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Analysis should be inherent in every single thing you do with your marketing

There’s a very powerful force out there in Modern Marketing and it’s called Data. The advantages are huge if you collect data, apply analytics and interpret insights. Analysis should be a part of every single thing you do with your marketing. Anything you do - any piece of content you create, any campaign you launch, or any marketing action you undertake - should be analysed.

 

To be a truly successful modern marketer, you need to know what’s working, what isn’t, and how to implement new solutions and improve your efforts as efficiently as possible. And again, the only way to do this is by taking the time to analyse your work. Analytics give you -

  • Instant accountability for underperformance
  • Undeniable and quantifiable proof of success

The only way you can prove to your business that your marketing efforts are working is through Analytics.

Proving marketing ROI through analytics

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

Here you want to stay ahead of your lead generation goals so you can have a solid month.

Leads waterfall

Create a graph that helps you visualise what you achieve each day and compare your results to your goal. If you’re lagging behind the first day it happens, you can quickly react 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.

Traffic waterfall

Similar to leads waterfall and if you’re falling behind, you might want to create content that draws more readers.

Average lead close rate

What is 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.

Average leads per business day month over month growth If your boss wants you to achieve the same target each month, then your February efforts have to be 15% more than January as it is a shorter month. So what do you need to do to achieve the same results in 19 days as you would with 22?

Channel effectiveness

Social media, SEO, eMail are individual channels. By monitoring each channel you can have insights on what works best for your business and if you are investing in the right sources. However, don't forget how each impacts the bigger goal.

Month-to- date (MTD) goal per channel

Let’s say you want to generate 100 leads via social media in March. By using the leads per business day metric, you can set daily social media goals to help you get there. This metric is also good if you wish to give your blog team incentive to hit a lead goal for their own channel. They then use this metric to track their daily progress.

Close rate per channel

Every marketer should understand what channels work best for their business from a customer acquisition standpoint. Maybe SEO is your best volume-producing lead generation channel for your business, and social media is one of your smallest. Well, regardless of lead volume, it's possible that social is driving more customers for your business!

Perhaps the close rate of leads generated via social media is significantly higher than leads generated via SEO ... so much so that SEO's volume isn't enough to make up the difference. That high close rate is also a very strong indicator of the quality of those leads coming from that channel and of course, you want to do more on that channel!

Paid vs. organic lead percentage

Lots of marketers group their channel analysis into larger buckets - for example, "paid"; and "organic"; might be separated for analysis. The paid bucket is any marketing that you spend money on (aside from employee time), like social advertising, sponsored newsletters, etc.

Organic is the opposite; it's all leads that you generate without cost other than your team's time. Blogging, SEO, social media, and email marketing fall into that bucket. So if you're a marketing director using both of these "types" of lead generation, you probably want to keep a close watch on how much of your leads are coming from one bucket over the other.

You might also set a goal to decrease paid channels as a lead source over time. Measure what percentage of your leads come from each bucket to get a sense for how your organic efforts are working for you, and if you are scaling to reduce your dependency on advertising. 

Content effectiveness

What is the impact of your blog post or eBook? Here’s a set of metrics to track if all the wonderful stuff you are making is paying off.

Leads generated per offer

One great use of content, particularly premium or long-form content, is to gate it behind a landing page to encourage your visitors to fill out a form. That content is often called an offer, because it's what you are offering on that landing page. But how do you know if that offer was worth creating? Simple!

By tracking how many people filled out that particular form on the offer's landing page. Now that you have that number, how does that lead volume compare to other offers of yours? Knowing that will help you determine how effective different types of offer content are to your marketing efforts.

Landing page new contacts rate

If you know the percentage of new people you're attracting to your business, that is the rate at which new contacts only are filling out your form on a landing page, then you can better gauge whether your content is helping you attract a new audience that you can do business with.

Call-to- action clickthrough rate

By monitoring your call-to-action clickthrough rate, or the rate at which people visit a page and then click on the page's CTA, you'll be able to understand how valuable that offer is to incoming traffic. It's also important to note that sometimes, a CTA's performance can be optimised simply by updating the CTA itself.

So i's wise to test CTA variations like colour, text, and position before you decide to change your entire content strategy.

Traffic driving keywords

Another way to evaluate if your content creation is impacting your business is by tracking how well relevant keywords related to your business are performing in search. We don't necessarily care about rank. This metric evaluates keyword performance based on the traffic that's coming to your content via those keywords.

Now what should you do with this information? 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. Create similar and even stronger content to help your goals. 

Marketing qualified leads

A marketing qualified lead is a lead that is ready to be rotated to Sales. There could be many ways to determine which leads are MQLs. Your company might decide a lead is marketing qualified after it takes a certain combination of actions -- like 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.

The purpose is to know what leads are the most sales-ready so you are passing on the hottest ones to your sales team. Now let's measure them. 

Total MQLs per month

How many of these MQLs are you generating every month? This is a good metric to know if you're helping your leads get to the "marketing qualified" stage via nurturing and more sales-driven content. You could also look at this metric more closely by evaluating average MQLs per business day.

MQLs per channel

Is a particular channel a strong source of MQLs for your business? How many MQLs do you get from your blog versus email marketing? Maybe you'll learn that one channel is a better source for generating newer leads who are still getting to know your business, but another is great for nurturing to the MQL stage. This metric would help you determine that.

Percentage of leads that are MQLs

Are more leads being nurtured into MQLs over time? Or is your business struggling to nurture your leads into 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. This is another great metric to track month over month. Ideally, the MQL percentage would grow over time while overall lead volume is increasing.

MQL conversion rate per offer

This metric is your tool to measure both MQL conversion and content effectiveness. Ideally, after someone converts on an offer's landing page, you'd then guide that person through the steps that would (hopefully) turn them into an MQL. So in the event that anyone who requests, say, a free demo is an MQL for your business, you'd want to guide your new lead to a form that lets them request a free demo.

The "MQL conversion rate per offer" metric tells you at what rate a person becomes an MQL, per offer. So if 20% of leads became an MQL after attending your webinar, but 10% of leads became an MQL after downloading your ebook, you would say the webinar has a higher MQL conversion rate. How is this helpful? Over time, you can learn what content is the best tee-up for a strong MQL opportunity. 

I’m sure there are other metrics that you might be tracking other than the ones here, so feel free to share what metrics you measure and use those where you can make the smartest decisions possible for your business. 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.

DOWNLOAD 6 MARKETING METRICS >

 

Vermilion Pinstripes Sales Marketing Communications is based in Port Macquarie, Australia and Singapore.

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