Part IV-Slicing Your B2B Marketing Measurement for Prioritization

It’s impor­tant that mar­keters prop­erly append mul­ti­ple clas­si­fi­ca­tions (meta data) at the track­ing code or cam­paign level so as to slice-and-dice the data by these clas­si­fi­ca­tions with such unlim­ited flex­i­bil­ity in view­ing cam­paign results includ­ing costs, sales, closed deals, lead quan­ti­ties, ROI, and more. Mar­keters can com­pare these met­rics at mul­ti­ple lev­els of cam­paign meta data hier­ar­chies (a sam­ple list is included below):

• Friendly Name of Campaign/Initiative with its unique track­ing code—with some of the below elements
• Start Date—this is essen­tial to know which date in time to begin allo­cat­ing met­rics asso­ci­ated to the track­ing code such as costs
• Global Cam­paign Ini­tia­tives or Par­ent Cam­paign (i.e. new prod­uct launch)
• Prod­uct Theme—which prod­uct this most closely aligns to or promotes
• Geo Emphasis—Americas, LACA, EMEA, APAC, etc.
• Pro­gram Initiative—lead acqui­si­tion, cus­tomer cross sell, retention)
• Depart­men­tal Cam­paign Initiatives—marketing, sales, channel
• Channel—online or offline
• Pro­mo­tional Formats—white papers, webi­nars, prod­uct tours, case studies
• Pro­mo­tional Offer—which white paper, webi­nar, etc.
• Media Source—MSN, Yahoo, Google, AOL, Forbes, USA Today, Tradeshow XYZ, etc.
• Tactic—email, paid search, SEO, ban­ners, e-newsletters, print, cold call, trade show, press release, etc.
• Ad Formats—banners (468×60, 728×90, 300×250); key­word lists and copy)

Another impor­tant notion is to ensure that mar­keters are uniquely track­ing dif­fer­ent aspects of a cam­paign. For exam­ple, a cam­paign that dri­ves vis­i­tors to the Web site should not be over­rid­den by an onsite pro­mo­tion of a whitepa­per or prod­uct launch, thus los­ing vis­i­bil­ity of which tac­tic drove them to the site. Mar­keters should set up track­ing where the mul­ti­ple attrib­utes of a cam­paign can be mea­sured to avoid over­rid­ing each other. These are some attribute examples:

• Exter­nal Cam­paign IDs/elements—what drove vis­i­tors to the Web site/tradeshow booth
• Site Cre­ative IDs/elements—which copy imagery con­verted best to a lead
• Site Con­ver­sion IDs/elements—which white paper or webi­nar con­verted best to a lead and sub­se­quently pro­pelled them to become a more qual­i­fied lead
• Re-Marketing IDs/elements—which lead nur­tur­ing cam­paigns (emails, auto­mated tele­phony scripts, direct mail, newslet­ters, prod­uct launches) cre­ated an up sell, cross sell, or sim­ply new sales opportunity

With the right closed-loop mar­ket­ing infra­struc­ture, mar­keters should be enabled to bet­ter pri­or­i­tize their efforts and dol­lars and more accu­rately assess their con­tri­bu­tion to the sales pipeline; (as opposed to imple­ment­ing a very expen­sive and time con­sum­ing data mart and cum­ber­some report­ing inter­face). Use your flex­i­ble Web ana­lyt­ics solu­tion by inte­grat­ing it with your SFA/CRM application.

By inte­grat­ing the ana­lyt­ics solu­tion together with a SFA/CRM envi­ron­ment, you can be pro­vided with one impor­tant item—relevance! By under­stand­ing the account or a contact’s Web site brows­ing inter­ests at a prod­uct or ser­vice level (such as key­words, prod­uct tours, white papers, time spent in each area of the site and other per­ti­nent vis­i­tor pat­terns) you can quickly pro­vide much more mean­ing­ful con­text to the sales process (call, email). With more sales infor­ma­tion, you can close more deals, and close them more quickly.

Look­ing back: Part III—Why B2B mar­ket­ing is dif­fi­cult to mea­sure.