Marketing VPs have a lot to worry about, often juggling multiple different balls that they have to keep up in the air. But what are they most concerned about? What are the key issues and pain points that keep them up at night? According to a recent survey of 1,000 US marketing professionals and executives, conducted by Adobe, what worries marketers the most is marketing metrics, or a lack thereof.
More specifically, three of the top issues that marketers agreed that they were most concerned about were; understanding whether their campaigns are working; proving the effectiveness of their campaigns; and demonstrating marketing return on investment (ROI). These three issues can be summed up in one, simple problem: not tracking the right marketing metrics.
Fortunately, the metrics and reports needed to address the three aforementioned concerns aren’t impossible to obtain – marketers merely need to know where to look. Here are the metrics and reports necessary to answer the questions weighing on the minds of marketers.
Understand Whether Campaigns are Working…Or Not
The first thing Marketing VPs need to do is to define what justifies if a campaign is working or not. While many marketers focus on generating leads, what really defines their success should not be leads, but bookings – after all, if all the leads in the world aren’t moving the needle on revenue, what’s the point? To this end, looking at marketing metrics that demonstrate Marketing Bookings by Campaign can help answer this question.
The marketing report in the example above separates each campaign and ranks them by total deal value booked per each campaign, as well as the total number of deals that originated from each specific campaign. For this marketing team, the “What’s New” fact sheet they produced and launched in preparation for a new product release was far and away their most effective campaign, producing not only more deals but much more valuable deals. Having this information should guide the tactics of the marketing team going forward, in terms of which campaigns to emphasize and focus on the most.
Proving the Effectiveness of their Campaigns
Oftentimes, the results of marketing’s efforts cannot be directly seen in revenue – after all, the sales team is responsible for closing opportunities. In that case, the effectiveness of the marketing team’s campaigns comes down to other marketing metrics – number of leads generated, and how many of these leads convert to opportunities.
Instead of just looking at a raw number (of total leads and opportunities), this report also includes a conversion rate. This tracks how effective leads from specific sources are in terms of converting to opportunities. In other words, this measures the quality of leads that originate from each lead sources, thereby grading the effectiveness of each lead source. In this example, the “5 Top Tips for using Google+” campaign might have generated the most total leads and opportunities, but is far less efficient at doing so than other lead sources. In this regard, the “Free Trial” blog post was far more efficient, converting leads into opportunities at a robust 29% clip. Perhaps this is the most effective of all the marketing campaigns, and should be focused on the most.
Demonstrating Marketing Return on Investment (ROI)
Marketing VPs should care a great deal about knowing the ROI of each of their campaigns and individual marketing efforts, in order to best allocate and spend their marketing budget. All it takes is a simple equation to figure out the ROI of each campaign: how much the campaign generated in terms of total deal value divided by how much the campaign cost to execute.
Look at this table example above. In terms of total deal value generated from each lead source, there’s no contest: the Inside Experts Conference was a massive boon. However, as any industry expert knows, conferences also cost a great deal, and this marketing team in particular spent a large sum in flying their team out to the conference, as well as the costs of being a sponsor at the conference. To that end, perhaps the ROI on other marketing campaigns will prove to be more worthwhile of the Marketing VP’s budget and time.
With these marketing metrics and reports under their belts, there’s no reason why Marketing VPs should be kept up at night. They can now definitively answer the aforementioned questions and really gain a full picture of their overall marketing efforts.
As a marketer, what are you most concerned about, and how do you resolve these concerns?
