Achieving a higher ROI on the B2B Marketing efforts is a crucial step towards measuring its performance.
The B2B marketing environment continues to evolve at an accelerated pace. With the past couple of years effectively deciding the marketing dynamics of today’s B2B marketing, it has become increasingly crucial to determine the most impactful marketing metrics.
While traditional marketing metrics still play an essential role in determining the success of B2B marketing efforts, they are not enough to measure the performance of an evolving marketing landscape. Moreover, while the board has finally acknowledged the importance of marketing in driving the overall growth of the marketing and has increased the budgets of B2B marketing, they are also expecting the marketing department to justify the investment and show direct revenue from the marketing efforts. Thus, CMOs must develop an understanding of the return of their marketing investments that will enable them to deliver effective marketing programs that will allow them to achieve the goals and needs of their organization.
Here are B2B marketing metrics that CMOs can utilize to measure the performance of their B2B marketing efforts:
Brand-focused and revenue-focused metrics
Brand-focused and revenue-focused metrics are two categories of B2B marketing metrics that are vital for measuring performance. By knowing their use cases, B2B marketers will be able to achieve a high return on their marketing investments.
Brand awareness, relevance and differentiation come under the umbrella of brand-focused metrics. These metrics enable CMOs to analyze the top part of their B2B marketing funnel. Additionally, brand-focused metrics can help CMOs determine how many prospects are aware of their business and what percentage of these prospects is likely to purchase the product or service of the brand.
Revenue-focused B2B marketing metrics measure how much of the target audience is actually converting into paying customers. They are also called conversion metrics since this data maybe just a part of the sales/revenue-generating process. Especially if there is a longer sales process that marketing-derived leads go through.
Also Read: 5 Ways IoT is Revolutionizing the Future of B2B Marketing
CMOs should break down these revenue-focused metrics into sales metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV), cost of sales (COS) and customer acquisition costs (CAC). Other metrics that will help CMOs to achieve high returns on their marketing investment include finance metrics that track the overall financial performance of the organization, such as profit margin, revenue per employee as well as return on ad spend.
Since both brand-focused and revenue-focused metrics often fluctuate, CMOs should ensure that they measure these metrics on a frequent basis.
Vanity and actionable metrics
All the brand-focused metrics as well revenue-focused metrics are critical for measuring the investment in marketing campaigns. At the same time, CMOs should learn to differentiate between vanity metrics and actionable metrics.
While vanity metrics such as brand awareness look promising in theory, they fail to deliver specific tangible business results. They only serve a purpose when combined with conversion metrics. Therefore, CMOs should learn to focus on actionable metrics that drive the success of their business. Metrics such as conversion rates and A/B testing results provide a deeper insight into the steps to drive the revenue from the B2B marketing efforts.
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