What if you fully understood and tracked all of the action within your sales funnel? Could you target and better qualify your leads–hone your message and gain better ROI for your marketing spend? The answer is a resounding YES!
Focus on fewer, more meaningful marketing metrics
Last week our technical practice lead Jean-Luc Vanhulst led the final session of our Summer Tech Talk series, this one on marketing metrics. Chatting with the people responsible for driving overall demand for qualified leads, the lunch was jammed with local marketing leaders who had their google analytics in hand and questions on their minds.
Each of our B2B clients at Write2Market has its own unique setting for the meaningful messages that create sales. For some, we see inbound phone calls and online web form conversions, we also see paper downloads and proposal requests and for others, it’s industry influence that drives their reputation. In every case, there is a marketing metric that CAN be measured, but how do you best measure and move on into stronger sales?
Specific success metrics for marketers
The fact is, we can measure almost anything based on the technology that exists today–but is it truly helpful? There are technologies from call tracking to marketing automation and CRM platforms that all provide dashboards and an ease of use that makes measurement an easy and attainable KPI for every organization.
But before you begin any new marketing strategy, you must first define your plan, truly understanding your goals and what defines success. In addition, you and your team must agree on what is critical to success. Think simply: website traffic, form fills, organic SEO ranking on specific terms, newsletter signups, inbound calls, Adwords that work–there is always an opportunity to dig in–or just get started with a baseline you can believe in.
Deming on how to get it done
From this point on, you can follow the famous concept of Total Quality Management (TQM): Plan, Do, Check and Act.
Plan for success, execute your strategy, check for your success metrics and act on the outcomes. Did you achieve your success metrics? Congratulations your ‘act’ would be to do more of the same. If you did not achieve the goal – check and act differently, tweak.
This is not a once and done marketing task but a repeatable process that requires regular review and renavigation, helping you to gain momentum in building your sales funnel.
Monitor for exceptions in your marketing campaign
Make sure that your success metrics are accessible and measuring what you set out to do! While you are now measuring for success – did you also monitor for exceptions? We’re surprised at how many companies do not have alerts for things like website uptime.
- Monitor continuously, checking for the “out of the ordinary” based on thresholds and alerts. Examples are the response time of a website or the bounce rate of visitors.
- Measure for outcomes, looking at the before AND the after–following up for effectiveness.
Create a dashboard to bring all metrics together for executives
Stuck in spreadsheet hell, cutting and pasting and providing different KPI’s to each of your executives? At Write2Market, we provide our clients with an individualized dashboard of specific KPI’s, an easy to digest snapshot of the important metrics that you need for review on a regular basis. This allows you to boil up the necessary information without having to log into disparate systems in order to gather up all of your metrics.
At Write2market, some of our favorite marketing dashboard tools are:
- Triple A, Write2Market’s proprietary PR & marketing workflow and ROI dashboard
- Cyfe
- Geckoboard
- DashThis
- Wistia f0r video tracking
- Zapier (for app automation)
Ready to bring it all together?
If you’d like some support unleashing your leadership in marketing, get in touch–I’d love to talk this through with you and our team can certainly help. Contact me on Twitter: @joelloyd or @write2market, or give us a shout at 404-900-7722.
–Joe’ Lloyd, Relationship Manager, Write2Market