Simplify Marketing Automation Value with Key Metrics

KPI's: Prove Demand Generation Value through Metrics that Matter

If your CEO or marketing executive hasn’t asked you yet for metrics that demonstrate your impact on revenue, get ready – it’s coming!

As we travel across the country and meet with marketers already fully tasked with making a measurable impact on revenue, they tell us that they are required to produce “metrics that matter.” In business speak, this means proof of the contribution their demand generation efforts are making to revenue.

In the past, this was a lengthy and painful task, if not impossible, for most marketers. But marketing automation technology has made it much easier to measure this impact. As you begin to think about the “metrics that matter,” here are a few best practices to consider:

Start with what you have. As you implement a marketing automation system into your organization, your ability to measure a wide range of metrics will immediately and exponentially grow. It will be tempting to measure everything, but start with what you can tangibly and discretely report. In the beginning, stick to basic marketing conversion metrics like number of emails sent, percentage of opens, and percentage of click-throughs. The number and sophistication of your value metrics will get more powerful as you become more familiar with marketing automation. 

Create a set of baseline metrics. In order to measure improvement, you have to start with a baseline. Create a set of baseline key performance indicators (KPI) – even if it’s just your best guess – for every key metric you plan to track and report. It's important to get general agreement on these baseline metrics from both sales and management.

WAG for every campaign. A few years ago, Harvard Business Review published an article on the art of guessing in business and found that experienced professionals were often no more than 10-20% away from their WAG (Wild @$& Guess) when compared to actual results. Every campaign should have a WAG associated with it from day one. This will help familiarize you with working to achieve these key metrics.

Only a handful of metrics matter. While there are many things marketing automation will enable you to measure, ask yourself, "What does my leadership team care about?" This will help you define the key metrics that matter for your organization. Remember to keep redefining what you measure as your demand generation practice becomes more mature. For example, your CEO could probably care less about how many emails were sent or the number of opens and click-throughs. What he really wants to know is how many highly qualified leads did marketing send to sales, and what percentage of these sales leads did the sales department convert into opportunities, then closed business?

To help you get started, read our white paper Metrics That Matter to learn about the metrics most often tracked by the Revenue Marketer.