Here are 6 hot trends to consider when planning your analytics strategy:

1. Measuring outcomes – For B2B marketers, it’s all about measuring outcome metrics. Consider some of these business results to measure:

• What and how many leads were created?
• What and how many sales were converted from qualified leads?
• How are you engaging with your customers and what leads are coming from that?
• Where are prospects coming from? Social media? Organic search results? Which are converting highest?

2. Integrated search and social metrics – There’s no denying that SEO and social media go together. The benefits of leveraging content distribution and linking in the social web combined with cross linking and keyword use in your content provides both search engine and social web benefits.With the power of search optimized content and social web strategies, you should be sure you are tracking your efforts. A few tools to help with this include:

• Google Analytics – A free, but extremely powerful analytics package from Google – this gives you the power to track all your site stats and referral sources, including from social sites.  Be sure and tag campaigns appropriately so you’re able to capture all traffic.
• Bit.ly – If you are using a URL shortening service to push out links to your content, bit.ly is one of the most widely used. This and most other services include analytics to track how many and who are clicking on your links.

3. Platform-specific analytics – You are engaging prospects on different social platforms inside and outside of your business, but do you know what’s happening? Are you measuring each tweet, blog post or other interaction? When you need to measure your platform specific engagements, consider these tools:

• Facebook page insights – Facebook has a built-in analytics system for those that run Facebook pages for business. You are able to get different metrics such as page views, interactions, quality of posts and detailed insights into your fan base.
• HootSuite – This tool is an integrated system that allows you interact through different social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and more. It also has powerful analytics as well.
• Tweetreach – A simple system that gives you a detailed report of your search term on Twitter. With this tool, you are able to discover your reach over Twitter.
• PostRank – This service monitors and collects social interactions with online content in real-time across the web. This is a good one to checkout for a great way to monitor content published on your own blog.

4. Revenue cycle analytics – There is always the pressure to measure your marketing ROI and how marketing programs impact revenue. This data is always changing and to properly measure it, you should leverage revenue cycle analytics.A powerful revenue cycle analytics system will work to touch each of the areas below:

• Revenue cycle modeling
• Gather information into one area
• Planning and forecasting
• Executive level insights
• Powerful analytics

5. More interested individuals across the organization – Marketing analytics isn’t just for marketers and data crunchers. When you implement a complete marketing analytics solution, more individuals across the organization become involved. When you have detailed, actionable reports and easily accessible data, everyone around the organization takes more of an interest in making data-driven decisions that will elevate results.

6. Greater focus on taking action – Taking action is key in B2B business, but how do you know what to take action on? Most marketers know a focus on taking action is essential, and with proper B2B analytics, you have the information on what to focus business strategies and tactical plans on.

7. Create actionable goals that are realistic – Every B2B marketing forecast has goals and objectives, but how do you know if those goals are realistic?Utilizing B2B analysis, you are able to focus and predict realistic goals for your organization. Some possible goals may include the following:

• Improve engagement and conversion rates
• Increase organic search traffic to your site
• Decrease costs and improve efficiency through the lead management process

For more resources on B2B marketing analytics and how it will increase your marketing ROI, subscribe to the Modern B2B marketing Blog or follow @Marketo on Twitter.

Thus, if your business has determined that your target audience lives on Facebook, and if you’re ready to invest in building personal relationships, then it’s worth taking a look at the new capabilities for tracking activity on Facebook pages.

Measure Facebook Metrics Together with Your Other Analytics

Social media metrics that track in the same place as your other aggregate or lead generation analytics have been a long-time wish for me personally, so the news that Webtrends launched Facebook analytics as part of their On Demand offering seem like a step in the right direction. This is no longer a clever hack around Facebook platform limitations that someone figured out how to integrate with Google Analytics. Webtrends has a legit approach that meets Facebook guidelines.

First Solid Attempts Always Come with Caveats

Granted, the Webtrends Facebook analytics offering is limited by a few details for now. First, in the next couple of months, this feature will require a service engagement with Webtrends. Second, the Webtrends method will only allow you to track page activity within custom tabs. If you want to know more about the capabilities, I highly suggest attending one of Justin Kistner’s webinars on the topic. The good news is that the long-term plan is to have Facebook analytics as a “do-it-yourself” offering, so if you’re not in a terrible rush, this may happen by the summer.

A Final Word of Warning: Use the Momentum and Find the Right Solution for Your Organization!

If your business has decided to have a presence on Facebook, make sure that it is about building relationships and use the cultural momentum of social media and of specific platforms. If Facebook is for you and you have good employee advocates, plan your move and make your move, do not wait 2 years. To balance out that advice, I also highly suggest reading Steve Rubel’s thoughts on dropping .com URLs in favor of Facebook and other social media destinations. There is no solution that works for all businesses, so whichever direction your organization decides to take, make sure you do so with full/transparent intent, dedicated resources, and a way to measure your success.

Images courtesy Webtrends

About the B2Bblogger:

Let’s start with the definitions as it is important to put each of these terms into context:

Marketing automation tool – a marketing database (think Salesforce, but for marketing).  You place marketing leads here first until they are ready to be passed into your business CRM and to a sales representative.

With the help of compelling content delivered via email & your website, you can help educate prospects in this database about your solution as you progressively glean more information about who they are and what solution would benefit them the most.

In order to easily collect the activity information of your prospects at this phase, the automation tool also has a web tracking component that saves a person’s web activity from a particular campaign into a field in the marketing database.

Web analytics – a tool that tracks visitor activity at an aggregate level; also helps build traffic trending over time, etc. on your web properties. You typically get very high level data and no IP information with a service like Google Analytics, but you can drill down to the individual with services such as Webtrends and Omniture.

Filling the Marketing & Sales Funnel
Implementing a marketing automation tool helps ease some of the work hours a marketing department spends manually gathering information and setting up workflows. With that freed time, the team has more resources to dedicate to generating demand for the business.

Demand Generation activities – events, PR, contributed articles, speaking engagements, advertising, SEO, social media – will feed the marketing database with contacts that can be nurtured, qualified, and then passed to Sales based on rules that marketing & sales establish together.

Creating a Lean & Mean Demand Generation Machine
Peter Young from Webtrends (@webtrendspeter, LinkedIn profile) has a very neat metaphor for describing the difference between web analytics and marketing automation:

“Marketing automation is like looking through the windshield of your car. Analytics is like looking into the rear-view mirror – both are critical to a positive driving experience.”

Another useful way to think about the power of web analytics is in the context of the Sales & Marketing Funnel. Web analytics reports and dashboard help marketers optimize web properties in order to bring visitors into the Marketing & Sales Funnel. Path analysis, web behavior tracking, landing page optimization, etc. all fall into this part of the experience. When you make changes to your web properties you can also check against historical data and make decisions based on those baselines.

The key at this step is to fine-tune the web properties to drive conversions (in many cases, this would be obtaining vistors’ email address for future email marketing).

Down the Rabbit Hole: Passing from Top of Funnel into the Marketing & Sales Funnel
As soon as someone identifies themselves, they immediately get placed in the marketing database, where further web activity, qualification (lead scoring), segmentation, and education (lead nurturing) takes place. From this point on, you may want to segment out the web traffic of these warm prospects visiting your site and use content marketing to drive thought leadership and educational messages to them.

Beyond the Horizon: Messaging To Your Customer
The other, sometimes overlooked, aspect is that this marketing database of contacts will keep track of a prospect’s behavior on your web properties into their transition as a customer. Additional segmentation on your customer population can help drive customer retention and programs that target your base. You can use marketing automation to learn, indirectly or directly, more about your customers’ needs.

About the B2Bblogger: