Marketing Measurement Goes Beyond the Numbers

Measurement, analytics, reporting, statistics. Marketing is now required to justify and validate their results. But what does that mean? Giving sales 500 additional leads per month is not as impressive as giving your salespeople 50 sales-ready leads that quickly become valid opportunities with a higher propensity to convert into customers. Is it?

Numbers can look very important, especially if they're moving in the right direction from your benchmarks. But, what you're measuring needs to provide valuable intelligence that helps marketers continuously refine programs and campaigns because you’ve leveraged buyer behavioral insights to tweak, refine and improve outcomes. Essentially, numbers are only as valuable as the actions they empower.

Dashboards are all the rage, but what does it mean to marketing if the reports show an email communication result recording a twenty percent lower number of people who clicked through when compared with the previous communication sent out to the same lead group?

If the only criteria for evaluation is the surface numbers, marketing would probably say that it's not the best communication effort they've ever produced. But, don’t be so hasty. That number might be misleading.

Dig deeper and assess the cumulative activity taken by leads who did respond. Relevance is different for different people. Your subject line could have created the drop in response. It could be the way the topic was presented, or it could be a matter of timing. So look beyond the click through to other factors that can equate to high impact. Look at the total number of web pages viewed by those who chose to participate. If you used a landing page, how much of the available content was viewed? And, what did they view?

What if, in considering the intelligence your marketing automation system recorded, you learn that there was a 20% higher page read generated from the people who originally clicked on the link in your latest email, as compared to those who clicked through on the last one?

What if you also learned that seven people signed up for a webinar on a related subject and three people veered over to read about a subset of the product or problem you were discussing? What if their actual session time was an average of 6 minutes, when last communication only produced an average of 4.35 minutes? Think about the value of attention spend. Then evaluate what subject matter has their attention and how you can extend from that interest to drive additional engagement.

If you consider the example above, you now have insights to those ten leads that you didn't have before. This intelligence enables you to personalize your focus and do directed follow-up that may generate a conversation that enables you to learn even more than you know now. You might even be seeing a pattern that helps you develop better "trigger" insights resulting in an increased ability to shift leads to sales at the most opportune time.

Before you get yourself tied in knots about the numbers being the big deal, consider what marketing can learn beyond those surface metrics and how that knowledge can be leveraged to produce even greater results that are measurable in sales volume. Think about the impact you can have by producing a report that shows actionable insights derived from getting closer to your potential customers.

Numbers aren’t bad. They are a valuable measuring tool, just not the only one. And surface numbers won’t produce the full picture of a buyer’s interest or buying process. Think about how you can combine numbers with insights and intelligence to get to know your prospects better. Those insights could be what's behind your company's biggest quarter in the last ten years...just saying.

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B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee helps companies significantly increase their marketing momentum by generating more and better leads for their sales organizations. She helps them capture the attention of web site visitors, and strengthen engagement with high value content till they are "sales ready." Visit the Marketing Interactions website: www.marketinginteractions.com.