In some ways, launching a digital marketing campaign is like igniting a rocket. It requires fuel (budget), effort, and strategy.
Like a rocket’s trajectory a digital marketing campaign must be carefully monitored and directed to ensure it reaches the desired destination – campaign success.
Digital marketing campaign success relies on access to metrics that truly matter, along with a hefty slice of intuition and creativity. Let’s delve into how to support your next big brand campaign with marketing metrics that drive meaningful insights and outcomes.
Awareness, engagement, conversions, and funnels
Before exploring digital marketing metrics and reporting, let’s talk about what we’re measuring. A traditional marketing funnel separates the customer journey into distinct phases that are some combination of awareness, then engagement, consideration, purchase and finishing up with retention or loyalty. Each phase has its own marketing metrics.
However, from our marketing experience at KLIQ, we’ve found that the journey is much more complex and blended than the simple funnel represented in traditional marketing models.
The customer journey is not strictly divided into distinct stages, but rather sees customers and prospects moving between all the stages. The journey to purchase includes decisions and depends on factors that our marketing can’t influence.
Less of a marketing funnel, more of a continuum
Not just an entry point, awareness continues through the full cycle. Your choices as a marketer about how, when, where and how much to spend on raising awareness will be informed by your strategy and market.
And when it comes to transitioning from awareness to engagement, this article from MarTech asserts that lead generation “should be about bringing people who are interested in your solution, your category or the pain point you solve — in that order”. And that can happen at any time, as long as you are visible and ready to engage when they need you.
Is B2B marketing an art or is it maths? The answer is yes. It’s both!
You’ll know already, because you’re doing it, that marketing absolutely isn’t about a mathematical formula or a predictable timeline. It’s a rich, complex blend of awareness, interest, engagement and nurturing that is as much about creativity and intuition as it is about the numbers.
And yet, you need the hard numbers that come with a more rigorous, quantifiable style of measurement. Because that’s how budgets and other resources get allocated. That’s how marketing teams get what they need to do their jobs.
We loved this LinkedIn post from Tom Fishburne’s Marketoonist on the topic of Marketing Math!
The difference between what you CAN measure and what you SHOULD measure
Every platform you’re using for your digital marketing campaign provides metrics. It’s true for websites and eCommerce, email providers, paid and organic search, social media, Google, YouTube or Pinterest.
Without priorities and clear data visualisations, you’ll end up drowning in a sea of data. It will be hard to separate out the meaningful insights that will have your brand campaign rocketing to the stars.
The solution is to focus on marketing metrics that align with your campaign goals and your broader business vision. Easier said than done, perhaps, but a crucial component of a successful campaign.
How your B2B marketing reports support business vision and goals
So when it comes to marketing reports, what do leadership teams need – and why?
Marketing reports serve as the compass for your brand campaign (or whatever rockets use for guidance). The truth is, your marketing metrics don’t just tell you how your campaign is tracking against your marketing goals. Your campaign manager and leadership teams will use analytics to guide budget, inform decision-making and offer insights into the effectiveness of your campaigns and strategies. The right metrics will shape the success of future campaigns!
CMOs and their C-level colleagues carry the vision of the company, and that comes with heavy responsibility. In their day-to-day roles, leadership teams align resources and expectations, inspire accountability and maintain focus, applying strategy and tactics to consistently oversee the execution of the vision and goals of the business.
That sounds like a lot, and it is. Without the necessary focus, effort and resourcing an organisation may not achieve its long-term goals and may not thrive.
The information that feeds into this important work needs to have clear connections to your marketing strategy and business goals.
Gaining strategic B2B insights from your marketing data with current tools?
At KLIQ, we specialise in empowering progressive global and Australian businesses to maximise their marketing efforts by harnessing in-depth, measurable data and insights, offering a deeper understanding of customer dynamics.
KLIQmetrics™️, our powerful marketing analytics dashboard is designed to bring a new level of clarity and precision to your marketing data. It transforms complex data sets into meaningful insights, enabling you to measure progress against key objectives and goals with ease.
With continuous updates for real-time tracking and data preservation for historical insights, KLIQmetrics™️ turns data into a strategic advantage over your competitors. Delve into a deeper understanding of your customers, and your potential market – their actions, inactions, and perceptions – with our intuitive tool.
See how this approach benefited Australia's tourism and non-profit icon, Sovereign Hill in our case study.
Schedule a consultation with our digital marketing specialists, and start getting more out of your marketing metrics.
