With B2B digital marketing, measuring KPIs has got to go beyond basic activity. Otherwise it's just clicks. Clicks won't get you anything unless they result in sales somewhere down the trail.

This focus on activity without regard to sales is most likely a carryover from the time when digital marketing meant a standalone email campaign that couldn't be tracked much farther. One addition to email clicks and opens might have been to monitor traffic to the URL specific to the marketing message—provided it wasn't otherwise accessible.

But, today, that's just not good enough. With marketing tasked to quantify business value delivery, they've got to reach much farther and prove impact to pipeline progression and, ultimately downstream revenues.

And, now—yes—I'm going to state again that it's important to use marketing automation technology. Without it, you can't track much that's relevant to those outcomes. Plus, many of these systems also integrate with CRM systems providing marketing visibility across the pipeline to the end result of wins, no decision or lost deals.

Some of the measurements marketing needs to be able to show include:

  • lead progression across buying stages
  • impact on pipeline growth
  • rate of contact-to-lead transition
  • growth in lead-to-opportunity conversions (sales-accepted)
  • individual vs. aggregate behavioral trends
  • reduction in time to revenue
  • increase in dollar volume - nurtured vs. not

In order to measure these types of metrics, they need to be built into your marketing campaigns before you launch them. In fact, I'd wager that any marketing program launched without a focus on something related to the above list will not help marketing prove the value they're delivering in relation to the related dollars the business is spending in hopes of achieving them.

Now, before you run screaming from the room, this stuff takes time. So, the sooner you get started, the better.

It won't work to try and achieve results reported by other companies. You've got to benchmark where you are now and work to beat your own numbers. Otherwise you'll make yourselves nuts by trying to compare persimmons to pecans.

That said, paying attention to what your B2B leads are doing is the first step in trying to get them to do more of it. How you structure your campaigns (read use content) will play a critical role. But as soon as you realize that all activity is not created with the same value, you're on the right track.

Link to original post