Many companies struggle to compartmentalize and develop a consistent set of marketing metrics with their business-to-business marketing efforts. This infographic from g2m solutions is a compilation of B2B marketing metrics that they expound on further in their Measuring Marketing ROI ebook.
The SMART Approach to Marketing Analytics
SMART is an acronym for a standardized approach to any marketing effort:
- Select What to Measure
- Measure it
- Analyze Key Findings
- Revise Tactics
- Test Impact
The Stages of the B2B Marketing Conversion Funnel
With the advent of omni-channel marketing, virtually every visitor arriving at your site is arriving, engaging and converting through a different path. The funnel of traditional and database marketing doesn’t apply at a micro-level any longer, but at a macro level the analytics and metrics in monitoring aggregate performance is still appropriate. The three stages are TOFU, MOFU and BOFU – here’s how each are defined:
- TOFU (Top of Funnel) – These are visitors to your marketing efforts that are typically in a research stage of the purchase cycle. The marketing objective here is to ensure that your brand, product or service is found where prospects are researching… on search, social, review sites, directories, and other relevant industry sites.
- MOFU (Middle of Funnel) – These are prospective buyers of your brand, product, or service. They’re not sold just yet – but they have identified you in their research and they may decide to engage with you further. These are visitors that you want to apply great calls-to-action and landing pages for to drive them deeper into the purchase cycle. Email marketing is central to this stage.
- BOFU (Bottom of Funnel) – These are buyers. They’re ready to purchase, they have budget, and they understand that you have the products and services to help solve their problems. This stage is critical with your conversion optimization and sales engagement. This is also where sales enablement technology can help automate and improve your conversions.
The Metrics of the B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy
There are metrics that can be applied to every stage of the marketing strategy at each point in the conversion funnel.
- Top of Funnel – Organic search traffic, organic keyword rankings, referral traffic, paid search traffic, paid search cost, paid search cost per click, direct traffic (which often includes social app traffic), and organic and paid social media traffic.
- Middle of Funnel – View to click on call-to-actions, view to click on landing pages and click to submission ratio on landing pages will provide you with the data to optimize and test new verbiage, layouts and content to drive submissions.
- Bottom fo Funnel – Lead volume, marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, leads to proposals ratio, proposal to close ratio and overall conversion ratios are measured at this stage and across every stage.
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Hi Doug — Thanks for this! We are just starting out, helping small businesses better manage their digital marketing. Many are overwhelmed by the various tactics and strategies. What would you say is the most important metric for small business to measure as it relates to inbound marketing? Is there a way to really simplify it for folks? Thanks!