It is that time of the year again, late October, when B2B marketers take a hard look at the year to date and start figuring out the strategy, tactics and budget for the next year. Every year it is the same dance in B2B marketing. It is a little different in B2C, for them it is the beginning of prime time with the end of the year’s holidays: 11.11, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Kwanza, Hanukkah, etc.
It’s the time when we build charts, presentations, share performance metrics, and try to connect the bottom line numbers with marketers’ multiple micro metrics and KPIs.
These metrics are pulled from online, offline marketing and multi-channel marketing attribution models. Digital marketers having so much data, it is easy to pull the wrong metrics that won’t help understand how the revenue was created, or how the opportunities are influenced. Metrics that don’t tie to the revenue, or customer satisfaction/retention are just noise.
Marketing’s KPIs are specific to each business, and should present how revenue was generated. The dashboard above is a reality for a lot of B2B businesses, where marketers find it challenging to tie metrics to direct revenue.
Start with your revenue
Marketing KPIs should start from the Revenue standpoint: What activities generated revenue for the business?
Analyze the wins and losses
Identifying the sales cycle and touchpoints necessary to progress the sales: What is the customer’s journey behind your top 5 wins and your top 5 losses.
Understand your marketing channels
Multi channel attribution indicates from where incoming leads came from: What Marketing channels are bringing more leads than others.
Quality of interactions: What marketing channels are converting more leads than others?
Understanding your consumer’s customer journey
Does your strategy incorporate the whole customer’s journey with your brand? You should also know the sales cycle and the major decision process
Choose the right platform to create dashboards?
I like using Google Data Studio, it offers the ability to connect to your data collected by Google (Adwords, Analytics, Adsense…). It also connects to your forms, raw csv files and other data aggregation platforms. For The price ($0), this is really powerful.
You will be able to answer all these questions if you have a reliable way to collect information. You need to make sure that everything is plugged the right way and you compare data from the same standpoint. If you measure the website traffic, use 1 platform, if you are using conversion, extract it from 1 source of truth, and don’t use data that crosses over platforms. Website sessions are not measured the same way by Pardot and google analytics for example, and trying to track sessions from both will generate inconsistent and unreliable data that won’t help your KPIs.