Marketing VPs used to focus on generating leads. Then, as the industry shifted and ‘lead’ became a dirty four-letter word to CEOs, marketers shifted their focus to converting opportunities and moving the needle on the company’s revenue. With this increased emphasis on opportunities created – over leads generated – Marketing VPs are being increasingly pressured to come up with marketing metrics and reports that better demonstrate the impact of their campaigns and efforts, and how effective these are in comparison with each other.

Enter: the Marketing Campaign Touches report.

What is a marketing campaign touch?

A marketing campaign touch is any method or modes of contact between your company and the prospective customer. It is an action a campaign takes on a lead. A touch can be a an email, an advertisement, an online ad banner, a blog post, a downloaded eBook and anything else that involves a business marketing message. Campaigns can touch many leads, and leads can be touched by many campaigns.

Unfortunately, with competition and the increased level of noise that prospective customers are faced with, marketing campaigns typically require more than one touch to convert a prospect to a lead, and eventually to an opportunity and a deal.

But just how many marketing campaign touches do we need?

Well, that depends entirely on your company, your industry and the types of customers you serve. For the purposes of our discussion, let’s consider B2B companies. The types of customers that these companies typically work with require lead nurturing campaigns. They are not likely to convert with only one touch – rather, they need to be convinced:

• of their need for your products and services

• to trust in your offerings over that of your competitors

• that you truly are a good fit for them, and vice versa

With the knowledge that you typically need multiple campaign touches to convert a lead to an opportunity, it is then incumbent upon the Marketing VP to figure out exactly how many campaign touches are required to convert their leads.

Where is your sweet spot?

Marketing VPs want to find the sweet spot of campaign touches – the right number of campaign touches, where leads are converted to opportunities and deals at the optimal rate.

Look at this example of a marketing campaign touches report above. After just one campaign touch, this marketing department is able to generate a great number of opportunities and a reasonable number of deals. Their lead-to-opportunity conversion rate after one campaign touch is 3.5%, while the lead-to-deal conversion rate is at a miniscule 0.5%.

But what happens if leads are touched by the team’s various marketing campaigns 4 times? While there is a smaller raw number of total opportunities converted after this many campaign touches:

• the lead-to-opportunity conversion rate is a healthy 11%.

• the opportunity-to-deal conversion rate jumps to 2.4%.

When considering conversion rates, these are pretty substantial increases that could mean a significant difference in Marketing’s ROI and the company’s bottom line.

This indicates to the Marketing VP that their product or services are reasonably complex, and leads need to be slowly nurtured before being converted into a meaningful opportunity that is likely to close as a won deal. Marketing should then craft drip campaigns that touch leads multiple times over the course of their interaction, before attempting to convert them to opportunities.

The crux of these types of marketing metrics and reports is for Marketing VPs to take a long, hard look in the mirror and figure out what works and what doesn’t, in terms of their marketing efforts. By diving into analyses such as how many marketing campaign touches are optimal for converting leads into opportunities and deals, Marketing VPs can hone their craft to become more effective and more efficient.