Top 5 tips for
measuring your B2B marketing effectiveness
The first half of 2023 is just about over, which means now is the time to review your marketing performance over the past 6 months, and use the insight to create the best strategy for H2. What worked and what didn’t? What can you do better? Where is most of your new business coming from? By finding answers to these questions, you enable your marketing team to make confident decisions about your future activity. But more importantly, you can make sure you are spending your budget wisely. It can be hard securing a healthy marketing budget at the best of times, but if you don’t have numerical data to show your efforts are working, then it becomes even harder. So, with this in mind, here are a few top tips to measure the effectiveness of your B2B marketing.
Tip 1: Start thinking about your data points
If you’re looking for numerical evidence, then you need to capture data – and lots of it. In today’s B2B marketing, its commonplace to have huge amounts of information relating to all aspects of your marketing activity. The question is, what are you doing with all these insights? From click through data to cost per acquisition information, are you capturing this data and are you analysing it? If you’re not, then you need to start doing so immediately. Begin by looking at what data you are currently gathering, what information you can capture in addition to this, and then decide how you are going to analyse it. The goal here is to have as much data and insights at your fingertips as you can.
Tip 2: Think about the whole customer journey
Measuring the success of your B2B marketing tends to work backwards. You wait until a lead converts to a customer and then you analyse what got them there. In order to do this, you need to not only capture lots of data (tip 1), but you also need to be able to visualise this in the form of a customer journey. Where did they start? What journey did they go on with your organisation? What got them across the line? This type of analysis across multiple customers will highlight insights such as ‘content is a popular marketing channel’, but ‘nobody is engaging with pay-per-click ads’. From here, you can look to change your future strategy to focus on more successful channels and journeys.
Tip 3: Choose your attribution model
When you review the entire customer journey from prospect to sale (tip 2), you’ll see that the individual likely engaged with lots of your marketing material and collateral (e.g., content, emails, social etc.) Now when it comes to determining the ROI and the efficacy of your marketing, you need to decide on an attribution model. Will you choose a ‘first-touch attribution’ style which states the first communication the prospect engaged with is the reason they converted to a customer? What about a ‘last-touch attribution’ model that says the last marketing activity they engaged with is the reason they converted? Or, will you decide that all of the marketing channels they engaged with are of equal importance – i.e., an equal attribution model? Without a pre-agreed approach to attribution, you won’t be able to determine your ROI effectively.
Tip 4: Maximise your technology usage
As we’ve seen so far, determining the effectiveness of your B2B marketing requires vast amounts of data, customer journey visualisation and a wealth of calculations. Now, as you can imagine, this is not something that is achievable manually. In actual fact, you’ll likely need a range of technologies to achieve this level of analysis, such as marketing automation software and a CRM tool. But, should you have these solutions in place, then the level of research and investigation you can do on your activity is huge. While many businesses would be happy to simply have and use these types of technologies, there are many who have yet to unlock the real potential of the tech and utilise all of their features. If you scratch below the surface of modern B2B marketing technology, you’ll likely find a myriad of ways you can track, measure and analyse your activities easily. Where possible, undergo training on all of your tech platforms to ensure you are using them to their fullest capabilities.
Tip 5: Analyse your activities regularly
This post started by talking about analysing your H1 performance and using this to inform your H2 planning. But, what if your H1 data highlights issues or opportunities that you could have managed effectively in February or March? What if you’ve been wasting time on a marketing channel that isn’t used by your audience? What if you could have been targeting a new data set and increasing your sales revenue over the past 6 months? The point here is that the more regularly you review your performance data, the better your decision making will be. You’ll be able to quickly overcome hurdles and pounce on any new opportunities that arise. Going forward, look to carry out a review of your marketing effectiveness every month.
Let us help…
Whether you are looking to identify new audiences, ignite conversations with new or existing customers, or highly focus your efforts in an ABM campaign, we have the best people for the job. What’s more, we have the knowledge and experience to track and measure all of our activity, enabling you to see the value in your marketing spend. By blending emotional understanding and extensive expertise, we’ve supported and empowered global brands to accelerate their business growth with our award-winning capabilities in strategy & research, content & creative, and data & delivery.
If you’d like to find out what marketing metrics you should be capturing and analysing, simply download our latest checklist… Measure Your B2B Marketing Effectiveness.
Alternatively, to see how our award-winning B2B marketing solutions can help you achieve your goals and targets, speak to us today on 0207 970 4123 or email marketing@reallyb2b.com.