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5 key marketing metrics every boss should care about

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Data is everywhere these days. With the the shift to digital we can measure almost everything.

Of course, this is highly advantageous as it allows for better decision making and improved ROI. If your company's marketing is still being run on gut instinct and repeating "what we did last quarter" then the message is clear:

"FIx it or you will be left behind"... In fact, you are already being left behind by your competition.

But data for data's sake is equally as unhelpful. We find many of our B2B clients are creating data from their marketing, they know how many website visitors they have, they know their email click-through rates, their social shares, but they don't know how this impacts the business and specifically, revenue.

The boss doesn't trust marketing to give him the information he needs. Up tp 70% of executives simply don't believe that marketers are focused enough on results to truly drive incremental customer demand.

Whilst this may be true, it falls to the boss to set the pace and to demand that marketing starts to provide analysis illuminating the effects of their marketing tactics. So what should you be asking your marketers to track?

Here is a quick peek at the 5 key metrics you need to focus on, and on which to measure your marketing team.

1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

The total average cost a company spends to acquire a new customer.

Simply, sales and marketing costs including all campaign spending, salaries, bonuses, commissions and overheads divided by the number of new customers.

2. Marketing's % of CAC

What's marketing's share of the overall customer acquisition cost. Tracking this over time gives you an indication of potential problems in either your sales team's performance (their commission costs are falling) or that marketing overhead is increasing without seeing a matching increase in customers.

3. Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) to CAC

This is a great way to understand the total value of your customers on average as a proportion of the cost of acquiring them in the first place. A higher LTV:CAC means greater ROI from your sales and marketing team. Some care needs to be taken here though, driving down your spending on sales and marketing too much could actually slow overall company growth. So looking at this ratio in conjunction with the other statistics and factors will give you a balanced view.

4. Marketing Originated Customer Percentage

This shows you the percentage of new business driven by marketing. Obviously this is an important metric to track the effectiveness of your marketing team. There is no "right" answer for this percentage as the structure of different businesses and industry sectors mean the ratios varies widely. But measuring this over time gives you a leading indicator of improvements that your marketing team is making. 

5. Marketing influenced customer percentage

A looser definition than the previous ratio – and therefore should be much higher. Marketing influenced customer percentage measures all new customers who marketing has interacted with along the way whilst they were leads. This is useful as it gives the boss a clearer view of the bigger picture and how marketing is making an impact across the sales process.

In summary, whilst other softer measures of performance have their place, by focusing your marketing team on these core measures, they will make better decisions that materially affect revenue and the growth of your business. Over time the senior members of your marketing team will plan, build and execute better in a way that naturally aligns around the sales process and this in itself creates greater aligment between marketing and sales.

To find out how your marketing is doing, download our Marketing Health Check Tool below. 

 

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Topics: b2b marketing b2b lead generation marketing analytics