e-commerce & social media

Here are the B2B marketing metrics that Business Owners should be tracking.

Condensed...

1. Set Shared Goals

• Reach
• Lead nurturing
• Revenue
• Visit-to-lead %
• Lead-to-Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) %
• MQL-to-Opportunity %
• Opportunity-to-Sale %
• Lead-to-customer %

2. Create Content Offers

• How many leads has this offer generated?
• Have you measured your new contacts?
• How many ‘clicks’ do your calls-to-action receive?

3. Gauge Your MQLs

• How many of these MQLs are you generating month over month?
• How many MQLs do you get from your blog versus email marketing?
• Are more leads being nurtured into MQLs over time?

Condensed...

In May, Forrester teamed up with the IT Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) and VisionEdge Marketing (VEM) to survey marketing leaders about how they demonstrate marketing's impact on the business.  About a week ago I (finally) published Forrester's take on this important survey (subscription required).

Key among the findings: marketing leadership continues to use metrics to report on performance and justify budgets.  But far fewer use data and analytics to analyze purchase patterns, fine tune the mix, and understand customer lifetime value - actions that can have a bigger impact on overall performance.  The bottomline here is that marketing's impact doesn't matter if CMOs fail to link what they do to business goals. 

To help CMOs shift their measurement perspective from outputs to outcomes and to put a sharper focus on business agility, I recommend four key actions to take:

1) Clarify which outcomes the business wants.

2) Go beyond ROMI to expose the full scope of marketing's influence.

3) Model and monitor customer lifetime value.

4) Measure existing customer value as well.