How do B2B marketers tackle the question of marketing campaign value? Do we make strategic decisions based on real, actionable data?
With the firehose of data that is available to marketers now-a-days, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find the information that truly matters. And this is especially true for B2B with their typically complex, drawn out sales cycles.
In our latest episode of #B2Bchat, we dug into questions surrounding metrics. Here is a summary of the questions and comments, compiled:
Q. Which components of your digital marketing campaigns are delivering the best results? E.g. Search, Email, Display Advertising, Social Media?
Search (PPC and SEO). These are most effective when in used in conjunction with great landing pages.
Email
Mediums are secondary, success depends on the contextual relevance of the message.
Q. Why do campaign budgets get cut? Poor performance or lack of tracking?
Both: poor performance due to lack of clear objectives. and lack of tracking because no analysis properly done during campaign
Most of the time the problem is poorly defined goals and metrics
Budget cuts can also come due to lack of well defined baselines.
Lack of commitment to the campaign. Unreasonable expectations of sales impact.
On social media budgets: Shyness with social media due to it being unproven, thus high risk. Execs are holding back.
Measuring metrics a science, but knowing how to explain them can sometimes be an art. e.g. convincing your boss to keep budget.
Q. What is your biggest pet peeve when it comes to marketing reports?
First Dashboard reports need to be customized (management level) and meet biz needs…focus on actionable metrics!
A lot of people over-do it with reports. Too much data and too complex = danger of focusing on wrong metrics.
Q. How do you assess the value of a digital marketing campaign? Where do you start?
Have specific goals and objectives
Start with the dollar value of new sales and work backwards
Measure the number of sales-ready leads and wins
A good marketing dashboard is fundamental
Q. What metrics (Key Performance Indicators) do you track? Which matter most?
“Actionable” metrics, data which will allow us to make better decisions and take action
PDF downloads, newsletter subscriptions, sales leads, e-commerce transactions
Word art of transcript from April 29 #B2Bchat – Measuring the Value of Digital Marketing (courtesy of Wordle.net)
About the B2Bblogger: Andrew Spoeth is an independent marketing consultant who specializes in B2B demand generation. He most recently worked as the marketing director at Enquiro, one of North America’s leading search marketing agencies. You’ll also find Andrew speaking at industry events, co-moderating the weekly #B2Bchat series on Twitter, and blogging at MarketingFinger.com. You can follow him on Twitter at@andrewspoeth.
Attribution… measurement… return on advertising spend… cost per lead… These are buzz words that marketing executives love. And they are ones that also keep them up at night.
How do B2B marketers tackle the question of marketing campaign value? Do we make strategic decisions based on real, actionable data? With the firehose of data that is available to marketers now-a-days, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find the information that truly matters. And this is especially true for B2B with their typically complex, drawn out sales cycles.
In our next #B2Bchat session, we’ll open up the discussion on measuring the value of digital marketing. Here are some of the questions we’ve collected:
How do you assess the value of a digital marketing campaign? Where do you start?
What metrics (Key Performance Indicators) do you track? Which matter most?
Which components of your digital marketing campaigns are delivering the best results? E.g. Search, Email, Display Advertising, Social Media?
Which attribution model(s) do you use? First click? Last click? Blended model?
Who is responsible for collecting the data? Agency? Internal staff?
Why do campaign budgets get cut? Poor performance or lack of tracking?
Do you use a reporting dashboard? If so, how often do you revisit the dashboard?
What is your biggest pet peeve when it comes to marketing reports?
How has your company’s internal reporting evolved over the past two years?
Join us for this week’s #B2Bchat on Measuring the Value of Digital Marketing, Thursday, April 29 at 8pm Eastern (5pm Pacific). Follow @B2B_chat for updates.
About the B2Bblogger: Andrew Spoeth is an independent marketing consultant who specializes in B2B demand generation. He most recently worked as the marketing director at Enquiro, one of North America’s leading search marketing agencies. You’ll also find Andrew speaking at industry events, co-moderating the weekly #B2Bchat series on Twitter, and blogging at MarketingFinger.com. You can follow him on Twitter at@andrewspoeth.
A B2B social media strategy should include a conversation calendar. Your conversation calendar lists the media and frequency of all your social media activity. The conversation calendar acts as a dashboard of your owned and earned media and the number of posts anticipated per month.
Image courtesy iStockphoto
The conversation calendar is especially helpful if you’re a B2B marcom manager who’s enlisting the help of other colleagues in the social media program. It makes it easier to assign social media to various colleagues and lets your colleagues know how much time to budget for their social media activity.
Your conversation calendar also gives you an idea of the volume of content required to support your social media program. It’s a lot more than you think! But before you become overwhelmed, read Ardath Albee’s advice on b2b content development. Ardath explains how to leverage your existing B2B content to keep up with the demands of a social media program.
Aside from its use as a planning tool, your conversation calendar can also be used with your social media monitoring program. Compare your activity on the conversation calendar to the number of mentions in the social sphere to get an idea of the impact of your social media program. You may find that you need to adjust the frequency of activity or completely drop under-performing activity from your program.
A simple spreadsheet is all you need to create your B2B conversation calendar.
Do you have another way to manage your social media conversations? Tell us here…
About The BtoBblogger: Joan is a B2B marcom consultant and copywriter with more than 15 years experience helping high tech and industrial companies generate leads and sales through integrated marketing communications including SEO copywriting, social media and website content. She can be reached at www.jdamico.net or through her blog www.integratedmarcom.blogspot.com.
Phil Lauterjung, President of Integrated LeadGen Results, continues his guest post series.
OK, are you ready for smart way #2? It’s really quite innovative and very high tech – over used word alert, is anything really high tech anymore? Can we still use that term? Well that might just be the point of our topic. It’s fallen out of favor too.
Trade Shows.
Wait, wait don’t start running for the exits just yet. For many years trade shows have been considered a necessary evil of many marketing budgets. And, often for good reason. You went because your competitors were there and it might look bad if you weren’t there. Your marketing department always wanted a big budget so they could make the big splash and razzle-dazzle everyone. Your sales people often spent more time talking to industry network contacts rather than potential customers.
And the ROI. What ROI you ask? Exactly. I once worked for an Executive VP who thought the best measurement was the cost-per-lead from the show. You know that drill – take the total cost for the show and divided by the number of ‘leads’ and the lower cost-per-lead the better. The only trouble with that method is that all it would take to drive the cost-per-lead down was to scan as many badges as possible (who cares if it’s a real lead?) or hold a bogus contest and get a bunch of business cards in a fish bowl and call them ‘leads’. That’s definitely not a recommended way to measure ROI.
Do you still plan on doing trade shows? Still wrestling with the budget and how to measure results? Here are a few suggestions for this coming year.
1. Reduce the size of your booth. I know, I know; marketing might not like that, but consider a few facts about crowd flow. People usually enter the hall and either turn right or left and head for the far wall in their chosen direction. Get a smaller booth at the front of that far wall aisle, and have marketing put their best effort into that location. You’ll be saving money on the smaller booth, but you’ll pick up the first wave (and less tired wave) of traffic.
2. Carefully evaluate which shows you’re in. Recognize that many shows just don’t get the kind of traffic and the level of quality attendees that they once did. Be brutally honest in your evaluation and only display at those shows you know will be attended by your targeted market segments. Talk to your good customers and ask them which shows they still find useful.
3. Conduct pre-show training with your staff. Outline your objectives for the show and emphasize the importance of real leads – potential buyers. Consider offering incentives for leads that come closest to your buyer persona/profile. You will go home with fewer, but better qualified leads.
4. Prepare a post-show marketing campaign. With the money you save on the trade show cost have a marketing campaign in place and ready to go as soon as your return. It will be very important to launch that right away. I can’t tell you how many times I have received letters thanking me for stopping by a booth at a show I attended 2 – 3 months earlier. I have trouble remembering where I was last week, much less a couple of months ago! What a waste of time and effort. They might as well not follow up at all. Follow up soon and measure your response from the follow up.
5. Measure your ROI. No, not the cost-per-lead method mentioned earlier. Track each and every lead, and nurture those that aren’t ready to see a salesperson. Keep tracking them – studies have shown that 67% of leads classified as ‘bad leads’ end up buying within 18 – 24 months. Measure the cumulative sales revenue from those show leads until the number left to follow up dwindle to a pre-agreed number. That will give you your true ROI.
Trade shows may not be the sexiest marketing tactic in your tool box, but it just might be more effective than you think. Let me know your thoughts and experiences in the comment section below.
About the BtoBblogger: Phil Lauterjung is President of Integrated LeadGen Results, providing strategies and tactics for small and medium size businesses to get found, get leads, and get sales. With over 20 years (12 in senior management) of sales & marketing experience helping both small companies and Fortune 500 increase sales, Phil is adept at implementing social media tools with a Certified Inbound Marketing Professional designation, and a member of the Sales Lead Management Association. Phil’s is a regular contributor to BtoBbloggers.com and also can be found on his blog; Conversations Re: Sales | Marketing | Social Media | Etc.
Conversations Re: Sales | Marketing | Social Media | Etc.
Hi, I'm @jeremyvictor, the founder of Make Good Media and Editor In Chief of B2Bbloggers.com.
B2Bbloggers.com is an online magazine for B2B marketers. Our goal is to engage, educate, and make it easier for B2B marketers to find the information they care about to do their jobs successfully.
As a publisher and new media marketing agency, Make Good Media advises businesses how to integrate social media and content marketing with traditional marketing tactics to attract, nurture, engage, and convert customers in the brave new B2B world of the social, mobile web. How can we help you Make Good Media?
How do B2B marketers tackle the question of marketing campaign value? Do we make strategic decisions based on real, actionable data?
Word art of transcript from April 29 #B2Bchat – Measuring the Value of Digital Marketing (courtesy of Wordle.net)
About the B2Bblogger: Andrew Spoeth is an independent marketing consultant who specializes in B2B demand generation. He most recently worked as the marketing director at Enquiro, one of North America’s leading search marketing agencies. You’ll also find Andrew speaking at industry events, co-moderating the weekly #B2Bchat series on Twitter, and blogging at MarketingFinger.com. You can follow him on Twitter at@andrewspoeth.
About The BtoBblogger: Joan is a B2B marcom consultant and copywriter with more than 15 years experience helping high tech and industrial companies generate leads and sales through integrated marketing communications including SEO copywriting, social media and website content. She can be reached at 
About the BtoBblogger: Phil Lauterjung is President of Integrated LeadGen Results, providing strategies and tactics for small and medium size businesses to get found, get leads, and get sales. With over 20 years (12 in senior management) of sales & marketing experience helping both small companies and Fortune 500 increase sales, Phil is adept at implementing social media tools with a Certified Inbound Marketing Professional designation, and a member of the Sales Lead Management Association. Phil’s is a regular contributor to BtoBbloggers.com and also can be found on his blog; 
