How'd you do this year? (On marketing ROI analytics for real life)

By this time of year, if all has gone well, you’re celebrating the stellar results of your super successful marketing programs. 

You’ve tracked those results diligently, reported them effectively, and discussed them fully. 

Sales is thrilled. They hope you double the size of your team next quarter — so they can double theirs. Customer success can’t believe what perfect new customers you’ve helped bring and all the upsell opportunities you’re teeing up. Good job, happy new year, etc., etc….

Wait. What? No, not you? Well, even so. If you’re realizing maybe your marketing analytics practice needs to kick it up a notch, now’s the time to get clear on how you’ll do it. (But also if things went perfectly. Don’t get too comfortable.) tl;dr? skip to the end

The end of the year isn’t (just) the time to look back. It’s the time to set the tone for the whole new year. 

No pressure.

But if you’re deciding at the end of the year what data points you’ll use to measure marketing’s worth, it’s too late. 

Now is not the time to stop everything and figure out how to build the reporting dashboards you should’ve been using all year. You’re not going to divert your team’s energy away from the end-of-year push to close the deals that don’t want to close because holidays.

And, it’s far more difficult to establish clear marketing KPIs retroactively than to measure and report the right things as you go. 

The end of the year is the time to decide what data you’ll use to measure success in the new year. So you can ensure you have the capabilities to do that. Then improve those capabilities as you go.

At the end of each year (or quarter), think about what decisions your reporting enabled you to make. And which decisions you need to make. Ask yourself and your team: What reporting did we decide to build for this year? What reporting would we like to build for next year?

Consider how your company’s needs, your team’s capabilities, or your overall business objectives have changed. How do your success metrics and data reporting capabilities need to change to keep up?

Finally, do you have the tools and processes needed to report on those data points? If not, get them set up. Pull in whatever people and tools you need in order to build the right capabilities. (Quite possibly the most important part of my mar-tech stack is not tech. It’s my Salesforce consultant.)

Marketing ROI analytics are not just about marketing and sales anymore. It’s about the full customer lifecycle. So by “team,” I don’t just mean the marketing team.

Marketing isn’t just responsible for bringing in leads. It’s responsible for the volume, velocity, and value of the pipeline. And that value is measured on both deals closed and overall customer lifetime value. 

Sales will measure marketing’s contribution by the volume, velocity, and value of deals closed. (That measurement will also take into account the leads they disqualified, had to chase for meetings because they were handed off too early, or had to mark down as closed/lost.) Customer success will measure marketing’s value on the customers who engage and expand — and who don’t churn, downgrade, or go dormant.

Most likely, whether your title is CXO or CMO or some other version of our evolving definition of SaaS marketing leadership, you’ll have to make sure your metrics serve both sides of the house.

And, that’s another reason it’s important to be set up at the start of the year to report accurately in real time. Once those leads convert to customers, it’ll be hard to get clean data retroactively. Unless you dig into a whole lot of time-consuming and complicated data manipulation. So, again, better to track this stuff as you go and be set up to do so in advance of the next year (or quarter). 

Measure only what you need to measure and what you can act on.

What you could measure in your marketing is nearly endless. The scope of what you should measure is commensurate with three things: the size of your team, the scale of your marketing investment, and the business objectives marketing will support. 

How many people will manage, analyze, and report on your data? If the scope of your analytics practice outpaces the size of your team, your people can end up spending more time wrangling the metrics than doing the actual marketing to get those results. 

Your data should make the case for your current and future marketing investment, without outpacing the reality of your investment. For instance: if you’re never going to scale your content marketing practice, or you’re in a niche field with search volume in the tens instead of tens of thousands, you’re not going to take action on super-deep organic search analytics or a major paid search initiative. You could have someone live in ahrefs. But why?

The most important thing is to understand the top-level business objectives marketing is expected to support (especially if you’re an OKRs team), and the most important data points to keep you moving the needle on those objectives, and to keep your team apprised of how you’re doing that. 

So how will you measure your marketing next year?

Marketing generally has three main objectives: 1) Grow the audience, 2) Grow new business, and 3) Grow customer engagement

For each objective, you want data that tells you what’s happening, how it’s changing, what might happen next, and what decisions you should make based on all of that.

Here’s what even the leanest of startup marketing teams need to measure. Where you go beyond this will depend, as noted above, on the size of your team, the scale of your investment, and the specific company objectives.

1) Grow the audience

Measure the size of the audience marketing has attracted and the quality of their engagement with your brand.

• Traffic

  • How many unique visitors are you getting on your website, blog, and landing pages?

  • What channels are driving traffic?

  • How are these changing over time (in the blocks of time that make sense for you — weeks, months, quarters)? How does that compare to the same period last year?

• List Size

  • How many people are opted in to receive your emails?

  • How many net new contacts have you created?

  • What sources are driving new contacts creation? (Sources can be by channel, campaign, content type, or content title — whatever makes the most sense for where you’re investing in marketing and what decisions you need the data to help you make.)

• Quality

  • How engaged is the audience? (Look at bounce rates, returning visitors, page paths, and on-page conversion rates.)
    
    The quality of your audience engagement matters. If you’re steadily increasing your unique visitors and email opt-ins, but you have an 80% bounce rate, you’re growing the audience but not in a way that’s sustainable.
    
    The types of content you invest in producing, and what your audience engages in, matters. If you do a lot of webinars, you’ll want to report on the webinars audience separately and more deeply than other content types — registrants, attendees, the split of customers vs. prospects, etc.

2) Grow new business

Measure marketing’s influence on the volume, velocity, and value of pipeline.

• Pipeline volume: Overall count of leads, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs…they’re not dead yet, not matter how many times people say they are), Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), and Opportunities. And what’s driving them — lead sources, touchpoints along the way — in terms of channel, content title, or content type.
  
  But wait. What’s an MQL? Do you have it in writing? Does the whole team understand and agree? If you don’t have written definitions of every stage of your lifecycle, do that right now. Really. Don’t measure anything you haven’t fully defined in a way that leaves no room for assumptions.

  
  And those definitions must include exactly how you tag and track them. How and when do you tag an MQL? Literally, who does it, what do they click, is everything working properly between HubSpot and Salesforce or whatever platform(s) you’re using? To be scalable and repeatable, your playbook needs to cover all of this.
  
  To understand what’s working in growing pipeline volume, you’ll want to understand which channels, tactics, and content titles drive people through each stage.
  
  In really lean teams, consider focusing more on what’s driving Opportunities. If 60% of your Opportunities show Organic search as their first conversion, you know where to invest your marketing dollars. It doesn’t matter if 60% of your Leads show a different channel source. Organic search is your most valuable channel.
  
  And, if you’re in b2b, consider counting your pipeline volume both in terms of people and accounts.
  
  This is important. But not easy. I’ve done it via custom Salesforce dashboards thanks to a very smart Salesforce consultant. HubSpot is great for counting people, but not for counting accounts (except for closed/won deals). And of course, a scalable, repeatable b2b pipeline requires knowing how many people marketing needs to bring in to close the number of deals sales needs. So count both. I worked with my Salesforce consult to build a custom dashboard that counts both, side by side.

• Pipeline velocity: The conversion rate from each stage to the next, the average number of days from each stage to the next, and the maximum number of days from each stage to the next.
  
  Again, consider whether you’ll track this in terms of people, accounts, or both. Certain people might move through the pipeline quickly, while accounts overall move more slowly. Marketing and sales will make different decisions about the data, but when they do so together, everybody wins.
  
  Also, consider comparing the velocity of closed/won to closed/lost. Here’s what you might learn. If the accounts you win go much faster than the accounts you don’t, what does that tell you? Maybe allowing people to slow down in a certain stage causes momentum to falter. You’ve identified a leak in the pipeline. You’re welcome.
  
  Also, look at the last conversion before moving to that next stage. Is it a sales meeting? Is there a key piece of content that’s most often downloaded by people before they graduate to MQL or SQL? This is where you’ll start to learn how to better automate nurtures that move the right people through each stage faster.

• Pipeline value: Overall deals won in terms of both deal count and dollars, segmented by lead sources (channel or content), and tracking multi-touch attribution along the way from first-touch to closed/won.
  
  Note that multi-touch attribution does not necessarily mean multi-touch revenue attribution. Yes, with HubSpot, you can assign dollars to marketing touchpoints. But, some teams want to see the quantity or timing of the touchpoints. They’re more interested in knowing that marketing generated ten deals and that you had to send 52 emails to get 4 of them clicked to get that person from subscriber to customer (completely made up numbers for illustration only…of course you get more than four clicks on 52 emails). Some teams don’t necessarily need to see that 25% of the deal is attributed to email campaigns. Or want to. Revenue attribution is still new, and not always accurate. See the marketing-influenced example below.
  

One more thing about measuring the pipeline: marketing-generated and marketing-influenced leads and deals.

Marketing-generated leads are people who became new contacts in your CRM via a marketing channel, or their first interaction with you occurred via a marketing channel (even if their record predates your CRM). 

Marketing-influenced leads are people who have interacted with marketing channels along their way to becoming customers, upgrading, or renewing, but were not created by marketing.

For example, someone meets your sales lead at a conference. That person is added to HubSpot via a conference attendees list upload. They interact with the first email, fill out a form on a landing page, and continue to interact repeatedly as they’re nurtured with timely, relevant, useful content sent via email over the course of the next six months, until they book a meeting with your sales manager. Sales closes the deal. This would be a marketing-influenced lead, but not marketing-generated.

If this is important to how you measure your marketing investment or how your team understands it, identify that up front and set up your systems and practices to track it appropriately.

3) Grow customer engagement

Engage customers with content, influence customers' engagement in the product, and support healthy customer lifetime value.

• Customer engagement with content and product: Customer engagement in content is straightforward enough — which pieces of content are connecting with which people, and how are they getting there.
  
  Beyond content, of course, is product engagement. At least in the SaaS space. It’ll work differently in other settings. Which parts of the product are customers using, and how is marketing influencing that? Maybe you have nurtures set up to nudge certain behaviors for new customers, power users, or people at accounts with red-flag warnings on waning engagement. Are they working?
  
  Measuring how marketing influences product engagement is all about the partnership between marketing and customer success and product. Are your systems set up to track the right customer actions? Are they accurate? Can you all access the data easily?
  
  

• Customer lifetime value: Can you prove correlation or causation between marketing engagement and renewal, upsell, or cross-sell? 
  
  This is partly about the customer actions metrics mentioned above. And partly about deal-tracking, just like on the sales side. You’re tracking the opportunities, the conversions, and other touchpoints that lead to those opportunities. Get it working well on the sales side and you can replicate on the customer side of the house.

Don’t forget demographics.

Which customer types, buyer roles, or whatever matters to your business, are involved at which stages? It could be gender and age group. Whatever demographics matter to your product. What attracts them? And which ones lead to the most deals? 

Let the data challenge your assumptions. You might assume a certain decision-maker is needed even to progress past the first interaction, but learn that your best deals start with a decision-influencer instead. 

How about on the customer side? Who are your customers? Who are your power users? How are their channel sources or marketing engagements along the way different?  

Who among them engages most in marketing? Is there overlap between power users and marketing engagement? 

What differences exist between churn and renewals; discount payers and full-price; upsell opportunities and lack thereof? What upsell opportunities exist for the full-price customers? Which full-price customers are also power users and/or power content consumers?

What channels did the power users come through (their original lead sources)? What messaging or content titles or types brought them in? Is seasonality a factor (consider both first touch vs. closed/won timing)?

tl;dr: This is a lot. Stay focused on the end results. Report out regularly. Don't do data for the sake of data.

Before next year even starts, you’re sitting down with your team and deciding what you’re going to measure, how, and why.

You’re pulling together data that will tell you what’s happening, how it’s changing, what might happen next, and what decisions you should make based on all of that. So that you know how marketing is performing under its three main objectives: 1) Grow the audience, 2) Grow new business, and 3) Grow customer engagement.

You can measure endlessly in marketing. Measure only what matters. Together with your team, remember why you’re measuring anything. At the highest level, marketing analytics exist to help you know how your marketing worked for the company in any given period. You’re answering these questions:

• What were the results?

• What brought those results?

• What didn’t work the way we expected?

• What can be done to get even better results?

• How well-positioned are we now to meet the goals we’re setting for the next period?

  For instance, maybe you’re priming yourselves to expand into a new vertical. Have people from that vertical already started accessing your content? Which pieces? How did they get there? Use the data to find the wedge into the new audience.

As you go through the year, report to the team on a regular basis. Agree on how frequently you’ll report out the data you’ve agreed matters, how, and to whom. Maybe it’ll be dashboards linked to from a weekly email summary. Maybe it’ll be in-depth discussions during a leadership or team meeting or both. Whatever it is, be clear on how you’ll do it, why that makes sense for your team. And be consistent about it.

Change things that don’t change the data. As you go, you’ll learn things you need to do differently. Change tactics, but don’t change the underpinnings of your data. For instance, if possible, wait until the end of the quarter for a wholesale restructuring of the MQL/SQL definitions and processes. Otherwise, you don’t have clean data to compare from one quarter to the next. Just like you can measure endlessly, you can change constantly. Try to pick points in time for key improvements.

Feeding your team the right data steadily, throughout the quarter or throughout the year, is so important. Especially for marketing. You don't want to be discussing at the end of the year how to make the case for marketing ROI throughout the year. You do not want to end the year with people unclear on how to measure marketing’s contributions, whether to increase them in the coming year, or why.