According to the Oxford Dictionary, Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are quantifiable measures used to evaluate an organization’s success. KPIs vary from business to business, but there is a list that everyone generally agrees to. For example, an increase in engagement and sales is on every business’s list of KPIs.
KPIs are the practical side of setting goals. You can have a list of what you want the business to achieve, but it’s useless without a baseline to check whether your work aligns with your goals.
All B2B marketers have three core goals: attracting new audiences, driving trust & engagement with existing audiences, then monetizing your engaged audience to fuel the sales pipeline and drive revenue growth.
Here are the top 14 KPIs for a marketing manager aligned to those core marketing goals:
Audience Growth
1. Media Coverage & Associated Backlink Growth
Backlinking is quickly becoming one of the best ways to accurately measure the impact of media outreach. Backlinks are “digital bridges” that go from an external URL to your website – and search engines love them. The simplest and one of the strongest examples of this is including a link back to your website in a piece of content that is later published in one of your target publications.
2. Social Media Subscriber / Follower Growth
With more and more people incorporating technology into their daily lives, it has become increasingly important to have an active social media presence and, even better, a substantial following. The KPIs of social media can be determined by the following three factors.
First, the number of interactions. This refers to the total number of likes and comments on the account. Second, the interaction rate. This factor does involve some math, but, don’t worry, it’s simple! All you need to do is take the number of followers and divide that by the total number of likes and comments. The last factor is known as the sentiment index. This requires you to subtract the positive comments from the negative ones. Ideally, the lower your sentiment index the better!
All of these factors are important, because when someone is interested in subscribing to or following you, chances are that they’re going to check out these numbers for themselves first to see if you’re even worth following.
3. Domain Authority & Ranking Keyword Growth
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that will help you predict how well your website will rank on search engine result pages. In other words, the higher the score the better!
If you’re looking to increase your DA score, we recommend incorporating the following tactics into your site. Start by creating interesting, clickbait-worthy content. People aren’t going to click on content that they find boring or common. Next, remember to build internal and external links. Linking to other pages on your own site is perfectly normal, so take advantage of it!
Lastly, make sure that bad websites or websites with bad reputations aren’t including links to your site. If this is the case, you run the risk of people thinking poorly of your site before they’ve even visited it.
4. Website Traffic
There are several tactics you can use to accurately track your website traffic. For example, tracking the pages viewed per session. Being able to see the number of pages viewed per session is important because it helps determine how interested people are in your content, and it will help predict the kind of content people will most likely want to see in the future.
Another way to track website traffic is by looking at the average time spent per page. This is similar to our previous example, since average time spent per page will help tell you if people are finding your content enjoyable and relevant. You can also look at the specific pages where people are either entering or leaving your website.
It’s important to know what content people found engaging enough to click on and what they no longer found interesting enough to make them leave the site. These are just a few ways to gauge your website traffic, but the list goes on and on.
Driving Trust & Engagement
5. Opted In Email List Growth
Email is the most cost effective channel to communicate with so your goal should be to grow your list of subscribers. Growing this list requires you to be intentional about how you convert inbound interest from media coverage, social media channels and search engines. Growing your emailable list requires more than just attracting new audiences, you have to retain your existing email subscribers too. Measuring growth of your list will keep you focused on strategies to convert traffic into email subscribers as well as email best practices so you retain your existing audience as well.
6. Web Conversions
Conversion rate is used to measure how effective a website is at turning visitors into subscribers, leads and eventually customers. Tons of traffic inflow to a website makes everything look okay until you discover later on that sales aren’t increasing or email opt-ins aren’t looking as good as you had expected.
Pipeline & Revenue Impact
7. Lead Quantity
One of the biggest goals for a successful marketing campaign is driving traffic toward your website. Meaningful traffic means that people respond to the Calls to Action (CTAs) and eventually become paying customers. Lead creation is an essential part of this process.
A lead is someone who exchanges their information for something that you’re offering. Sometimes leads develop on-site forms and other times they can respond to an ad that they come across on other digital channels. Either way, a lead is a great person to target because they’ve already shown interest in your product or services.
Data analysis will reveal two types of leads. A marketing qualified lead (MQL) identifies themself as a prospective customer and has an organic interest in what you have to offer. They might show their interest by signing up for an e-mail subscription service. On the other hand, a sales qualified lead (SQL) is considered follow-up worthy. They contact the sales team and the sales team is convinced that they will likely turn into a paying customer.
Finding out the number of leads is important because it helps demonstrate how effective your marketing campaign is. It’s proof that you can generate genuine interest that can be converted into sales—which, ultimately, generate revenue.
8. Lead Acceptance Rate
Smart marketers establish lead definition requirements with Sales then provide them with the ability to accept or reject a lead based on that predefined lead criteria. Lead acceptance rate is a critical indicator of the quality of marketing generated leads.
9. Sales & Marketing Service Level Agreement Compliance
Even though it’s not your department, how well the sales team functions reflects on the marketing team. If successful, it shows excellent cohesion between the teams, but the marketing team is likely to receive blame if it fails. To avoid that situation, we recommend you negotiate a formal service level agreement with Sales. This agreement, with formal signatures from the leaders of each organization, outlines the lead criteria, behavioral actions expected and desired time frames from the marketing, inside sales and sales organizations with regards to the managing of leads.
Leads drop in value as more time passes. A prospective customer is likely to abandon a purchase if they are left to their own devices. The marketing team needs to pass on leads as quickly as possible and ensure that the sales team quickly follows up.
10. Lead Conversion
Getting many leads is useless if the leads don’t turn into sales. A successful company knows how to drive potential customers to the site and turn them into paying customers. Having many followers or a high amount of web traffic means nothing if those people aren’t buying anything.
Calculating the conversion rate is easy. All you have to do is look at the number of hits you get on your site versus the number of sales. If 1,000 people visit your site and only 100 people make final purchases, then the conversion rate is 10 percent. You should aim for a high conversion rate because it’s a sign that your marketing campaign is working so well that it can directly increase sales.
11. Lead Velocity
Declining lead velocity can be both a symptom and a cause of bad customer experience. If the speed with which your leads are making their way through the pipeline is slowing or the number of those leads in various pipeline stages is decreasing, it likely signifies a customer experience failure of some sort. Your content, lead management processes, sales pursuit strategies may be flawed. Measuring lead velocity helps to uncover failing efforts and where added focus may improve prospect experience and customer acquisition.
12. Marketing Sourced or Influenced Revenue
This attributes revenue to anything that has been sourced or touched by marketing is considered to be “influenced” whether it be through the prospect’s event attendance or digital activity or the consumption of a sales enablement asset provided to sales by marketing.
13. Average Customer Lifetime Value
Individual sales are great, but long-term growth is more about recurring sales. If you can attract and keep a customer, you’re at least guaranteed to get their business for a long time. A successful marketing manager looks for ways to attract customers and keep them coming back for more.
It is relatively easy to calculate a customer’s lifetime value. The number you come up with represents how much a single customer is worth to your business during their lifetime. You can find it by multiplying your revenue by your gross margin and the average number of purchases that the customer makes.
The revenue is the money that your company makes during each financial period. The gross margin is the percentage that the company keeps after deducting expenses. You can easily track the average number of purchases per customer by looking at your sales records. The data is easy to find and even easier to use.
It’s essential to know a customer’s lifetime value because it reflects your business’s ROI (return on investment). It’s a sign of whether you’re getting a return on your investment and for how much longer you can keep it up. Also, knowing a customer’s value makes it easy to make any future plans for the business.
14. Marketing Return on Investment (MROI)
Simply put, the MROI determines whether your campaign is worth it or not. Even though spending money might be painful now, it will be worth it in the near future. Building brand awareness is beneficial because the products will eventually sell themselves. However, you can only achieve this success if you can justify your spending.
MROI is calculated by subtracting the marketing costs from the sales growth that was a direct result of these marketing efforts and then dividing that number by the marketing costs. It comes down to how much money you’re spending and how that directly impacts revenue. Finding out MROI might include the finance manager and sales manager as well.
This is perhaps the most important KPI because it demonstrates whether the job is being done well or not. It also reflects your ability to effectively lead a team and follow a budget.
Conclusion
We narrowed down the most important KPI for a marketing manager to track. There are more statistics that you need to track but these are the main ones that best indicate your business’s success. You can personalize them to apply to your business.
Remember that you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Using KPIs is more than just tracking your progress—it’s essential for making future plans and introducing new strategies.