Here’s how to measure your B2B marketing efforts

The outbreak of the coronavirus accelerated the adoption of technology as well as the digital—a reality small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have to embrace and plan for.

In the digital world, data is the lifeblood. We hear plenty of Geekspeak—“2.5 quintillion bytes are created daily” or “80 percent of the world’s data supports this theory!” As someone famously said data is the new oil.

Marketers are inundated with data every day but most SMEs struggle to make good use of it. If done right, it is pretty good for B2B marketing success.

As SME promoters start questioning the return on marketing investments, perhaps everyone needs to have access to quality data to measure their success. On the other hand, customers also need effective interactions and personalisation.

Data as a tool

A good starting point to discuss the ROI with the management is by presenting data analytics.

Among all the functions, only marketing has the capability to generate useful data that drives growth—ranging from customer profiles, preferences and buying history to pipeline and quality.

Analytics play a major role in marketing and if sales growth has to be expected, cross- selling and relationship-building must have a deep presence.

Without analytics there is no way we can manage retention and acquisition of customers.

To start with, marketers need a good data strategy. From website analytics to customer relationship management (CRM) and various other martech tools, there is a lot of space for data to get trapped in silos and get lost.

Instead of just listening to the ”noise”, executives will need to use data in ways that would be useful to them. Strategic thinking is needed for this.

A good data strategy is a prerequisite to a marketing strategy. It will be helpful to know what you are measuring and how success will look like when a campaign ends.

A huge amount of impressive data from different sources won’t bring the true picture for various B2B marketers unless sliced and examined on required planes.

An added issue is the cost of assimilating the data and the resources needed to analyse it. Any investments in data analytics will take a long time to deliver returns.

Too many marketing teams focus on creatives and campaigns, and worry about losing customer-centricity by not providing high-quality technical details that are integral to B2B marketing.

It is not easy to manage campaign logistics, creative, data analysis and tech tools by a small team of marketers in SMEs.

You need to decide on the right metrics based on the data strategy to assess efforts. Several metrics are possible to measure, even for a single channel such as paid advertising. Now, it’s up to you to decide what you are going to measure.

Here are some potential metrics that you may want to consider for B2B marketing:

Total revenue: It is the baseline from which we can measure the contribution of marketing. We can get a quick view of marketing activities by measuring incremental revenue.

Lead traffic: The website, for instance, must be used to generate leads. For this, the landing page of the website must be rich in content and well managed. It is essential to convert random visitors into leads.

Customer lifetime value:  It is consequential to calculate CLV even though it is hard to attribute and calculate but you have to track from the first arrival till possible customer loss to get an idea of this value.

Cost per acquisition: Keeping track of traffic and conversion to leads indicates which strategies and channels are working the best.

MQL to SQL: The extent of marketing qualified leads (MQL) to sales qualified leads (SQL) indicates the quality of leads. If this quality is high, it means marketing is doing things well.

Campaign ROI: It is also an indicator of successful tactics and marketing strategies. If you measure, monitor and manage campaign parameters better, you can find success over time consistently.

It is difficult to discuss all the details of a B2B marketing campaign and its data elements but I have listed the most crucial metrics.

Martech, analytics, and cloud solutions must be organised at the same access level to deliver an insight-based strategy that can be measured better.