Peter Caputa wrote a great article called 9 More Reasons To Invest In Inbound Marketing and a few things he mentioned really stood out to me.
- Inbound Marketing is Trackable
- Inbound Marketing Efforts Can Be Directly Attributed to Revenue
- Inbound Marketing Analytics Enable Improvement Over Time
In the digital age of marketing being able to track the results of your marketing campaigns is crucial. Everyone from the CEO to the finance team to the vice president of sales and his sales ops people, and of course the entire marketing department, all want (and need) to know what happened with your marketing campaigns. Each company has its own metrics that it prefers but everyone agrees that revenue is an important number to track. Using most marketing automation (MA) or customer relationship management (CRM) solutions you can track every response to your campaign, how many opportunities were created because of your campaign, and how many deals were closed that started with or included a touch from your campaign. The importance of having the ability to understand which of your marketing efforts drive the most revenue is paramount.
However there is another measurement that is just as important as revenue when it comes to measuring the ROI of your marketing campaigns and at Full Circle Insights we call that campaign influence. It is not just about the first touch or last touch campaign in any closed deal, but about which campaign actually played the largest role in generating that revenue for your company. This can be a little tougher to measure with CRM or MA solutions but if you can generate accurate campaign influence numbers I assure you your boss and the exec team will be thrilled because they will know which campaigns actually drive the most revenue or close the most deals and will be able to focus more energy and resources on similar initiatives.
Peter’s point about analytics enabling improvement over time is also a salient one. It is impossible to figure out what is going wrong (or right) if you are not measuring your results. By putting marketing analytics in place and measuring all the data that comes in from your campaigns you will be able to not only improve your resource allocation but also hone in on the perfect target audience for your product and the messaging that truly speaks to them.
If you are interested in learning more about campaign influence check out our free 20 minute webinar on the topic or this blog post written by our CEO.
