impact of campaigns, database management and sales-marketing alignment.
The key takeaway is that metrics that answer the simplest of questions prove to be most useful.
Program metrics drill down
There are four major buckets of program metrics that provide actionable information that can be put to use right away:

Benchmarking metrics – Identify the leading firms in your industry, benchmark their results and processes and develop targets against those. It’s important to establish easy, understandable measures that provide insight and identify a call to action.
Social media metrics – Don’t confuse social media success with bottom-line impact. To get an idea of your momentum, you should be comparing your metrics to industry averages, your competitors’ numbers, and/or your own historical data. Followers are good , but converting them to leads, opportunities, and revenue is far better.
Lead source metrics – Create and establish lead source metrics to measure the value of your marketing campaign efforts, which can be used as a baseline to create an ROI analysis. This will enable you to identify and communicate key sales characteristics.
Database and data quality metrics – There are a few key points to keep in mind when approaching database and data quality metrics.

• Select a few of your identified critical business impacts that are associated with poor-quality data
• Evaluate the data dependencies associated with that business impact, and list the associated data expectations
• Establish reasonable targets for improvement. Small incremental improvements will have huge impact over time
• Continue to monitor and adjust – be open to input and feedback from others within your organization

Measurements that don’t meet the specified acceptability thresholds indicate that some data remediation is necessary and you need to take action right away.
Marketing measurement payoff
The real payoff will come when a B2B marketing organization learns how to automate the data-collection process, and can present the data to tell a cohesive story.
Learn more by watching the Getting Started with Marketing Metrics webinar here.
Leave a comment below and let us know your most successful approach to marketing metrics!