As Peter Drucker famously said “what gets measured, gets improved”, but where do you start when it comes to effective B2B marketing? Atomic’s performance marketing team has four suggestions on where to start.
No two business challenges are the same. Thus, identifying what to measure is the first simple step to successful B2B lead gen. From here, actionable insights can be unearthed, which will ultimately lead to effective marketing and continued growth.
Here are 4 key metrics we suggest examining:
1. Lead Touchpoints
A conversion goal may have been identified with a campaign, even achieved… but if your business doesn’t have an in-depth understanding of what has worked and what could be improved, planning your content and media investments for growth will just continue as guesswork for future campaigns.
Although we would all like our leads to convert within the first touchpoint, it often takes multiple touchpoints. Thus, marketing teams need to identify not just the last touch point before conversion, but the user journey as a whole, so that your business can make informed improvements. This can be achieved by marketing automation software such as Salesforce.
2. Marketing Qualified Leads
They tick all the right boxes to be your customer and are taking pre-determined actions that have been tagged as events on your website that flag them as primed for conversion... MQLs are valuable information to extract from your marketing team, not only for sales but also in discovering trends that may inform your future growth strategies and investments.
Atomic uses Leadfeeder software to identify how many unique visitors from the same company are visiting a client’s site or campaign landing page, and with their LinkedIn integration, we know the lead’s role and contact details if they are publicly available. This helps to build an informed picture for not only marketing teams, but more frequently, sales. Bridging the gap between marketing and e-commerce and marketing and sales teams is a key objective for many of our clients over the next year and something that Atomic is particularly focused on within our ABM offering.
(Source: Hubspot)
We also use this tool to help clients using a lead scoring process to segment the MQL. Some of the data that can be used for this purpose are demographics, company information, online behaviour (on your website), email engagement or social engagement.
3. Email Engagement
According to SuperOffice research, one in two B2B marketers say email is the most effective digital marketing channel.
This is certainly true, however, within our inbound projects for clients Atomic has seen that many brands frequently share one common simple mistake – determine your goal before you determine your strategy! Inbound and automated email marketing campaigns are no different than traditional campaigns in that unless you know what it is that you are setting out to do and why the end output is not going to be as effective as possible. You need to be clear not only on the overall campaign objective but the objective of each individual email – whether it’s click-throughs, conversions, referrals etc.
No two campaigns are the same, so while there is best practice for communication timings, titling’s, copy, formats, and CTAs, you really won’t have ‘the answer’ until you are A/B testing solutions for yourself on an ongoing basis. Every communication is an opportunity to learn more about what works best for your brand and your specific audience. Some of the tools we use to do this on behalf of our clients have included Mailchimp, Marketo and Salesforce Pardot.
4. Site Conversion
Just as your website should have its primary objectives predetermined by your business ones, best practice is that every page should also have its own individual reason for being. No landing page should try to be all things to all men. If your team have clarity on your desired user journey for visitors, the CTA of each page should be relatively simple to determine.
From here, conversion rates may be quantified by calculating the total tracked events (via Google event tags for example), divided by the total number of people visiting your landing page.
If you are using Google Analytics, the conversion rate is calculated based on the number of sessions and not on the number of users and this can skew your conversion rate. Since a potential lead might visit your landing page several times before considering to take an action, using ‘users’ to calculate the conversion rate will provide you an accurate measurement. So Atomic’s advice is to do the maths yourself to arrive at the true figure. Taking the additional time before campaigns kick off to set up automated reporting via an API scraper is not only a great timesaver for reporting but also allow you to report back in real-time whenever needed.
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