B2B marketing and PR departments feel increasing pressure to justify their activities and results.
According to a Forrester Research survey, 56% of marketers said connecting spending to revenue is their top challenge — up from 45% last year. More marketers understand that if they cannot quantify their results, CEOs and CFOs will view their department as a cost center and exclude them from strategic decisions.
Marketers face many hurdles when attempting to align their activities with business results, points out another Forrester Research white paper, Metrics that Matter for B2B Marketers. They face a deluge of data that’s difficult to collect, aggregate and store. Many marketing teams lack analytical skills, and most tend to rely on easier to track metrics. Only 10% of organizations polled believe their teams are effective at using data analytics to reach decisions.
Hurtling the Measurement Quagmire
These are a few of the tips the white paper offers for selecting metrics and measuring performance of B2B marketing initiatives. The recommendations can also apply to measuring public relations activities.
Examine the entire customer life cycle. The most important metrics quantify the outcome of marketing’s work across the entire customer life cycle and provide insights on how to improve performance. Life-cycle-based performance measures give marketers the data they need to quantify the contribution that marketing makes to building the pipeline, generating revenue, and growing accounts. Follow leads generated by marketing or PR through the entire sales, renewal and retention process.
Take a long-term view. Most B2B marketers focus on short-term trends like sales pipeline. Relatively few track metrics that take a longer-term view, such as marketing’s contribution to retention and market share.
Meaningful insights. Marketers often track quantitative data like inbound traffic and social media followers. While those metrics can make marketing look good, the more meaningful metrics include lead conversion rate, customer retention, and account penetration.
Unify your approach. As technology advances to bring more sophistication to performance monitoring, B2B marketers will need to integrate measurement and reporting capabilities. An integrated approach calls for connecting data across programs and platforms, recruiting help from customer insights experts, and deploying dashboards that visualize facts and follow the buyer’s journey.
Visualize the data. Deploy dashboards that visualize facts and follow the buyer’s journey. Such dashboards help to interpret the data. Rather than relying on static reports that become dated quickly, secure dashboards that operate in near real-time.
B2C Marketers also Struggle to Measure Performance
Other research has found that marketers, including both B2C and B2B teams, could do a better job at measuring their performance.
The 2016 Planning Report from the Leapfrog Marketing Institute actually showed a decline in accountability within marketing budgets. Only 10% of C-level executives surveyed said more than 75% of their advertising and marketing budget is accountable to ROI. That’s down from 40% of decision-makers in 2015.
The decline in accountability is at least partly due to increased investment in social media marketing where ROI is still unclear.
“My hypothesis was that in an era of ever-growing data availability, there would be an increase in measurable ROI,” stated David Reibstein, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School and an institute advisory panel member. “But there has been a huge rush to social media, despite the fact that when marketers are asked what it’s doing for them, they don’t know… but feel like they need to be there.”
The Social Media Monitoring Solution
Many experts argue that increased social media monitoring and measurement can help marketers align their activities to business results, gain credibility and protect their budgets. For instance, research from Regalix found “a need for analytics to measure and monitor social media activities more rigorously, so companies can focus on channels that are working for them, and not have to invest in a social plan that covers as many channels as there are, which more often they do now.”
Bottom Line: Justifying their work to upper management is the top challenge facing B2B marketing and PR departments, because of difficulties in connecting marketing or PR spending to business revenue. Those who select metrics that take into account the entire customer lifecycle within a full-service measurement dashboard can better analyze their impact on sales, profitability and reputation.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
