You're reevaluating your B2B marketing strategy. What key performance indicators should you prioritize?

To generate high-quality leads, define them clearly using criteria like company size, industry, job title, and engagement level. Integrate CRM and marketing automation systems for seamless data flow, aiding in accurate lead tracking and analysis. Establish a feedback loop between sales and marketing teams to refine strategies based on sales insights. Implement a lead scoring system to prioritize leads by quantifying their quality through various attributes and behaviours. Understand the customer journey and identify key touchpoints to tailor marketing efforts to your target audience’s needs

Prioritizing lead quality as a KPI in B2B marketing is crucial for maximizing ROI. Focus on tracking leads that match your ideal customer profile and monitor their progression through the sales funnel. High-quality leads typically yield better conversion rates and ROI. Analyze which channels and campaigns generate the best leads to optimize resource allocation. However, balance this with quantity metrics to ensure sufficient pipeline volume. Consider implementing lead scoring systems to objectively measure quality. Remember, lead quality often trumps quantity in B2B, where sales cycles are longer and deal values higher. Regularly refine your definition of a quality lead based on actual conversion data and sales team feedback.

When it comes to measuring conversion rates keep a few things in mind: 1. Only compare similar conversions with each other. Don't compare conversion rates of clicking on a button with filling out a form. 2. Be aware that tracking on your website may be impacted by various factors such as technical (cookies...) or legal (GDPR, DMA...). 3. When you want to drive form submissions consider leveraging on-platform features like lead gen forms that pre-fill relevant information. This will boost conversion rates by a lot. 4. Think mobile first as most social media users are browsing. Therefore, your website should load fast, be mobile optimized, and easy to read.

Begin with monitoring Churn Rate—it’s the canary in the coal mine for customer satisfaction. High churn signals potential issues, demanding immediate attention. Engagement Metrics are your daily pulse check. If customers aren't interacting with your content, they might not be sticking around. Track email open rates and content shares to measure their interest. Lastly, Net Promoter Score (NPS) reveals how likely your customers are to advocate for your brand. Happy clients become loyal champions, which is gold for retention. These KPIs aren’t just numbers; they’re your roadmap to transforming retention challenges into marketing triumphs.

Consider different conversion rates for each stage of the funnel. At the top, for example, converting doesn't mean selling, but leaving data on a form. For the middle of the funnel, consider the engagement with your communication, such as opening messages, watching videos, clicks, downloads. All of this is important and must be monitored throughout the lead's journey. The conversion rate of leads into opportunities and requests for proposals at the bottom of the funnel are also relevant. And finally, how many opportunities were converted into sales and how much the revenue was, in order to measure ROI. Follow the different conversion rates to each stage of the sales cycle allows you to adapt exactly the necessary steps of the journey.

There is key question here: Are you nurturing your existing customers as much as you should? Customer retention is one of the keys to sustainable growth and is way more cost-effective than customer acquisition, and in most cases, the loyal ones turn out to be the best source for reference business. As a way of giving more weight to customer retention, the focus will be on the continuous delivery of value, nurturing strong bonds, and staying ahead of the needs of customers. The most critical strategies include constant personalised communication with clients and using data to understand their journey better. By putting more emphasis on retention, the business tends to become resilient, thriving on long-term partnerships.

In addition to your own internal customer retention data, look at your Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is a single number that can measure the loyalty of customers to a company or product. It's based on a single question: How likely are you to recommend 'us' (brand, organisation, product, service) to a friend or colleague? The score is reported on a scale of -10 to +10, 0 - 10, or -100 to +100, with the lowest end of the scale 'Not at all likely' and the highest end, 'Highly likely'. A higher score shows more loyal customers. Tracking this metric over time can be a predictor of where customer retention (and growth trends) will head - positive or negative.

Especially when running a ROAS analysis, pay attention to attribution models and windows. There's no right or wrong here. It's rather what's best suited to your business. Attribution Model: Some common attribution models are first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch. They all look at the channels and touch points involved in the buying process, but each of them weighs channels and touch points differently. Attribution Window: This is the period of time in which a touch point with your marketing efforts has to happen to be counted towards a sales influence. Align this time period with your average sales cycle.

Every part of an integrated marketing strategy should contribute positive ROI, and be able to demonstrate a link to growth - in sales (volume or value) and/or profitability. Marketing initiatives that are only designed to increase awareness and understanding, but don't have a direct link to sales and profit, are wasted, because their usefulness will be questioned. Demonstrating tangible ROI maintains organisational support for your marketing budget. Growing brand awareness, attitude and understanding *should* lead to an increase in sales and/or profit. That's the point of it. Otherwise, the activity is just making stakeholders feel good!