It’s tough dealing with a tight budget, but measuring the right metrics can help you figure out what’s important. See Heidi Bullock and Megan Niedenthal's slides as they explain which marketing metrics can help ensure you’re putting all your “gold” in the right place.
Discover:
-How to increase the effectiveness of marketing programs across multiple channels (social, website, emails, paid programs)
-Proven methods for measuring campaign performance using single and multi-touch attribution metrics
-Best practices for determining the ROI of each marketing program you run
Find Your Pot of Gold with Marketing Metrics that Matter
1. Find Your Pot of Gold with Marketing
Metrics that Matter
Heidi Bullock
VP Demand Generation, Marketo
Megan Niedenthal
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Marketo
3. Data challenges for marketing
40%: Processes to collect, manage and
analyze data
39%: Having access to data that is accurate
and reliable
39%: Using data and analytics to link
marketing activity to business
outcomes
8. Success Secret #1: Agree on Definitions
Need help? Check out:
http://www.marketo.com/ebooks/how-to-define-a-lead/
9. Example – What Metric Matters?
Names from a
Tradeshow?
Attended demo, right,
demographics?
Pipeline
10. When Metrics Take Away Credibility
Vanity Metrics
Sound good and impress
people, but don’t measure
impact on revenue or
profitability.
Activity Metrics
Measure what you do instead
of what results and impact
you have.
11. Cost Metrics
Frame marketing in terms of
cost and spending instead of
results and outcomes.
When Metrics Take Away Credibility
12. The best event programs incorporate intentional
measurement strategies in advance.
Have a hypothesis!
Success Secret #2: Set Goals Upfront
Pre-Event:
Engagement #
downloads on your
asset
During Event:
# booth visits, # demos,
# attended talk
Post-Event:
# downloads on slides –
on follow up email
Leads > Opportunities
15
3 Closed Deals
Jan Feb Apr May June
48. Source: Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics, Apr 2014
* Percentage of all programs in channel that achieve MT Ratio > 5
49. Source: Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics, Apr 2014
* Percentage of all programs in channel that achieve MT Ratio > 5
Inbound + Nurture = 58% of (MT) Pipeline
Paid Programs = 42% of (MT) Pipeline
50. Source: Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics, Apr 2014
* Percentage of all programs in channel that achieve MT Ratio > 5
(MT) Ratio = Pipeline /
Investment
>10 is Great and <5 is Fail
Sponsored Email = 12.8, Tradeshow = 10.6,
PPC = 13.0, Webinars = 25.4, Field Events =
6.6, Content Syndication 7.7
51. Source: Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics, Apr 2014
* Percentage of all programs in channel that achieve MT Ratio > 5
% Programs with MT Ratio > 5
e.g. Tradeshow has good average
but 49% programs “fail”
52. Use Metrics to Set & Justify Budgets
New Targets
New MQLs
Score>100
23,000
Inventory of
Active MQLs
20,000
New Opps*
1,000
6 Month
Created
Opp Inv.
2,000
270
*Opps is bigger than SQLs because includes outbound and partner referrals
SDR
capacity
driven
Inbound/
Programs
120K
(900K DB
Total)
New
Names
New SQLs
922
Wins
Inventory Of
Active Targets
60,000
131,000
15.3%
10.5%
2.4%
1.9%
75%
35%
54. Takeaways
1. Agree on definitions and set goals upfront
with C- level.
2. Create your hypothesis before diving into
data.
3. Just because you can measure something,
doesn’t mean you should do it – focus on
a few metrics that matter for YOUR
business.
4. Avoid cost and spend metrics – focus on
investment and return.
5. A trusted marketing forecast = credibility.
6. Progress not perfection!
Hi everyone! My name is Megan Niedenthal and I’m part of the product marketing here at Marketo. Today, we’ll be talking about a topic customers ask me about all of the time: what are the right metrics to look at in order to understand which programs are working the best for my business so that I can understand where to spend my “gold” to make more! And I could think of no better person to discuss this topic and share how we make these decisions here at Marketo than our very own Heidi Bullock- our VP of Demand Gen. Welcome Heidi!
HEIDI “great to be here!” (or something to that affect)
BACK TO MEGAN…
Before I pass things over to Heidi, I want to set the stage in regards to the challenges our customers face everyday. Many of us know, today’s marketing environment has radically changed.
Your buyer or potential buyers are more empowered than ever before. They live a multi-channel life. They can effectively do the majority of research online about your products and services and – they use many different channels to do this research.
Now this is great for buyers – but there is a big side effect. There is more data on your buyers or potential buyers than ever before!
So, from a marketer’s point of view, there is now an overwhelming amount of data to collect, manage, and understand.
So specifically, what are the key challenges for marketers around this data?
If you review a lot of survey data– the big issues typically include collecting and managing data from multiple sources/locations within the company, having data that is reliable/clean, and how to best leverage the data that is available.
All of this can seem very daunting – and it can feel like a big challenge!
But, here are your options: You can freak out about or you can use the information to your advantage to ensure you are spending on the programs that will yield the biggest return. And Heidi is going to some ways that she and her team are able to do that. I will be fielding questions throughout the webinar, but let’s kick things off with one of the biggest challenges I hear from people: which is how can they want to be sure that their marketing efforts are going towards to things that will have the biggest impact on their business? Where should they start and what should they actually measure.
Heidi, how are you thinking about these things?
TURN OVER TO HEIDI!
Sure! This is a great place to start.
I always recommend people to break this down into two topics: Methodology and Analytics.
I want to share with you how you can use data and analytics to link marketing activity to business outcomes. My goal is to show you how to use the right data and metrics to build marketing credibility and hone in on metrics that matter so you can measure and optimize for your business. I am not going to cover how to best process data or ensure data integrity. Those are topics for another day!
This cartoon cracked me up. I want to highlight before we start on methodology that big data is NOT your starting place. It is tempting to start digging around and looking for patterns – but I think this is a quick plan to go insane.
The RIGHT place to start is the methodology.
I am going to run through some tips that I think help you develop a rational frame work – so then you can examine the data in an effective way. You need to make sure you have a taxonomy in place before you dive into the data.
First off, there are different levels of metrics and reporting – and it’s good to be very clear about the different level and what metrics matter. I think this is a nice framework to keep in mind.
There are:
Corporate level metrics – like revenue, profit, market share
Operational metrics – like program investment efficiency, customer loyalty
And execution metrics – like which programs are most effective for driving demand
It will most likely vary for your business – but you should hone in on a few that really matter for each category. Let’s go over some tips that can be helpful with all of these categories….
--
Success Secret # 1 – Agree on definitions ---for what metrics matter ---and what key stakeholders need to see.
**Let me provide a simple example of why this is so important.
-
For a tradeshow – what metric matters?
Is it # of scans?
# high quality demos?
Or is it pipeline??
If you run the events team, it may be # of high quality demos – but if you are reporting back to your CFO – it is probably pipeline. It is very important to AGREE on what metrics matter for what type of person/ or stakeholder you are speaking with.
That last example was a good one – because it highlights the differences between TYPES of metrics.
I want to touch on a few types of metrics you should steer clear of:
Vanity metrics
Too often, marketers rely on “feel good” measurements to justify their marketing spend. Instead of pursuing metrics that measure business outcomes and improve marketing performance and profitability, they opt for metrics that sound good and impress people. Some common examples include press release impressions, Facebook “Likes”, and names gathered at tradeshows.
You want to avoid Measuring Activity ---- rather focus on measuring Results
You also want to avoid focusing on quantity ----hone in on quality metrics instead.
The worst kinds of metrics to use are “cost metrics” because they frame Marketing as cost center. If you only talk about cost and budgets, then no doubt others will associate your activities with cost.
As an example, let’s take a marketer who improved cost per lead by $10. Based on these great results, she went to the CEO to ask for budget. Did the marketer get her budget?
No. The CEO decided the ‘reduced lead cost’ meant marketing could deliver the same results with fewer dollars – and so the CEO cut the marketing budget and used the extra funds to hire new sales people.
What went wrong here? The marketer performed well, but she made the mistake of not connecting her marketing results to bottom-line metrics that mattered to the CEO.
By framing her results in terms of costs, she perpetuated the perception that marketing is a cost center. Within this context, it’s only natural that the CEO would reduce costs and reallocate the extra budget to a “revenue generating” department such as sales.
Think about using terms like investment per lead --- instead of cost per lead.
Success Secret # 2 – Have a hypothesis and set your goals upfront with key stake holders.
Your first step is to quantify your expected outcomes. All too often, marketers plan programs and commit their budgets without establishing a solid set of expectations about what impact they expect the program to have. This is a terrible habit, and is one of the underlying reasons why other executives, especially CFOs, question marketing investments.
The solution is to assign up-front goals, benchmarks and KPIs for each marketing program.
It is very important before you even start on ANY program to make sure that the team is aligned on objectives and outcomes.
The example I am showing here is for a tradeshow:
I suggest setting up a meeting with key folks – may be your VP of Marketing, CEO, head of sales, head of product
Review the reasons why you think the event has value and how you propose looking at success over time.
The timing element is an important one because most likely you will not see closed won deals the day after the tradeshow.
So here you can see there are pre-event goals, during event goals, and post event goals.
Once you have identified what the goals look like, you need to figure out how you are going to measure success.
Success Secret #3 is to design your programs to be measureable.
This is really important because if you do not have a way to measure impact – it will be nearly impossible to report back on your goals.
Using Marketing Automation like Marketo, it is very easy to look at metrics like I am showing on this slide.
For a webinar, I can look at early metrics like ‘attended’ all the way to pipeline – which ultimately is the most important.
Success Secret #4 – focus on decisions that improve marketing.
A key part of your planning process is to identify up-front what decisions you need to make to drive company profits, and then build your measurements to capture the right information.
This means you should measure things not just because they are measurable – but rather because they will guide you towards the decisions you need to make to improve company profitability.
Like the dashboard in your car, three to five metrics are all you really want. Think about the contrast with a dashboard in a 747 airplane --- there are so many measurements it’s hard to quickly ascertain the most important ones.
Here is a nice way to think about the right metrics. It can serve as a helpful taxonomy when you are developing your benchmarks or even if you want to improve on your current set.
1. Performance metrics – answering HOW DID YOU DO?
2. Diagnostics metrics – what is working, how can we improve
3. Lastly, there are leading indicators – these should help you forecast how you will be doing
With this change, marketing has the opportunity to seize the day and take a much larger share of revenue – since Marketing is responsible for that 70%. Requires Marketing to think as rigorously about their process as Sales typically thinks about their.
Here’s Marketo’s…. Let me explain.
Now, that we discussed the key considerations before data analysis – we can move into marketing analytics.
One of the most important things is knowing whether or not the campaigns you were putting your marketing dollars into worked or not. And that obviously lets you make good decisions on how to spend future dollars in order to continually optimize your marketing efforts, and accelerate revenue at a faster pace.
So let’s talk about program measurement.
So with the multi-touch framework in place, we can now get a deep understanding of how our marketing activities are driving pipeline and revenue for the company. In fact, we can PROVE it.
In the chart above, I can see how much investment we’ve made in each channel. And notice that we call it investment, and not cost.
Ok, so we also show how much multi-touch pipeline, and how many multi-touch opportunities we generated from that channel, using the framework we just discussed.
And what you see is that the inbound and the nurture, together make up about 58% of our pipeline.
The paid programs make up the rest – 42% of all pipeline.
Another useful metric we use is the multi-touch ratio.
The MT ratio = is the ratio of the pipeline each channel generates, compared to the investment we’ve made in that channel.
And you can look at it by channel, as well as each individual program.
For us, any MT ratio greater than 10 is good, and we should do more of that.
If anything falls below a 5, we don’t want to do more of that.
In between 5 and 10, it depends on whether the goal is primarily to generate awareness or to generate dollars and we’ll usually discuss it.
So you can see for the sponsored email, which we talked about earlier, even though it has a low conversion rate, it eventually gets to a 12.8, so pretty good.
Now, this is the channel view, the next step is to do some analysis WITHIN the channel. -
Our tradeshow channel has an average MT ratio of 12. But that’s the average. If we dig into a program view, we’ll see that almost half of our tradeshows fall below our minimum threshold of 5. In other words, they are losing us money. So we want to be VERY selective about which tradeshows we participate in.
And as a sidenote, you can see that a percentage 56%of our channels are currently meeting our minimum threshold of 5.
BUT ---- That means that 44% are losing money. So our job as marketers is to continue to push this % higher.
So in this case, we know exactly which programs are working and which aren’t. And by the way, you should have programs that aren’t working. If you aren’t, your not experimenting enough.
Once we understand how the revenue process works, we then use this information to set our budget. So at Marketo, we don’t simply say marketing should be 7% of revenue. What we do is say we need this many wins in order to achieve the revenue targets we set.
And since we have a deep understanding of how the revenue process works, including conversion rates and velocity, we can simply work backwards. We know how many opps we’ll need, how many SQL’s we’ll need, how many new MQL’s and Targets we’ll need, as some of the wins will come from existing targets and mql’s.
Then we can budget for a marketing program that drive the wins we need to hit our revenue targets.
That’s really powerful, because if someone comes to us and says “I need to take 10% out of your budget”, we can say “okay, that will have a 12% impact on revenue next quarter, what do you want to do?”
It also lets us look forward, it lets us make forecasts. It lets us talk not just about what happened, but what WILL happen..
And we show it like this. With each row, we can show how many opps did we create, how many will we create the month after that, and the month after that.
This is probably the most critical thing marketers can do to build credibility.
To summarize:
Do not just dive into data. Agree on definitions upfront and create your hypotheses.
Reporting is less important than DECISIONS that improve ROI
Focus on financial metrics that matter to the CFO (profit, cash, revenue)
Avoid cost and spend metrics – focus on investment and return
A trusted marketing forecast is the single most important step to make marketing a revenue driver, not a cost center
And lastly….Progress not perfection – last time I checked no data set is perfect!
Thank you so much for walking us through this today, Heidi!
If you have questions or want more information on today’s topics, we will be sharing a recording of todays’ webinar with you. You can also find more resrouces on Marketo.com or you can reach out to Heidi or myself via Twitter. Thanks and have a great rest of your St. Patrick’s Day!