Using your data and analytics to tell you what is, and what isn’t, working about your marketing.
As a B2B marketer, you are concerned with different promotional activities all geared towards generate leads and converting customers. Some of the activities you may undertake on a regular basis include content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, email, pay per click marketing and others.
However, do all these marketing campaigns matter for your business? Are they helping you achieve your end business objectives of generating leads, improving brand awareness and shooting up sales?
It is easy to get caught up in the wave of being busy, engaging in “all” marketing activities for your company. However, this should not be the case.
Rather, it’s important to analyze the different marketing activities and from your analytics software, determine which ones need more attention based on the results they produce.
Below are some ways in which you can use data to determine which marketing channels are resulting to leads and customers for your business.
1. Determine Leads Generated by Particular Channels
Use your analytics software to determine leads generated by each channel. Are visitors getting into your sales funnel through your social media accounts, email or blog?
As you plan your future campaigns, the performance of each marketing channel should help you decide the time and resources to allocate to each channel. Investment in channels that result in higher ROI should be scaled up while resources on poorly performing channels reduced.
Alternatively, you may use a different marketing approach with channels that result in poor lead generation. Test different marketing approaches to determine whether there will be any significant improvement that may warrant your attention in the poorly performing channels.
2. Determine the Number of Qualified Leads
Generating leads will not help your business if you cannot convert them. Therefore, rather than simply looking at the number of leads generated, dive deeper and determine the number of leads that become customers.
Use your CRM software to determine the number of leads that convert into customers from each marketing channel. If you are using Hubspot, you can dig further into the records of the leads to determine how your marketing efforts move them through the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.
3. Check the number of Leads Generated Through Your Blog
Blogging is a time-consuming and resource intensive activity. Your blogging efforts will result in your website getting higher placement on search engine results pages and getting more traffic. However, apart from traffic, you also want your blog to generate leads.
Check the number of leads that are joining your sales funnel from your blog. You can generate leads from your blog through dedicated landing pages set up for segmentation purposes.
For better blogging ROI, determine the exact blog posts that lead visitors into your sales funnel. This means measuring the number of visitors and leads that each blog post generates.
Measuring the performance of your blog content can also help you determine the kind of topics that resonate well with your audience. For example, you will find that some topics get more visitors than others. On the same note, other topics generate more leads than others.
This information should help you know the kind of content to produce that will result in the highest impact for your business.
To determine which content generates the most leads, find out the last blog post that readers visit before clicking to your landing pages.
4. Determine Number of Leads Generated by Different Landing Pages
Apart from determining the number of leads generated from your blog posts, measure the leads that convert on your landing pages. If a particular landing page is converting more leads, you can direct majority of your call-to-action messages to that page.
Alternatively, you can get attributes from the high converting landing pages and incorporate them in the landing pages that do not convert as high.
It’s important to split test your landing pages to determine which combination of design and copy results in the highest conversions. You can optimize the pages for certain keywords or use different media such as videos and measure their impact on conversion.
5. Determine Conversions by Segment
You can also dig into your conversion data to determine which segment of your leads convert the most. If you have segmented your target audience by different characteristics, you can view what they react to. For example, you may find that leads from companies with less than 5 employees follow a quicker path to conversion than those with over 50 employees.
The conversion rate of the different lead segments can help you determine how to tailor your marketing efforts for the best ROI.
To keep improving results, you’ll need to consistently measure and tweak your marketing activities. Apart from this, you will have to compare data over time and seek new and more relevant data sources.
