Marketers sometimes come up against resistance in getting the budget they need for a successful campaign. The reason given is that executives don't see any concrete ROI because marketing is not an exact science. Instead, marketing is a mix of art and science. However, with the availability of online trackers and other sophisticated tools, marketing professionals can now offer the types of metrics that budgeters like to see. And truthfully, marketing campaigns can be much more successful with proper metrics and tracking. You can learn more about your audience along the way, and make changes to your campaign while it is active to improve your bottom line results. Using the following five metrics to measure your B2B marketing campaign, you can get an excellent concept of where your campaign is working and where you need to improve.
1. Website Analytics
No matter what tools you use, free or paid, you can gain a lot of knowledge from your website analytics. Before you start any campaign, you should know your baseline analytics, so you can compare results during and after the campaign. Some of the specifics you should be looking for in your numbers are:
- Change in traffic from week to week, month to month and year to year
- Days that you have the most and least traffic
- When your traffic volume is the highest
- Where your traffic comes from (in country and international)
- How much of your traffic is new and repeat visitors
- Are your visitors from desktop or mobile
- Which of your website pages are most popular
- Which pages are not popular
- What keyword are people looking for that you are missing
- How long do people stay on your site
- What is the ratio of visitors to transactions
2. Performance of Inbound Links
Marketing and sales are most closely tied than ever before. When you are running a campaign(s), you should be consistently measuring your results to determine whether your campaign is hitting your goals. If so, you can adjust the campaign to make it more successful. If not, you can adjust your campaign to fix what is not working.
Tracking inbound links of any type can be done easily if you have a tracker attached to the link. Adding trackers is very easy, and your marketing system should tell you how to do so. Simply put, every link from every piece of content, ad or campaign tool should have a tracker on it. Then all you have to do is read your metrics every couple of days to see where your traffic is coming from.
3. Social Media Metrics
Social media sites all have built-in analytics that you can use to measure your on-site success. Each site's metrics are different, but you can gain insight from all of them to see how you are influencing your audience. Measuring interactions such as likes, comments or shares is helpful to see what people are interested in discussing.
4. Counting Conversions
In B2B marketing, conversions are where your marketing counts. While not every visitor is ready to convert, once you gain a conversion your lead is becoming more qualified. Depending on the length of your marketing/sales funnel, conversions can tell you how ready your customer is, how urgent the lead is and where you need to nurture.
5. Ultimate ROI
If you are counting dollars, ROI can tell you if you are succeeding. By measuring your cost per lead, and your rate of success per lead, you can learn your ultimate ROI. With this number in hand, you can walk into your budget office and tell them exactly how much it costs to find new business, get return business and what your department is bringing to the company's bottom line.
