Although B2B didigital marketing generates a tremendous amount of data which can be analysed more in-depth than the one generated by traditional marketing, the determination of ROI is still challenging, especially for technology companies who aren’t doing much in the online marketing department. Choosing the right goals and metrics is critical work. In order to know the ROI, you must first know what to monitor, so you recognise ROI success when you see it.
We’ve come up with some key metrics that technology companies should be monitoring in order to deliver an engaging experience for customers and drive ROI.
1. Website Traffic – Unique Website Visitors
What you achieve by analysing website traffic is that you gain a general understanding of the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy and campaigns. A decrease in website traffic may signal issues related to your SEO, content reach, campaign targeting and social media marketing strategies.
2. Website Content that Generates Traffic
Understanding which type of content generates more traffic is crucial. Then comes the segmentation of content to match audience demand and needs. Social media comes in handy when trying to identify hot topics across different mediums and then write content accordingly.
3. Successful Landing Pages
By closely analysing landing pages, you understand how readers reach your website and where they are coming from. Every landing page should comply to several rules of thumb in order to convert as many visitors as possible. Some of the rules include providing a quality user experience and including a compelling message and a strong call to action.
4. Referral Traffic
It is highly advisable that you monitor analytics in order to see what external sources drive traffic to your website. When the users click the hyperlink to visit the webpage that is on different websites, then the Google Analytics considers this process as a referral visit to the destination website. By analysing referral traffic you will know on which sites to display paid advertising campaigns and will have a better understanding whether your social media marketing campaign is working or not. For example, if there is a post on social media or other websites that directs the traffic to your website, then that author knows about your business very well.
5. Bounce Rates
Things are a bit simpler here. Basically, the higher the bounce rate, the higher the chances that content on a page is not captivating enough to users or lacks a strong call to action to drive conversion. What you need to do is analyze the pages with high bounce rates and adjust content and UX to increase user interaction.
6. Social Media – Audience Growth & Post Performance
By monitoring social media channels, you will be able to segment your customers based on the type of content that drives engagement. Develop content that speaks to the unique needs of each segment and track performance across all social channels to create effective social strategies.
7. Qualified Leads From Marketing
If you want to track ROI of specific marketing efforts, you need to track leads from every single campaign and understand what helped them convert. This way, you will have an idea about which marketing efforts have helped bring in a lead and then adjust team efforts accordingly.
8. Cost Per Lead
In other words: how much money does the marketing department spend on producing a qualified lead? Once you have that information, you can make more careful and documented decisions about where to invest resources.
Before finishing, mind these two reasons which make it difficult to track campaign ROI in B2B digital marketing
The first one has to deal with the well-known belief that marketing and sales operate as two completely separate systems. Marketing automation platforms support the marketer while CRM systems manage sales. Because of this strict demarcation, information about sales leads once they become qualified is oftentimes not visible to marketing departments. This is where the chain breaks and sales and marketing teams can no longer determine which campaign or tactic actually worked and brought in that particular lead.
The second reason hampering the tracking of campaign ROI in B2B is that the lead source and campaign information, which is tracked in the marketing automation platform, is often not preserved in the CRM once a lead moves through the sales funnel. All too often the lead source information, which is typically associated with the data passed with the lead itself, is not carried over to the next sales stages.
To conclude, the effectiveness of measuring ROI in B2B digital marketing depends not only on the metrics that you’re monitoring but also on establishing a constructive collaboration between marketing and sales departments. It happens all too often that leads generated via digital marketing get lost when they are passed on to sales. Therefore, make sure you strengthen and create a tight communication between both sides in order to effectively drive ROI.
