How to measure success in B2B marketing

The goal of B2B marketing is growth. Growth is something that can be measured, but is it specific enough? What is growing exactly? Where did your increased clientele come from? How much did it cost to win that client? How well are your marketing measures performing towards your company’s goals?

Measuring success in B2B marketing is not looking at the final figure. Metrics tell you so much more than only how successful you are under the line. They help you answer several questions, such as:

• Which of your marketing initiatives work best?
• How are your sales and marketing teams performing?
• What makes your target audience tick?
• Where are your incomes generated?
• Where can you still improve? 

Metrics are also a wonderful tool in times when you are wondering what you are doing it all for. Look at a graph that shows you your conversion rate from the moment you started, and you see the proof of your efforts paying off.

At SUM digital, we love metrics, and we use them from the very start. We have several reasons for that. One is that they allow us to act fast and perfect our strategies. Another is that we can show our clients at any moment in time how every step we take contributes to their growth.

Without metrics in B2B marketing, there is only blind belief, and that is not good enough. Do you want to start measuring the success of growth efforts? We share the metrics that matter.

Which metrics matter to you?

Of course, the B2B marketing metrics that you measure should be aligned with what you want to achieve. If you are focusing on attracting traffic via advertising, then you might be less interested in the organic traffic to your website’s pages. We make a custom growth marketing plan for all our customers, in which we also decide which metrics are most relevant for them. Search online for B2B marketing KPIs and you will see articles like: ‘The 25 metrics to measure’ or ‘18 B2B content marketing metrics’. Do you really need all that information?

The danger lies in overanalyzing and getting upset about metrics that actually do not matter too much to your growth journey. It is key to measure what matters and use that to your advantage. We share some of our favorite metrics that help us measure growth.

Metrics for measuring website traffic

Even though it is great that the traffic to your website increases, it is not so great if a large part of them does not belong to your target group. Sometimes it is better to decrease the number of visitors, when a higher percentage of them is actually interested in what you have to offer. Just measuring traffic is simply not good enough.

There are several useful B2B marketing metrics that tell you a lot about the leads you are generating and their intentions on your pages.

• Bounce rate: how many people try to reach your page, but bounce because it took too long to load, the page is not mobile-friendly or a different reason?
• Page views: how many visitors look through several pages on your website? Which pages do they look at, and how much time do they spend on these pages?
• Traffic source: how did your visitors find you? Did they come from a post on your LinkedIn page, are they organic traffic from Google, or did they click on your advert?
• Unique visitors: which percentage of your total amount of traffic are fist-time visitors?
• Average session duration: how much time do your visitors spend on your website’s pages on average? 

Conversion metrics

It is good to know where your traffic comes from, which pages they visit, and how much time they spend on your pages on average. It helps you determine if your B2B marketing campaigns are working, which pages are most successful, and if your content is engaging enough. Once you have their interest, what you really want your traffic to do is convert. 

A conversion is an action. The most common conversion is the sale of a product, but it can be much more than that. Signing up for a newsletter is a conversion, scheduling a call is a conversion, and so is downloading an e-book. Every conversion is a small B2B marketing win, and these metrics matter. 

• Conversion rate: what percentage of all your visitors performed the intended action?
• Lead-to-customer ratio: how many leads do you need to attract on average to earn one customer?
• Cost per conversion: how much does it cost your company on average to get one lead to convert? This can be the conversion from visitor to SQL or from SQL to customer, for example, depending on the KPI you are measuring.
• Conversions per source: which source brings you the highest number of conversions? 

Metrics about your leads

Leads are people who have come into contact with your brand and who have entered your sales marketing funnel. It is someone who saw your advert, someone who signed up for your newsletter and someone who placed items in their cart but never checked out. B2B marketing is about guiding your leads towards conversion with the goal to make them loyal. Metrics about your leads are therefore very interesting and insightful.

• Number of MQLs: Marketing Qualified Leads are potential customers that have shown an interest in your product or service.
• Number of SQLs: Sales Qualified Leads are leads that are ready to be contacted by your sales department, as they are very likely to become customers.
• Lead score: do your leads match your Ideal Customer Persona and how engaged are they over time?
• Cost per lead: naturally, you also want to know how much every lead costs you to compare that to how much profit every lead generates.
• Cost per Opportunity: How much does it cost you to get an opportunity in your sales pipeline. 

Other, more specific metrics

The metrics discussed so far are interesting for many B2B companies who are marketing for growth. There are more specific metrics that apply to the different methods you decided to use. This is why we make a selection of valuable metrics for our clients at SUM digital, because every one of our B2B growth marketing plans is different. Here are a few examples:

• Advertising metrics: cost per click, cost per action, number of (quality) leads generated by the advertising campaign and conversion rate of those leads.
• Email marketing metrics: open rate, click-through rate and unsubscribe rate.
• SEO metrics: search rankings, percentage of organic traffic, domain authority, keyword rankings and search visibility.
• Financial metrics: return on marketing investment, return on ad spend, monthly recurring revenue and monthly growth in profits.

Find the trees in the metrics forest

As you have seen, there are many metrics to consider. Hiring a growth marketing team like SUM Digital will help you single out the metrics that matter to you. With tools like HubSpot and Google Analytics, we are able to show you exactly those results that you are interested in. That way, you can see for yourself how we realize your growth, one metric at a time.
What do we do with all these results? We use them to analyze success, to define the target audience, to adjust or even cancel campaigns, to optimize growth, to monitor progress, and to make decisions. By doing this from the very start, we ultimately create a custom-made B2B marketing plan that will generate growth now and in the future.

B2B marketing success with SUM Digital

We are excited to hear about your story and are happy to show you what we can do for you. Schedule a free discovery call and let us show you the metrics that matter for growing your business. 

If you are not ready for a call, but would like to learn more about SUM Digital and what we do, download our Growth Playbook here.