Marketing Measurement Best Practices

Even with a good marketing automation solution in place, today’s B2B marketing teams faces massive amounts of data. This leads to three major issues: reporting, the actual data and testing. To understand how much value a marketing campaign delivered, it’s critical to have strong reporting to answer questions such as: How many emails did we send?, and How many names did we collect? This along with getting the data in an organized format for accurate analysis and the problem of testing individual treatments or groups of treatments creates a challenge for marketers. Smart marketing teams look to B2B marketing measurement systems to address this challenge. With these solutions, they get the tools they need and add value to the overall revenue cycle. To view a more detailed view of what’s needed by B2B marketers today, consider the following needs and solutions surrounding the measurement system: B2B Marketing Needs 1. Framework – The first need for program measurement is a framework to categorize marketing programs and this framework should be organized around the stages of the purchasing process. By using this framework, each marketing activity moves leads to the next stage of the process. This allows direct comparison of programs targeted at the same stages. 2. Measurement of disparate programs – A consistent measurement of disparate programs is essential. Using a measure such as click-through rate might validate the comparison of two email programs, but there’s no direct option for comparison of click-through rates on email to web visits. Optimal measurement systems project future purchases almost immediately after the execution of the marketing program. B2B Marketing Solutions Stage assignments – Stages require precise definitions to classify individuals. Some definitions may include static attributes, such as having an approved budget. Others become defined by behaviors such as information requested from your web site. This behavior is then converted into accurate stage definitions and patterns including: which materials they viewed, how often and how recently. Value projections – This area requires some estimate of subsequent stage-to-stage transitions through the actual price. A simple assumption is that the transition rates remain constant. For instance: a 10% increase in new leads results in a 10% increase in sales.The system must also take into account deviations and allow marketers to estimate for changes in advance and automatically adjust projections as new data comes available. This involves analytical tools to help marketers improve projections and report on performance trends. Program interactions – The stage-based method measures the impact of each program independently and lets marketers calculate the incremental marketing ROI. This area takes into account many programs running simultaneously and how these interactions are most likely between programs at the same stage in the buying process. Analytical database – Most operational databases store only the current value of most data elements. If any changes occur to those elements, loss of old values would make it impossible to reconstruct a lead’s stage assignment at an earlier time. Having a separate operational marketing automation system designed for analytical processing would solve this and other issues. B2B marketers need all the help they can get and with a stage-based measurement system, they get that help. Since most B2B marketing departments lack the resources to develop these systems internally, they should rely on marketing automation vendors for assistance. To learn more about B2B marketing measurement and how it helps increase marketing ROI, subscribe to the Modern B2B marketing Blog RSS feed or follow Marketo on Twitt