The Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics: Key Take-Aways

I recently got my hands on Marketo’s latest white paper, titled: The Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics.

Here are some of the gems I found in the 70-page paper and which I cover in the video above.

1. Define targets for each of your marketing campaigns as you plan them. Consider setting a ‘best possible outcome’, ‘worst case scenario’ and ‘most likely outcome’. Express these targets in terms of number of leads, amount of incremental revenue to be generated, or in terms of anticipated ROI.
2. Keep 10% of your marketing budget for ‘Marketing R&D’. Experimentation can lead to new best practices. Acknowledge that you are experimenting with some of your programs and detach those from revenue targets.
3. Don’t Measure Just for the Sake of Measurement. Before you invest time and resources in measuring a data set, you should know what you would do if the answer turned out to be X or Y.
4. Define Distinct Stages in your Customer’s Buying Cycle. Especially in B2B, with longer sales cycles, you need to acknowledge the fact that there are several stages in the buying cycle. Marketing’s work will not only generate leads, but also help move leads forward through these stages. This requires fixed definitions – understood across the marketing and sales organization – based on business rules.



5. Measure Flow, Balance, Conversion and Velocity of Leads. Once you have lead stages defined, the following metrics will be most important: Flow (# of people entering the stage), Balance (current inventory in that stage), Conversion (% of names, on average, that make it from the previous stage) and Velocity (time it takes, on average, to complete the stage).
6. Aim to knowing the answers to these crucial questions: What would be the expected ROI if your marketing budget increased by 10%. What would be the impact on sales closed? Alternately, what would be the impact on sales if the budget was decreased 10%? Questions like these test marketing’s maturity.

This paper is a must-read for marketing executives that are aiming to improve their departments’ efficiency and accountability.