If you google ‘how to measure campaign effectiveness’, the top results are bound to include some variance of ROI and Pipeline.
What if you’re not there yet? Or, what if you are, but you’d like a more holistic view of your campaigns?
Read on for some of our recommendations.
In the B2B marketing space, the trend is certainly moving towards Pipeline and ROI as a way to measure marketing effectiveness and even determine compensation plans (as evidenced in the 2020 State of Revenue Marketing & Compensation Report).
This being said, when speaking to customers on a day-to-day basis, I hear a lot about wanting to measure additional metrics to look at campaign effectiveness with a different lens.
Such as understanding how many engaged leads or accounts are needed to get to a certain pipeline or revenue number.
To start, you’ll need to define what you are looking to measure. A few ideas outlined below:
- Account stages (or lead/contact stages if not using Account-Based Marketing yet). Below is an example of the stages of account funnel stages prior to SQA/Pipeline that we track at CaliberMind:
- Opportunity stages such Sales Qualified Leads, or opportunity and pipeline created (closed won, closed lost) → you may wish to consolidate or focus only on crucial needle-moving stages
Determining which metrics matter will depend on your team’s marketing strategy and the KPIs for your team. For instance, if you’re goaled on pipeline — you likely want to use opportunity stages as a measurement of campaign effectiveness.
It’s worth mentioning that account-level metrics can be leading indicators of opportunity-level metrics, so you may want to use these to estimate how much pipeline or revenue your campaigns will generate, depending on your confidence in your pipeline reporting.
Once you’ve determined which metric(s) you’d like to focus on depending on your strategies and campaign structure, you’ll want to assess your current state.
Gathering these will not only allow you to spend some time evaluating where you are currently, but also start to think about where you’d like to be.
This is where defining your goals comes into play.
If you’re looking to use opportunity stages as your measurement of effectiveness, I recommend calculating the current totals for that opportunity stage, as well digging in to the total aggregates for sourced/influenced amounts.
- Sourced referencing the amount Marketing touched prior to opportunity creation
- Influenced referencing the amount Marketing touched after opportunity creation
A goal should be S.M.A.R.T : specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
For example, you can set a goal for accounts engaged at the MQA stage (Marketing Qualified Account) per channel by referencing the current MQA number.
If you had 1,350 MQAs on average per quarter, a realistic goal could be to increase by 10% knowing your budget will be increasing by 7% in the coming year.
So, using the S.M.A.R.T framework to define your goal, you could end up with a goal of: Increase engaged MQA accounts by 10% next quarter.
This goal can now be divided up by channels you wish to track or kept as a higher-level metric. If you’re looking to divide it up by channels, use attribution reporting to determine how much each channel has historically driven to set your channel goals.
To visualize how your team may evolve from measuring one metric to the next, a good visual to reference is the ‘crawl, walk, run’:
If you need additional help measuring campaign effectiveness or determining which metric is best for your team, reach out to our Customer Success team. We’re here to help!
