Measuring the success of your marketing campaigns depends on your business goals and the type of campaign you’re running. Sales and marketing work for the same company and therefore need to have the same goal: generating revenue. Generating more revenue begins with creating more quality engagement within your target accounts.
Your marketing team is focused on driving awareness, influence, and engagement from within your target accounts. This engagement is driven through strategic marketing campaigns and activities aimed at individual contacts in those accounts. To create this engagement, you must know what’s working. Are you seeing your accounts move to the next stage in the buyer journey? Is your marketing creating velocity and putting new opportunities in pipeline?
Before you can tackle the topics in this chapter, you need to set up a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Your CRM serves as a centralized place to store and manage all your customers’ contact information. All your data should be stored here instead of spreadsheets, as this can cause data silos.
Setting Key Performance Indicators
To measure your goals. It’s important to have key performance indicators (KPIs). The KPIs let you know whether you’re on track to meet your goals and whether you’re sales and marketing team is focused on the things they need to do to grow more revenue.
The most important KPI is the movement of your target accounts through the buyer journey. This is measured by using data in your CRM. Your sales and marketing teams need to define what the next meaningful stage or status that these accounts go to, with the ultimate goal of making these accounts your customers. Here is an example of the stages through with your accounts and the associated KPIs might progress.
Attributing metrics at the account level
Account-level attribution means you can see the activity at each of the accounts you’re targeting. You must know which content and marketing activities are creating velocity and advancing accounts to the next stage of the buyer’s journey
Comparing cost per click
Every marketing team has a budget. The budget is set by the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of your company. The CFO wants to see a return on investment from the amount of money the company has invested in marketing initiatives. One of the big questions B2B marketers always get is “How many leads did you generate this quarter?” But that’s a vanity metric, because the number of leads generated doesn’t correlate to the amount of new revenue the company brought in.
Your CFO should be delighted that you’re going to cut costs by taking an accountbased approach. An B2B approach to your digital campaigns means rethinking your metrics.
Showing impressions
Dynamic CPM is another option that is far less expensive for targeting at the account level. The dynamic CPM is based on the value of each impression. Using your account-based marketing platform, you can bid for a flat CPM at the beginning of a campaign. This dynamic CPM is based on impressions (not clicks) for the individual contacts you want to target in the account.
Last word
Engaging accounts continues after you have landed accounts as your new customers. Marketing must continue to nurture them and develop them into customer advocates. Advocate marketing helps you to retain your existing customers. By developing your customers into advocates, they become “champion” users of your business. Customer advocates also help you create awareness in more new accounts through word-of-mouth referrals.
