B2B Marketing KPIs: Top Metrics You Need for Success

As a B2B marketing professional, you are swimming in marketing data. You have many tools that are all tracking different parts of the marketing investment puzzle, and as such you're likely no stranger to the world of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). However, just because you're swimming in data doesn't mean it's easy for you to track your marketing effectiveness. Ultimately, marketing efforts need to impact business objectives. This is where B2B marketing KPIs come into play. They help focus your efforts and provide guideposts on what data is most relevant, so you can easily measure marketing performance. In this guide, we'll explore not only the importance of measuring marketing KPIs for your B2B business but also delve into often-overlooked indicators that can significantly contribute to your overall success.

Why are marketing KPIs and metrics important to track?

B2B marketing metrics are important to track because they help measure marketing success.

Of course, that’s not the only reason why you should measure them. B2B marketing KPIs metrics also provide insights to better plan for future campaigns.

A Google/MIT Technology Review Insights study found that 89% of leading marketers use performance metrics to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Here’s why:

•     Marketing data supports informed decision-making
•     Knowing which lead sources provide the highest ROI 
•     Allocating marketing spend toward the most successful channels
•     Increasing lead conversions and helping shorten the sales cycle
•     You can get a better idea of what works for your ICP and what doesn’t
•     Experimentation helps your team and company grow
•     It assists you in getting ahead of your competitors
•     Not only do you save money, but it increases revenue too!

B2B marketing KPIs and metrics help marketers measure results and showcase the impact that B2B marketing is making for their company in a way stakeholders will appreciate.

But, to reap these benefits, you need to consider the primary goal of each campaign. Ask yourself:

•     What action do we want our customers to take?
•     How can we get them to take that action faster?

Once you know how and why you’ve developed your content marketing, you’ll need to decide what metrics to measure.

B2B Marketing KPIs to Measure

B2B marketing metrics involve selecting appropriate KPIs that can be monitored frequently, in real-time, and in an automated manner. It helps check that performance is on the right track to warrant timely corrections whenever they are needed.

Website Traffic:

 B2B buyers spend significant time online researching potential purchases. This makes driving website traffic crucial. Key metrics include:

• Visits: Each click on a web page.
• Unique Visits: Individual visitors click on one or more web pages in a visit.
• Page Views: Total number of web pages viewed.
• Session Duration: Average time a visitor spends on the website.
• Bounce Rate: Percentage of visitors who click on one page and leave.
• Traffic Source: Origin of website visitors, such as another site or email.

Source and Medium: 

Source refers to a specific domain (e.g., LinkedIn.com) that sends traffic to the website. Medium describes the type of traffic (paid, organic, or referral). Together, these B2B marketing KPIs show which channels and tactics bring in the most visitors and may warrant future investment.

Conversions per Activity

Getting website traffic is great, but there’s a big difference between getting somebody to click an interesting link or check out an interesting website, versus getting potential buyers to take a serious look and move down your sales funnel. Measuring the number of conversions per activity can help you sort the leads. By setting up landing pages and confirmation pages, you can use Google Analytics to track these B2B marketing KPIs. That way, you can tell how many visitors took a specific action after being guided to your website by your marketing endeavors. For example, a clever viral ad might get thousands of people to visit your site, but maybe only fifty of them filled out the registration form for product and pricing details. Those numbers are vital information for marketers.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

 Marketing Qualified Leads are leads who have taken an action that shows interest in your product, like filling out a form or downloading a whitepaper. The exact criteria that separate MQLs from SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) varies from business to business. The general distinction is that MQLs are further up the funnel, less ready to convert, and will probably need more exposure to marketing content before they’re ready to be handed off to the sales team. Separating your MQLs from your SQLs goes hand-in-hand with scoring leads to assess their quality. Scores are based on how likely a lead is to become a customer at some point in the future. MQLs from a company that closely matches your typical customer profile are higher quality leads than ones from an unrelated field. Identifying MQLs also enables you to measure the cost per MQL each campaign brings in.

Revenue Contributed

When all is said and done, brand awareness is great — but it doesn’t pay the bills. It doesn’t matter how many leads visit your website, or how many actions they take to indicate their interest if they don’t end up buying your product. At some point, somebody in the C-suite is going to want to know the actual ROI for your marketing efforts and budget.

Building attribution models that can measure the ROI of individual marketing campaigns accurately can be tricky. It sometimes requires you to step back, take the big picture view, and make the necessary determinations about how your marketing activities are contributing revenue to the bottom line. A multi-touch attribution model informed by the right software tools can be of great help here. 

Engagement as Clicks

Counting clicks is a very simple but meaningful way to judge how effective a piece of content is at attracting and holding a viewer’s attention. Whether those clicks are taking them to your website, or a third-party website such as a social platform, they can serve as signals of brand awareness as well as purchasing intent.

Simply put, content that gets clicks is doing what it’s supposed to do — and content that nobody clicks on is dead weight in your marketing campaign. You can’t even begin to consider things like lead scoring or conversions if your audience is looking at the links to your content and saying, “No thanks.” Quantifying engagement as clicks is a crucial first step in ascertaining whether your marketing efforts are working or not.

Conclusion

Ultimately, your marketing goals are the deciding factor in terms of choosing what to measure, but the bottom line is the bottom line. Revenue metrics always have the last word on whether any B2B marketing KPIs campaign was worth it or not.

Once you know what KPIs you’re looking at and how to measure them, it’s essential to review them frequently and track how they’re changing over time regularly. No matter how big or small your marketing team is, your relevant KPIs will tell you if you’re meeting your goals and help you make smarter decisions about when to revise, recalibrate, or change course. With reliable, pertinent data backing up your efforts, you can launch and manage your B2B marketing campaigns with confidence that they’re delivering the results you want.

References:

https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/business-strategy/b2b-marketing-kpis.shtml

https://www.cognism.com/blog/b2b-marketing-metrics