This guest post on the 60 Second Marketer blog was submitted by Kristin Hambelton, senior director of marketing at Neolane, Inc.
“My company has long sales cycles and uses multiple marketing touches, so we find it hard to measure marketing program ROI. What are some interim things we can measure to prove marketing’s worth and impact?â€
With C-level pressure on marketing ROI and a real business need to understand the impact of BtoB campaigns on a company’s bottom line, marketers are often put on the defensive. The reality is, measurement comes down to more than just an exercise in defending budgets. Marketers actually do want to measure the impact of their efforts, but from a process and technology standpoint, it’s historically been too time and labor-intensive. Marketers know they are running good campaigns — but they just can’t prove it. This can be attributed to the mounds of data they have to sift through, multiple systems that need to be queried, and campaign timelines that outrun budget and sales cycles; all of these factors impact the ability to link marketing campaigns to pipeline conversions.
This article will provide BtoB marketers with suggestions on how to measure campaign effectiveness and efficiency in the early stages of execution without having to wait for the campaign to end in order to arrive at revenue-per-program calculations. Being able to generate credible cost-per-qualified lead and cost-per-opportunity reports that are combined with some astute observations of their own (that’s where the “art†of measurement comes in), marketers can satiate the CFO’s need to understand “what has your campaign done for us lately?â€
Here are three steps to avoid landing in the hot seat.
•   Decide how you will rank qualified leads: Since relying on the number of leads alone is not enough, before you start any campaign, work with your sales team to agree on how to define qualified leads. Qualified leads are a quality measurement for your campaigns that can be used early on, in conjunction with your quantity metric (number of leads). These two metrics together help you to start to project the impact that the marketing campaign(s) will have on company revenue.
Determining criteria for lead qualification helps your organization better understand which leads should move through the qualification process (and eventually into the sales pipeline), helping to determine early cost-per-qualified lead calculations. For example, once sales reviews raw leads and disqualifies those inquiries as competitors or other irrelevant lead types, the team can start at Level 1 – leads that meet certain baseline criteria such as a minimal budget and an interest in learning more. Level 2 could be conducting an introductory product demo, and Level 3 could be those that demonstrate an interest in an in-depth needs assessment.
•   Keep it simple: Remember, you don’t have to boil the ocean here. With so many channels – email, print, websites and more – tracking conversions by touchpoint can be overwhelming, especially for campaigns that can run several months. So, pick a few metrics that you can easily manage throughout the campaign to establish benchmarks. Then use those benchmarks to track how prospects move through to the pipeline. Suggestions can include email open rate, webs page views, repeat web visits and collateral downloads. Ultimately, conversions to the pipeline will give you a good sense for how well the campaign performed.
•   Fine tune along the way: As you track that predetermined set of metrics, if something doesn’t look right, address it ASAP. Nothing could be worse for job security than getting 8,000 leads, then six months later realizing that none of them made it to the pipeline. For example, if you are seeing a high number of click-throughs on an email campaign but no conversions, maybe your landing page isn’t set up correctly to pass the information to your sales force automation or CRM system. Or if you see a high number of incoming leads but few are getting into the pipeline, look at a sample of those leads at the individual level to see if there is commonality. Maybe they were the wrong title, or they were all outside of your country of business, or the company size was too small. By taking a look at just a handful of leads early on, you might be able to correct the problem and re-steer the course of not only this campaign, but also future campaigns.
With CFOs clamoring for a scientific approach to marketing ROI, and in the absence of having a tool that will do it all automatically, marketers can use these easy-to-implement techniques to quantify early campaign benchmarks and better track how leads progress through key stages – raw leads, qualified leads, pipeline and customer. By defining what lead characteristics can be easily tracked and managed, marketers have the opportunity to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their efforts early on, resulting in better quality leads and validation of their targeting approaches and lead sources.
Kristin Hambelton is senior director of marketing at Neolane, Inc., an enterprise marketing software provider. Hambelton is responsible for all operational aspects of the company’s marketing strategies. She has 18 years of marketing experience with high technology products and services companies including Digital Equipment, Kronos and IDC.
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