B2B marketing KPIs are designed to help business executives make important decisions about the growth and development of their companies. They provide companies with objective and measurable assessments of their marketing campaign and strategy – which can help them justify marketing-related costs (including costs associated with ad spend, new hires, and collateral).
B2B marketing KPIs are best used to inform and guide sales and marketing teams. They will help prove or disprove the efficacy of particular marketing tactics, promotional channels, and outreach programs.
What is a B2B marketing KPI?
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. KPIs for B2B marketing is a set of quantitative measurements that can be tracked and help those involved determine the effectiveness of marketing efforts. To be successful in today’s business world, you must be data-driven. You must be comfortable with numbers, and you must be able to use numbers to figure out which of your marketing and sales tactics are working and which are not. Tracking marketing KPIs for your B2B business helps you do juist that.
Why should you track B2B marketing KPIs?
Before you move toward tracking B2B KPIs, you should have a full sense of what the latter means. KPI metrics are more than mere numbers. They demonstrate how well your company is doing against the business objectives you have set. If you have established a 3-to-5-year strategic plan, KPIs will help you fulfill that.
Here are some of the specific things that KPIs can be used for:
1. To assess the overall company health
You only need to measure a few KPIs in the most important categories, including employees, customers, processes, and revenue.
2. To assess progress over time
This is an important metric. If you set targets at the beginning of each year, you can use KPIs to track essential result indicators. These can include:
- Business locations
- Employees
- Retention
- Total customers
- Leads
- Conversion rate
- Lead generation
- And other bottom-line metrics
3. To analyze patterns over time
If you review the same KPIs every quarter, you will begin to see patterns. This information can give you a detailed insight into your company’s sales cycles. It can help you better inform your sales and marketing team and drive down marketing costs.
What B2B marketing KPIs and metrics should you be tracking?
There are a variety of B2B marketing KPIs that you should be tracking. Some are easier to track than others – for example, total traffic to a website versus return on investment. However, the more you’re able to manage, track, and optimize, the better off your business will be.
We’ve laid out a few of the top B2B marketing metrics you can track. While this is not the complete list of marketing KPIs, it can give you a good starting point of the B2B marketing metrics you should establish.
1. Lead-to-close conversion rate
This measures the percentage of leads that become buying customers. You will need to be careful when calculating this number. Doing it by time period may not necessarily indicate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Your aim should be to determine the customer lifetime—that is, how many potential customers you turned into actual customers throughout the year.
2. Initial customer acquisition cost
This tells you how much your company spends on average to secure a single customer. The customer acquisition cost (CAC) is a leading indicator of the performance and efficiency of your marketing team.
3. Marketing percentage of your CAC
This metric gives insight into your marketing team’s impact on customer acquisition costs. Specifically, it can tell you whether your marketing team is spending money on the right things. The figure need not be used to punish – but to help your team make better decisions.
4. Marketing originated customers
This KPI shows the percentage of new customers secured through marketing initiatives. It is the best way to determine your return on investment. More importantly, it can be used to boost morale. You can use it to reassure your marketing and sales team that their work impacts the company’s bottom line.
5. Marketing influenced customers
Not all new customer acquisition results from direct interaction with landing pages, social media ads, and other explicit marketing efforts. However, other forms of outreach can make potential customers aware of your brand, which can lead to an eventual sale.
This particular KPI involves tracking the total number of customers who purchased from your company owing to indirect contact with nurturing programs or educational content produced by your sales team.
What are the best tips for tracking B2B marketing KPIs?
The B2B market is large, lucrative, and complex. B2B marketing metrics matter. They will help give you specific numbers to work toward. They will also allow you to measure the effectiveness and success of your marketing team. Here are a few tips on tracking B2B sales KPIs.
1. Develop a marketing strategy
First, do the obvious. Sit down with your team to set your business goals and establish a strategy that you believe will help get you to achieve them. The function of the KPIs is to help you assess whether the strategy and the tactics developed to execute it actually work.
2. Pick data that matters most
Website, sessions, conversion rates, social media followers, and engagement rates are some of the data points you want to include in your KPIs.
3. Review historical data
Before you set new performance indicators, recall and review current and past performance data. Google Analytics is a good place to start. Look at website traffic, social media analytics, advertising performance, sales, and conversion rates. This will help you figure out the percentages you want to improve each of these by.
4. Be realistic
Reviewing the above data will help you be realistic about your KPIs. It would help if you were sober-minded and practical about what your team can achieve based on your resources.
Are you looking for more B2B marketing tips, tricks, and templates?
Don’t feel like you need to establish a B2B marketing KPI tracking system alone. The Marketing Blender is a company that specializes in helping businesses of all sizes improve their digital marketing operations. You can get started by visiting our website and contacting us directly.
In the meantime, leverage our additional B2B marketing resources, covering the latest tips and insights from our subject matter experts:
