Here’s a one-pager that I think captures the top-line metrics from marketing, PR and sales activity, measured against key marketing goals. It aims to show how every part of your marketing machine contributes to business success, working hand-in-hand with the sales function. It shows results, not activity – outputs not inputs – to report actual business value.
There’s a large quantity of data that can be tracked during marketing, PR and sales activity. What’s crucial is to identify the metrics that genuinely demonstrate what has/has not been achieved in support of goals. Then regularly and consistently report results and trends, to provide meaningful information that will support management and operational decisions.
Below this high-level view will be another level of operational metrics for each activity, to enable analysis of how effectively that activity is operating – e.g. website heat-maps, usage rates of different content formats, unopened emails, analysis of media coverage, conversion rates between stages in the funnel.
It’s important to track detailed results and trends in order to know where tactics are working and when they’re not living up to expectations. If it delivers, repeat ….. and if it doesn’t, be open to change and course-correction when appropriate.
Set a Small Number of Big Goals
To state the obvious, effectiveness can’t be measured unless you’re clear what you want to achieve. The scope of a marketing function differs in organisations, but most people will recognise these three big marketing goals:
- Create awareness of my company and products/services
- Engage with customers about their needs and how my company could help
- Generate demand for my products/services.
As a general principle, I think all teams (not just marketing teams) need a small number of big goals to buy into. That way, it’s easy for individuals to check themselves: is what I’m about to do serving one of our big goals? If not, I need to question why we’re doing it. All activity must support the big goals, otherwise precious resource is wasted and progress to achieve goals is slowed down.
Focus on Results not Activity
Measuring effectiveness means reporting what’s been achieved, rather than what activity has been conducted, no matter how much effort has gone into it. It’s worth spending time thinking about what metrics do actually show results against the goals you have set. (Measuring effort is important too, to determine efficiency and operational cost – see Marketing ROI.)
It’s surprising how easy it is to focus on effort rather than outcome. For example: we took a stand at a major event, the stand was packed every day, visitors loved our give-aways and our marketing and sales people collaborated well to make it all happen. All great commentary but not results serving goals. So report metrics such as media coverage, analyst engagements, speaker slots, # new contacts, social media interaction, # sales meetings. You’d show these in the Events tab on the next level down from the Top-Line Dashboard, along with the additional commentary. Note – use the same approach for the virtual events we’re all doing at the moment because of COVID-19.
Report Marketing ROI
I’ve shown marketing spend as it relates to gross revenue. It can be a ratio (for every £ spent, we have ££ in gross revenue) or a percentage (marketing spend is x% of gross revenue). The point is to show marketing investment in the context of the overall business plan. The relationship between revenue and gross profit will be assessed by the broader business with factors such as discounts and partner costs coming into play.
By definition, not all marketing spend is purely and directly demand focused – e.g. brand, PR, analyst relations, nurture – hence the need for a dashboard to show the complete picture over time. The marketing ROI metric will fluctuate with the timing of spend and the length of sales cycles, but the longer it’s tracked, the more meaning it will have.
Dashboard Effort and Benefit
No matter how data-centric a business is, surfacing the right data into a regular, meaningful marketing dashboard is usually a challenge! The data will be held in multiple places and the integration of applications and data sources is an increasing challenge with the explosion of MarTech and CRM systems, often delivered as SaaS. Effort will be needed to pull together the required data into a chosen dashboard and format. But it’ll be worth it:
- Make the dashboard accessible to all teams across marketing and sales functions – get them involved in results
- Make it the source of truth regularly discussed across teams – the big picture and the contribution of specific activities
- This will help foster a culture of cross-functional collaboration in support of common goals
- Use the insight from the dashboard to make informed operational decisions.
Team Targets & Attribution
When it comes to team targets in a demand generation funnel, my view is to avoid splitting marketing-generated and sales-generated targets if at all possible. Otherwise you can encourage competition between teams that achieves nothing except a potential disjointed customer experience and time-wasting internal discussions (arguments?) about attribution. Instead, I’d like sales and marketing teams to think of the whole buying cycle as a joint endeavour in which each team plays their part at different stages. That’s another blog …
SALLY-ANNE BURWELL – May 2021
B2B MARKETING and PR 