Prepare Q4 and start measuring your Marketing performance

I am all about measuring Marketing performance; We are far from the time where it was enough to show nice pictures and repeat. Marketers are turning into Project Managers, and are taking more and more responsibilities in the prospect journey to ensure that people sail smoothly from awareness to active buyers. In this blog, I will go from the assumption that we all agree that websites are an absolute necessity in the communication tool.

For the new Digital Marketing Manager, engaging in this measuring journey is a question of life and death, when you cannot demonstrate the return on investment, budgets WILL be restricted. Q3 might have been too early for you to work on metrics, but don’t let Q4 pass by, otherwise it will slip until next year same time. To prevent that, here are 5 basic metrics you need to start measuring for Q4 2017 from 3 major business tools:

I am a Google analytics certified partner, so Google products are the first thing I recommend, and I do so for several reasons. First, it is free, so no additional budget to implement this analytics platform. Second, it is very powerful, complete and allows you to create basic segments. The only downfall is that metrics take 1 day to sync and you cannot create reports that include today’s date, for 95% of businesses and it is fine for most businesses.

I have been using Google Data Studio to create dashboards lately, it allows me to save time when reading metrics and compiling my dashboard. Compiling web data is so much easier this way, I just connect, print-to-PDF and analyze. Easy peasy.

Define what you want to accomplish with your website and what people in your organization care for. Most of the time, the main goal of a website is to increase the number of people (users) who come to visit your website and increase their pageviews and time onsite. This gives an indication that you are doing a good job at bringing people to your website from different channels. To identify where they come from, you should look at the referrals and sources of traffic. Make sure that you have filtered your company IP (ISP or hostname for larger organizations) to avoid measuring all the time that people inside your company connected to your website. It looks best on a linear chart.

Understanding what your most popular pages are is helpful to see what your audience is consuming in your website. It tells you what you need to work on, and what doesn’t create value for your brand. It looks best in a classic table.

Marketing automation increases the quality of leads and helps with segmentation. It measures the interaction each user has with your digital assets and show you the people that are the most interested in what you are offering. To explain the value to your sales team and organization, tell them that you can create an alert for all the time that their most important targets are looking at your solution page and searching information on your company. It allows you to score the leads. No need for a sales person to spend time contacting someone that didn’t engage with your brand, it would be best for him to focus on people that are active and are searching for your brand.

Define your most important prospects first. Who do you need to work with? Who would be the best customers for your company? I am always surprised that so many b2B businesses don’t know for sure. Create a list of the 100 best targets and flag them in order to recognize them when they interact with your brand. In ABM we call them Dream 100. It looks best in a list.

Create a scoring model that measures the interaction that your prospects have with your brand. You should know if they open the emails you send, visit your website, and other digital trails that makes sense for you. Scoring will give you the opportunity to rank your contacts par activity.

The grading process measures your prospects’ profile. Depending on their title, their experience, or department, you grade their profile. Someone that would be a very close to your top buyer persona would be graded A, for someone else that is very far from being your ideal customer would be graded F. Once you mix both metrics, you will have a model that will allow you to understand where and who people are in their engagement with your brand. It looks best in a matrix.

Now that all your prospects have a grade, you can measure the performance of your lead generation over time. The analysis should be pretty easy, the goal is to bring as much quality leads as possible and stay in front of the right people. It usually looks best in a bar graph.