Measurement is close to the heart of many marketers, and B2B marketing is no exception. We decided to take on the topic of metrics after it was recommended by several of our #B2Bchat community members.
Here is an edited recap, the highlights of our August 26, 2010 Metrics That Matter in B2B Twitter chat.
Q. What is the biggest challenge companies face when it comes to metrics and measurement?
- Not knowing what to measure
- Not using the information they gather / not taking action
- Understanding how using metrics for measurement, analysis and trending will positively impact the bottom line
- Data synchronization across channels
- Accepting results are rarely as expected. Creating a learning culture
- Tying marketing metrics and measurements to business results
- Establishing metrics in new areas such as social media
Q2. If you could only measure one thing in your marketing organization, what would it be?
- Cost per lead/ cost per customer acquisition
- Lifetime customer value
- Customer loyalty / customer satisfaction
- Sales from leads generated by marketing
- $ spent on each marketing activity – mapped to sales revenue
- Return on investment
Q3. How do you best communicate metrics internally? Which medium do you use? How often?
- Keep things visual. Use graphs and charts.
- Simple is often more effective, e.g. use a white board (if reporting locally)
- Taping a graph to the office door (great conversation starter)
- Pay attention not only to the mechanics of reporting metrics, but also the context. Is a number good or bad? Should I care?
- Internal wiki
- Online dashboard, pdf, Excel, and PowerPoint versions
- Show metrics compared to benchmarks and targets to put the number in context
- Supported by anecdotal evidence and stories of customer wins. – Speak to sales and customers… learn how they found you
- Be brutally honest; never quit learning
- Some reporting tools that were mentioned include ViralHeat, JamiQ, and Highrise.
Q4. Which marketing metrics does your CEO get to see? Note: This question received a variety of answers, pointing to the fact that there are likely great differences depending on the company’s culture, and company size.
- All of them. The CEO reads, ask questions, makes comments.
- As few as possible. Keep their eyes on big picture; let units worry about finer details.
- Show high level metrics and results that matter to senior exec. Always match against business objectives to show progress.
- CEO will look for qualitative data. Is this number good or bad?
- The best CEOs are interested in all the marketing metrics. There is always something to learn from.
- Typically summaries of activities with results (clickthroughs, replies); more detail when new campaign or new medium is launched.
- CEO doesn’t need granularity of Marketing KPIs, but needs those directly tied to forecast.
- It will really will matter on the CEO’s background. A former CMO will probably want everything.
- Any report to the CEO should be more than metrics. What do the #’s reveal? What’s the next move?
Q5. Have you recently discarded a metric because it was deemed low priority? What was it?
- There are many useless things people still measure – e.g. Page Hit, Impressions (without influence) .
- Number of followers
- Competitor mentions vs corporate mentions, the reason being, too many variables at play
- Don’t give as much importance to overall traffic – we all know how to get tons of hits with no results.
- A tactic for determining value of metrics to the organization: pull the report but don’t deliver it. See if anyone screams.
Q6. Social Media and B2B. What are the metrics you need to watch?
- In general, social media is hard to measure.
- Most important are blog stats; Twitter followers, etc. are gravy.
- Most important measurement of social media for B2B marketers is conversion rate of visitors drawn to site.
- Marketers need to watch rates of follower add-ons over time, drop offs and tie to tweets and other activities of their firm.
- Distill conversations/comments into categories based on objectives with -/+ ratings. Also report on influencers vs masses.
- Marketers also need to measure “rate” and “direction” of viral activity and look for patterns
- Social Media channel to email list conversion
- B2B marketing deptartments often measure reach, sentiment and share of voice (and convo)
- Track stickiness to other channels to get big picture: events, webinars, mailing lists and regional call centers.
The final word of today’s chat goes to Katie Morse, Community Manager at Radian6. We tackled several specific questions in our session, but this tweet could be applied as an answer to most of them…however you share your metrics, they have to tell a story. #’s for the sake of #’s aren’t usually helpful.
Click here to view the complete, unedited transcript from this episode of #B2Bchat on wthashtag.com.
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.
