Top B2B Marketing KPIs (And, Hacks) your Marketer Should be Tracking Right Now

Top B2B Marketing KPIs (And, Hacks) your Marketer Should be Tracking Right Now

written by Houston Golden
Founder & CEO, BAMF Media
November 6th, 2020
Share This

Understanding B2B marketing KPIs isn’t simple.

It requires flexible campaigns and constant tweaking to get right.

Plus, you have constantly moving KPIs that you need to adapt to.

We also know that there are just way too many metrics that you can track and sometimes cutting through the all the noise to get a good picture can be difficult.

Today, we simplify it to the top KPIs your marketer(s) should be tracking.

So without further ado, let’s get these KPIs over to you.

Quality of Leads – How Many are MQLs? SQLs?

These KPIs are the same KPIs that BAMF tracks since we work with a lot of B2B companies.

Successful B2B lead generation is dependent on lead quality as much as the marketing campaigns that your marketer is spearheading.

B2B markets have a very specific customer type due to the various niches in the industry and the value of the goods and services being exchanged.

This is the reason why methods such as ABM (account-based marketing) have taken center stage when it comes to intensive B2B lead generation.

Before you even get to start marketing, you need to determine the ideal customer profile(s), create a prospecting list, heavily segment, and create messages that highly resonate with them.

The quality of the leads coming through is critical.

You do not want to waste valuable resources marketing to people that won’t even turn into a marketing-qualified lead, let alone a sales-qualified lead.

Tell your marketer to keep an eye out for the lead quality coming through your lead generation channels. If only a few of them are qualified, you’re probably having trouble targeting, your lead generation magnets aren’t filtering the right people through, or worse, you’re selling in the wrong place,

Ask your marketer about the current lead quality status, if you’re not getting the right leads in, invest in a third-party lead generation service or retool your campaigns to filter through the leads.

Here’s a hack we use on LinkedIn.

Every little bit of information about the lead can be leveraged to tweak your message and filter unqualified prospects out.

At BAMF, we go beyond the vanilla LinkedIn Sales Navigator to refine our lead generation. We use tools such as LeadFuze to properly refine our targeting.

b2b marketing KPIs, Top B2B Marketing KPIs (And, Hacks) your Marketer Should be Tracking Right Now

LTV and Customer Retention

The biggest KPI that pretty much determines how much you can and “should” spend on your marketing is LTV or customer lifetime value.

LTV is computed via the following:

Average purchase value x frequency of purchase x average customer lifespan.

However, at BAMF, we take it a step further.

We also multiply this by our cost margins (e.g. if it’s 50 percent, then we multiply by 0.5). This makes our LTV much more accurate in determining not only the value but also the profit during a customer’s lifespan

This value is directly correlated to how much you should be spending on your B2B marketing and lead generation.

High customer lifetime values can allow for more spending, while lower customer lifetime values should have controlled spending.

But, here’s what.

Lower LTVs don’t mean slashing your campaigns, it could mean spending more resources on remarketing or increasing lead generation efforts to gain more economies of scale to lower the cost to produce your products and services.

B2B marketing relies on high-value repeat customers and there is no excuse for your marketer not to keep an eye out for this value, especially when running multiple high-value lead generation campaigns.

Although customer retention is generally assigned to customer service and support teams, your marketer also has to be highly involved in the process.

They are responsible for creating customer retention campaigns and remarketing to repeat customers.

Also, customer satisfaction, which is a major contributor to LTV, starts at the lead generation and incubation phases.

Email Marketing Statistics

Email marketing and content marketing are mainstays of B2B lead generation.

Why?

Because they work.

Now there are a lot of metrics that you can track with email, but let’s focus on the ones that your marketer needs to have a handle on:

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

CTR is used in almost all digital marketing campaigns from social media to email, but in email, it’s one of the critical KPIs to determine if the message that your marketer uses is working.

It’s a quick way to track engagement because links in the email itself are being clicked.

The best way to improve CTR is to personalize the message to make it resonate with the audience and to make the links compelling enough to click.

We can go on and on with how to improve CTR, but what’s important is that it’s given importance because it can quickly relate to efficiency.

You can also go ahead and ask for open rates because this shows you how effective email subject headers were at getting prospects to open emails. However, don’t use it as a main KPI because images embedded in an email that is received in an inbox are counted for open mail.

Email Conversion Rate

The email conversion rate is how many people converted to actual leads after click-through to a link on the email. After improving your CTR, pay attention to your conversion rates.

This is indicative of how effective the links were at converting your prospects to actual customers.

ROI

Last, but definitely not least is ROI.

There are different methods to compute the ROI of an email campaign, but the basics are simple.

(Additional sales + investment in email marketing) divided by the investment in the campaign

By looking at this figure, you can either justify the costs of email marketing, cut losses, or better yet, improve the emails that you send.

By using a combination of these metrics, a marketer can easily determine if the email campaigns you have been working or not.

Time on Page

Do you want to know if your website is hot?

Check out your time-on-page.

Logically, if you like something, you spend time with it.

If you find that people are spending just a tiny amount of time with your landing pages, then, they don’t like them.

However, if that average amount of time goes up, it can translate to your landing pages being interesting enough that they’re engaged by it.

Why aren’t people staying on your website long enough?

  • Slow loading times – statistics show that slow loading times cause a lot of people to click on something else or get rid of the tab altogether. No matter how engaging your content is, it still won’t matter if you bore a lead because of slow loading times.

To run quick and accurate page load tests, you can use tools like GTMetrix.

b2b marketing KPIs, Top B2B Marketing KPIs (And, Hacks) your Marketer Should be Tracking Right Now

Also, make sure that your content is optimized to load on time using plugins such as Smushit.

  • Optimized for PC – everyone is on their phones, if they can’t navigate easily, they’ll get frustrated and leave. At BAMF, we make sure that even our LinkedIn posts are mobile-optimized with proper spacing. It’s inexcusable.
b2b marketing KPIs, Top B2B Marketing KPIs (And, Hacks) your Marketer Should be Tracking Right Now
Check out Google’s Mobile Friendliness Testing Tool
  • It’s boring – the content could be off, the design from the 90s, it could be pushing for a hard-sell, it’s just not interesting enough, etc. These are the usual culprits and it’s not something that you can fix overnight.
b2b marketing KPIs, Top B2B Marketing KPIs (And, Hacks) your Marketer Should be Tracking Right Now

Capture versus Conversion Rate

Plenty of signs ups and new prospects in the pipeline are great and all, but how does it matter if they don’t convert to new sales.

Sure, great capture rates are perfect for brand awareness campaigns, but B2B marketing – just as B2C marketing – is primarily focused on getting conversions.

Conversions drive new clients, and new clients drive growth and revenue.

That’s the bottom line.

Here are the top two reasons why keeping track of capture vs conversion rates matter:

  1. Lead nurturing – B2B pipelines are designed for a lengthy buying process and incubating these leads until they convert is half of the struggle. Although it’s natural for leads to drop out of the pipeline, a dropping conversion rate is enough cause for your marketer to check if there’s a nurturing issue in the pipeline.
  2. Filtering and qualification – low conversion versus capture rates could also mean that you’re capturing the wrong audience, the capture mechanism could be working but prospects drop out because the product is not a good fit.

If you have a low conversion rate despite having a high capture rate, it’s time to reexamine the pipeline.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Lead generation isn’t cheap.

Data costs you money, and even cost-effective methods such as outsourcing to a third-party agency can seriously rack up thousands of dollars a month.

Take a LinkedIn lead generation campaign as an example:

  • You’ve got the lead generation manager
  • The content writers
  • Tools and applications
  • Optional PPC or ad spend
  • Consultancy fees, etc.

Startups and marketers need to be aware of how much they’re spending.

This is why you’ve got to pay attention to your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

How much did it cost “this campaign” to bring in one customer?

It’s computed by taking the total dollar value of your campaign and dividing it by how many customers you got afterward.

We like it because it’s simple.

By looking at the CAC – or CPL (Cost Per Lead) – you can immediately check if the campaign is worth it.

The usual procedure is to set a budget per lead and a maximum allowable amount to spend before you start restructuring or ditching the campaign altogether.

Most of the time, it’s used as an efficiency metric.

However, it does come with a couple of notes:

  • B2B spending is always going to cost more, especially if you’re working with ABM (account-based marketing) which requires heavy research. However, these costs are balanced when marketing a high-value good.
  • In some cases, it is premature to account for CAC in the middle of the campaign. Some buyers engage in cyclical purchasing that require a longer buying process. Also, some campaigns need some time to warm up, e.g. content marketing or SEO.

It’s not the be-all and end-all, but it’s useful if you want to check out how efficient your campaign is at a glance.

Sometimes, the best way to fix your CAC is to go back to the drawing board or kill the campaign altogether.

Attribution Channels and Revenue Attribution

A KPI that all growth hackers should be tracking is their attribution channels.

Attribution channels allow you to track where traffic is coming from whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, or anywhere else. By quickly checking out your attribution channels, you’ll know where you’re making your mark.

b2b marketing KPIs, Top B2B Marketing KPIs (And, Hacks) your Marketer Should be Tracking Right Now

Startups can easily scale their investment up on one channel if they find that they’re converting more.

A change in traffic on one channel should always be examined, it could be a temporary spike because of a promotion, a change in algorithm, or a widespread change in consumer behavior.

Here’s a real-life example.

At BAMF Media, we create diverse landing pages for campaigns that we have on different channels.

At a glance, a significant amount of our traffic is generated on LinkedIn and content marketing, so we make sure that our resources are aligned on these two channels so that we’re more efficient with our budget.

b2b marketing KPIs, Top B2B Marketing KPIs (And, Hacks) your Marketer Should be Tracking Right Now

We also take it a step further. We make sure that each post that we have on LinkedIn is set up with UTM codes so that we’re extremely precise with the sources of our traffic and it even allows us to A/B test individual posts.

b2b marketing KPIs, Top B2B Marketing KPIs (And, Hacks) your Marketer Should be Tracking Right Now

It’s easy to track even particular banners or CTA buttons on your different mediums, all you need to do is build a custom URL via the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder tool.

You don’t only want to know where to scale, but why you should in the first place.

However, that’s not all attribution channels tell you.

They also let you know if there is a growing potential for you to get noticed in other traffic sources, it gives you room to grow in other places, and at BAMF, we’re all about growth.

While you’re at it, make sure that you know which channel your revenue is attributed to. Say you’re generating 1,000 visitors from Facebook and 500 on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is making twice as much revenue.

Then, it’s fine time to tune your campaigns and spending to focus on LinkedIn or check out what went wrong in converting people from Facebook.

Make sure that your marketer can tell you not only where your traffic is coming from, but why. This gives your firm legroom to its research and considers the possibility of scaling, adapting, or riding the change.

Multiple touchpoints should also be given attention because they affect your attribution channels.

Takeaways

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to which KPIs you should be tracking. A lot of multichannel and cross-channel campaigns could use a couple more metrics. However, these are the ones that paint you the most general picture.

Why is this important?

Your marketer needs to be able to provide a general overview of your process at any given time.

It gives you the field of view to make changes.

Think of yourself as a general that’s going to battle. You don’t have to know where every single soldier is, but you need to know where they’re pointed at (and what’s pointed at them.)

Generals rely on their command staff feeding them the right information, so make sure that your marketers are hyped-focused on the metrics that matter in the long run.

I’ll leave you with this.

You can’t go growth hack if you don’t track!

About the Author

The name's Houston Golden. I'm the Founder & CEO of BAMF — a company I've grown from $0 (yes, really) to well over $5M+ in revenue over a span of 5 years.

How did I do it? Well, it's quite simple, really. I've helped hundreds of business owners and executives get major traction (because when they win, we win), I tell all on this blog.

Growth hacking is a state of mind. Follow along as I explore and expose the unknown growth strategies and tactics that will change the way you think about marketing.
Connect with MeJoin the Facebook GroupFollow Me On Instagram

Leave a Reply

1 comment

Leave your comment