A Guide to Marketing Metrics for Business Leaders

Every good marketing strategy involves a lead generation ‘engine’, which directly influences revenue generation and business growth. But strategy alone is not enough. Strategy needs to be applied and turned into a set of actions. Bringing your marketing strategy to life requires a planned set of tactics that you roll out over time.

The most important element of this process is constantly measuring and reporting the effectiveness of your tactics and then optimising your campaigns for best results. By having this process in place you can run an effective lead generation “engine” and hit your revenue goals.

How do you track your marketing effectiveness?

1. Set Shared Goals

The animosity between Marketing and Sales is a long running cliché in all business circles. But in order for the new methods of marketing to work, they need to work together. In fact it is now possible to create shared goals and metrics that keep both teams accountable to each other and also informed of the others importance in the business.

We have broken these metrics up into quantity and quality.

Quality Metrics

• Reach: This includes anyone the company can target with their existing email databases, social media, blog subscribers, website traffic and pay-per-click advertising. This could also be described as the area at the mouth of the funnel.
• Lead Nurturing: This is where you create and build relationships with your leads. You have to provide useful and interesting content to nurture your leads through their buyer’s journey from a first-time website visitor to a sales ready lead.
• Revenue:Increasing this is the fundamental goal for all businesses. You should tracking it weekly and monthly on its own and also in comparison to your goals.

Quantity Metrics

• Visit to Lead %:This gives a quick view of how many of your visitors are converting into leads. How effective your calls-to-action and offers are determine are the two biggest contributing factors to this number. From this you can identify the problems with your design or content and work on improving them.
• Lead to Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) %:Presents a measure of how well you have turned your new generic lead into a qualified lead that is interested in your business and the content you are distributing.
• MQL to Opportunity %:By measuring your MQL’s and how many change into opportunities you can find out how effective this stage of your process has been.
• Opportunity to Sale %:This is the end of the line, the final conversion that will result in revenue for you. It mostly measures how effective sales were in closing the opportunity into a sale but is also influenced by the effectiveness of the previous stages. It is marketing’s role to make sure the salesperson has the best possible opportunity here.
• Lead to Customer %: This is the direct percentage that is closest to showing the full effectiveness of your sales and marketing funnel.

You can set goals for your marketing team by creating benchmarks with these numbers. Then gradually work on improving the conversion rates at each stage of the funnel. Furthermore, reversing this process can help create budget goals. You can choose the number of customers you need and by using your current conversion rates work out how many opportunities, MQL’s, leads and visitors you need.

2. Make Content Offers

Measuring the impact of each piece of content can be a difficult process but it can be done using content offers. You can put interesting, quality content behind landing page forms so you can collect lead information details. You can also do this to begin the lead nurturing process.

The content you initially offer should be highly informative and focused on your buyer’s problems, not a sales catalogue. You want to educate the buyer; help them understand the field better. It should also encourage them to seek more information about their problems. You can use this to gradually present them with more content that pushes them down your sales funnel.

The call-to-action and the content leading to the landing page is the starting point. The landing page is a crucial part of the content and you should see it as the book cover, the part that entices readers to pick the book up, read about it and then buy it. You must be clear and let the visitor know exactly what they get for their details. If you make it easy for visitors to find your quality content, they will reward you with their details.

Your visitor should have a good impression from start to finish. By having a consistent theme that lets the visitor know exactly where they are going and what they are getting you will encourage more people to seek out your content.

How to measure your MQL’s

Marketing qualified leads are ready for a discussion with your sales team. The number of sales will be directly linked to your ability to figure out which leads are the most promising and focusing your sales team on them.

• Month on Month:Measure how many MQL’s you are generating each month compared to the previous month.
• Blog vs Email:Find out which channel is the best at delivering new leads and then converting them to high quality leads.
• Total over time: Are the number of leads being nurtured until they are high quality leads? If your business is struggling to get leads to a position ready for sales you need to look at the content in the middle of your funnel. What pieces are effective? Which need work or replacement?

It is also important to note that guiding a lead through their buyer’s cycle with valuable, interesting and impressive content will create a strong and trusting relationship.

Business leaders expect their Head of Sales to give them clear and measurable results but they should also be demanding the same quality from their CMO and marketing team. It is now marketing’s role to be held accountable as a part of business revenue generation.

Marketing should be measuring and reporting on the top and middle of the funnel to ensure continuous improvement. It will also offer them a chance to look back on their data and evidence as they move forward so they can make more informed decisions.