This is the last article in our digital marketing metrics series. Because what everybody really cares about are leads and sales, we’ve saved the best piece for last. Ultimately, we care about improving our content marketing strategies in a continuous effort to generate leads and boost sales. If the latter doesn’t happen, you’re not doing a very good job, regardless of what all the other metrics indicate.
Broadly speaking, lead and sales metrics refer to the number of leads and closed deals generated as a result of prospects interacting with your content. According to Curata, each of these two categories can be furthermore broken down into several smaller indicators. Therefore, Lead metrics include:
- New leads generated
- Existing leads touched
- Funnel conversion rate
While Sales metrics include the following indicators:
- Pipeline generated
- Pipeline touched
- Revenue influences
In order to better understand what these metrics refer to and how they are linked to your content marketing process, we’ll discuss each of them in detail. We promise to give you only la creme de la creme (no irrelevant info) so bare with us until the end 🙂
Lead Metrics
They help you better understand the middle-of-the-funnel activities which in turn allows you to link leads to specific pieces of content. Lead metrics help you determine whether the content marketing effort is making sense from a financial standpoint.
New Leads Generated
A marketing automation tool and CRM will help you keep track of the number of leads generated by creating a database with leads that came after consuming a piece of content. One such tool is HubSpot.
The good news is that leads coming from your content publishing efforts are oftentimes more qualified and are closer to buying as opposed to those generated through paid channels. The more content leads consume, the more qualified they are. Therefore, one important metric here could be the number of pages read per lead. In that sense, Marcus Sheridan, founder of The Sales Lion, explains that “when leads viewed 30 or more pages of the website before our initial sales appointment they would buy 80% of the time.”
Existing Leads Touched
This metric refers to the number of existing leads in your database that have interacted with a piece of content. You can find out this number by using the same marketing automation tool and CRM mentioned above.
While some people believe that it’s all about the new leads generated, we strongly believe that nurturing existing leads is crucial. Leads are hard to get but easy to lose given the huge amount of online content and information. If you forget about them, they will definitely forget about you. According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.
Funnel Conversion Rate
This is where you get to understand which pieces of content helped convert leads lower into the funnel the most.
In order to know which piece of content performs best, you can make use of an online lead form on your website and determine how many people went to the lead form immediately after consuming your content. You can also set a browser cookie and track when someone fills out that lead form after viewing your content.
Sales Metrics
These help you understand the extent to which your sales pipeline was influenced by consuming your content.
Pipeline Generated
With a help of a first-touch attribution model, you can learn the total money value of all opportunities where the first touch of the lead associated with the opportunity was with a piece of your content. In other words, you’ll be able to know not only the amount of sales qualified leads generated by your content but also how much they are worth.
Pipeline Touched
This refers to the total value of all opportunities where the lead associated with the opportunity has touched a particular piece of content.
Revenue Influenced
This refers to the amount of revenue closed as a result of the contact associated with the deal having consumed one or more pieces of your content prior to converting.
If you’re using some sort of customer and prospect database like Highrise or Sugar CRM, you have the possibility to write in the prospect record that they consumed content pieces X, Y, and Z. Following next, when your sales team turns that lead into a sale, you can determine the projected revenue and profit of that customer and assign it to the content pieces. This way you’ll ultimately know how much each piece of content is worth.
3 useful CRM, sales and marketing automation systems are Salesforce, Oracle’s Marketing Cloud and Marketo.
This was it for the Digital Marketing Metrics we’re focusing on when developing strategies for our customers. Which part of the series do you think is the most important? We are looking forward to reading your comments and feedback in the section below.
