The best thing about demand generation is that it’s measurable marketing, but so many companies don’t track their efforts. Is yours one of them? Here are my thoughts on how companies are failing at measuring their efforts – and some easy solutions:
- They don’t set objectives. If you don’t know what you want, you can’t track success. So, set objectives or you’re more likely to be focused on being busy hacking out campaigns without strategy. Which means creating ineffective campaigns and frustrating your buyers.
- They’re intimidated on setting up reports. With objectives, reports are easy – you just track to see if you meet them. Whiteboard the perfect report (without actual data) and then socialize it with the stakeholders who will be reviewing results. Once it’s approved, program it. Unless your goals are incredibly unique, your CRM or marketing automation probably already has a standard report built in that measures the most important metrics. Don’t allocate resources to manually build or pretty up reports because someone likes vertical formats or pink headings. Spend that time creating new effective programs. Plus, manually moving figures is just asking for errors.
- They don’t test. Test everything and test on as many programs as you can. That way you’re always reaching for new success. Test things that will have a bit impact and make sure you have enough volume in your test cells. See my blog here for more specifics.
- They’re afraid of failure. In demand generation, if you don’t have regular failures, you’re not taking enough risk! Crazy ideas can work and make a lot of money. Make a commitment to trying out of the box ideas and see what you get. Doing that separates average demand generation marketers from the ones that really shine.
- They don’t take time to review results. Review results right after a campaign launches to see if there were deliverability or functionality problems and then at least once a week after that. You’ll never learn if you don’t.
- They don’t socialize results. Write an executive summary and share it with team members, sales and management with a link to full reporting to keep them in the loop and to welcome feedback.
- So, what do you track? Things that can be accurately measured:
- Anything that tracks how you spend and make money – cost per lead, cost per sale, cost per anything. And growth metrics like average sale, deal size or revenue.
- Sources of things –like program, channel, event or offer. Anything that helps you see where to invest time and budget and where to cut.
- Sales metrics that track leads down the funnel to conversion like conversions, raw leads, MQLs, Opps, days to close and closed/won.
- Customer metrics that show loyalty and engagement like lifetime value, retention and total purchases.
- Email metrics are support metrics – you want to make sure you have high deliverability and low unsubscribes and know what parts of your email gets clicked. But ultimately, the only successful programs are those with conversions to your offer.
Need some help? Tips on how to make more money with less effort? Let me know if I can help!