How to make your marketing metrics count

There was a great article in Advertising Age recently about the conundrum many marketers face reporting metrics to the business.

Marketers have all kinds of metrics with which they can toy around: unique website visitors, page views, video views, impressions, click-through rates, retweets, Facebook fans, blog comments, leads collected, and more. Sales people, on the other hand, are measured by the number of sales they make and their monetary value. The reason why there’s been an inherent tension between sales and marketing in many organizations is because they aren’t generally measured the same way.

This is how a conversation could play out:

“We just finished our latest lead generation campaign for our new product. Great news, we exceeded our goal for leads collected by 50%!” exclaimed Kyle, product marketing manager, in the weekly all-hands meeting at a technology startup.

“Those leads were garbage. Only 10% of them were qualified, and our pipeline is nowhere it needs to be to make our quota,” grumbled Sharon, head of sales. “Stop Snapchatting our weekly happy hours and do something that actually drives revenue!”

Who’s right and who’s wrong? If the marketing is measured by leads collected, then it can confidently say it did its job. If the sales team is measured by deal value and number of closed deals, then it isn’t wrong, either.

The dirty secret is that awareness and revenue metrics are related to one another, but it’s tangential in nature. You need to drive awareness to generate leads, which are then qualified, and of the qualified are then pushed forward to consider, try, and buy your product or service (e.g. revenue). It all ultimately works together, but your Chief Executive Officer isn’t measured on number of qualified leads. The Board of Directors doesn’t care about your marketing video going viral on YouTube unless it leads to someone writing a check for your product or service.

Since both sides are technically correct in measuring the metrics they measure, how do you come to middle ground? In a perfect world, all metrics — across marketing and sales — would tie directly to return on investment. Unfortunately, that’s not how this works. Marketing teams have introduced terms like return on engagement, return on marketing investment, and return on objective in an attempt to validate its efforts to the business. Believe me, I’ve done this as well — but it wasn’t until I had broader marketing responsibilities that I recognized this was a fool’s errand.

Recently many companies — especially business-to-business ones — have started implementing account based marketing (ABM). The idea here is that you target particular companies (accounts) into which you want to sell. Marketing and sales then agrees to the types of tactics that will deployed from top to bottom — awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, post-sales experience. Then targets will be attached to the tactics at each point of this journey, agreed upon, and measured vigorously.

Even if ABM isn’t for your company, your sales, marketing, and communications leaders need to work together to come up with a cohesive plan for measuring tactics that tie to sales pipeline and conversion. At the end of the day, making enough money to pay your employees and keeping the lights on is all that ultimately matters to your customers, partners, and investors.

Think of metrics in a scale from lowest amount of value and attribution to revenue to highest:

1. Clicks: This gives you a sense for how wide and far your campaign is getting to your prospects through email, advertisements, et cetera. Of course, you’ll need to account for mistaken clicks, the fraud rates in advertising that are prevalent today, and multiple clicks by the same users (always go for unique visitors).
2. Targeting: Did your campaign reach the right audience?
3. Website visitors: After engaging with your campaign, who actually visited your website? Did it result in a lift in the type of traffic you actually wanted?
4. Sales Opportunities: Who became a sales opportunity after engaging with your campaign? How many of these visitors were converted into qualified leads?
5. Sales: How many of those qualified leads signed a check for your product or service?

Another way to look at it is to put everything in a funnel, in order of logical buyer progression:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision
• Purchase
• Post-sales experience

Tie metrics and targets to each of those points in the funnel, and then measure and refine accordingly. This way, you’re not making apples to oranges comparisons.

Ultimately, it all comes down to compromise and making a decision about what’s important and what’s fluff. This will vary by organization and even campaign, but the handshake between marketing and sales must be there so that everyone’s efforts aren’t done in vain.

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Originally posted on LinkedIn.