How Marketing and Sales can succeed with Analytics
ABOUT THIS ARTICLE ON ANALYTICS:
This article explains how Analytics could help you make smarter business decisions, create a responsive marketing strategy and align marketing to sales.
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Goal setting and progress tracking
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Marketing channel effectiveness
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Content effectiveness
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Formulating marketing qualified leads
The Smarter Marketer: Analysis in his / her DNA
There’s a very powerful force out there in Marketing and it’s called Data. Why is that? Because data provides insights. But that only happens if marketers analyse data. Analysis should be a part of every single thing you do in marketing – be it any content, any campaign launches, well - any marketing action.
Analysis is a critical step towards modern marketing success. When you need to know what’s working, what isn’t, and how to implement new solutions and improve your efforts as efficiently as possible, the only way is to analyse your work. Analytics give you -
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Instant Accountability for Underperformance
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Undeniable and Quantifiable Proof of Success
Here’s 15 marketing metrics every marketing manager should be tracking and how do you prove ROI to your business.
Goal Setting and Progress Tracking
This is how you stay ahead of your lead generation goals so you can have a solid quarter.
1. Leads waterfall
Create a graph that helps you visualise the day’s achievements and compare those results against your goals. With the visuals, you can spot the lags and react quickly to pick up the pace. You can use an Excel spreadsheet or a marketing software like Hubspot that provides automatic updates. Either way, you can ask me for a template or demo.
2. Traffic waterfall
What to do when you’re falling behind on your web traffic? Create content that draws more readers.
3. Average lead close rate
Understand your average time to close a deal. If you’re taking longer than average you might not be attracting the right people. So consider tweaking your campaign.
4. Average leads per business day month over month growth
This is important if your management wants to achieve the same target every month. But some months like February are shorter with 21 working days. So, work out what do you need to do to achieve the same results in 21 days instead of the usual 24 working days in March, for instance.
Channel Effectiveness
By monitoring individual channels like Social media, SEO or eMail, you gain insights on what works best and understand where you’re investing rightly.
5. Month-to-date (MTD) goal per channel
Assuming that you want to generate 100 leads via social media in March. By using the leads per business day metric, set daily social media goals to help you get there. This metric also helps to incentivise your blog team to hit a daily lead goal for their own channel.
6. Close rate per channel
For customer acquisition, do you know which channel works best for your business? Maybe SEO is your best volume-producing lead generation channel for your business, and social media is one of your smallest. But what’s the interplay here? Is it possible that social is driving more customers for your business? Analyse to understand the close rates generated by each channel and see the quality of leads. Of course you’d want to invest more in the channel that gives you better leads.
7. Paid vs. organic lead percentage
Marketers need to understand the spend on “paid” (e.g. social advertising, sponsored newsletters, etc.) and “organic” (generated by your marketing team’s efforts). Keep a close watch on how much of your leads are coming from one bucket over the other, and also set a goal to decrease paid channels as a lead source over time.
Content Effectiveness
Metrics for your blog post, eBook and other content you have created.
8. Leads generated per offer
Pro tip: Gate an attractive offer behind a landing page to encourage your visitors to fill out. Track how many people filled out that offer form and compare with your lead volume or with other offers that you’re promoting. Knowing what content attracts your customers will help improve your marketing efforts.
9. Landing page new contacts rate
The new contacts generated through the content forms tell you if you’re attracting a new set of audience for business.
10. Call-to-action clickthrough rate
By monitoring your call-to-action (CTA) clickthrough rate, you'll be able to understand how valuable that offer is to incoming traffic.
11. Traffic driving keywords
This metric evaluates keyword performance based on the traffic that's coming to your content via your selected keywords. If you have many traffic-producing keywords, you've done a great job creating a piece of content that has received significant links and shares, helping it perform better in search engines. If not, adjust your keywords.
Marketing Qualified Leads
Marketing Qualified leads are ready to be converted to sales. The determinants of what makes a MQL will vary e.g. filling out a form, visiting your website five times, and visiting your product page. Or you might decide that a lead is an MQL once it requests a demo. It's up to you.
12. Total MQLs per month
How many MQLs you are generating monthly. This helps you go to the next stage of nurturing and driving more sales-driven content.
13. MQLs per channel
Understand the channels that deliver your strongest strong source of MQLs.
14. Percentage of leads that are MQLs
By monitoring what percentage of your leads are MQLs over any given time, you'll be able to understand how well MQL generation is working compared to lead generation. Ideally, the MQL percentage would grow over time while overall lead volume is increasing.
15. MQL conversion rate per offer
This metric is your tool to measure both MQL conversion and content effectiveness. The "MQL conversion rate per offer" metric indicates the rate a person becomes an MQL, per offer. If 20% of leads became an MQL after attending your webinar versus 10% of leads became an MQL after downloading your ebook, then the webinar has a higher MQL conversion rate. Isn’t it helpful to know what content or activity works best for your business?
These are what my clients and I have been working on. If you’re using other metrics, I’d love to hear about them. Let’s all work together as marketers using analytics to make the smartest decisions possible for our businesses.
Meanwhile download this eBook - The 6 Marketing Metrics Your Boss Actually Cares About: Prove the ROI of your marketing efforts by presenting these six metrics.
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