Business KPIs and their role in B2B marketing
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of marketing strategies and actions , as well as for supporting accurate decisions by company management. Digital has brought with it countless benefits, but has also created new challenges, first of all the multiplication of data and potential performance indicators. Any marketer knows (and often uses) hundreds of standard indicators, each of which is linked to one or more steps in the lead life cycle , or the relationship path between the company and its customer, potential or consolidated.
Today, companies have access to huge volumes of information, which also derive from the application of increasingly advanced data analysis techniques. This makes it even more important to select KPIs based on the objectives that the company sets itself , KPIs that must flow into dashboards that are easy to interpret and be subject to continuous updating. Extending monitoring excessively only determines a waste of resources.
Lead Lifecycle KPIs
In this study , in addition to highlighting some of the KPIs most used by marketers, we have underlined how they pass through the entire life cycle of a lead , from the moment they are a simple visitor to the company website to the conversion into a buyer, which in B2B presupposes a rather complex and articulated sales pipeline . An important task for marketing specialists is to break down the lifecycle into its phases and identify, for each of them, the indicators of greatest interest.
Website/social channels visit : time spent, engagement rate, social followers;
From Lead to MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) : conversion rate of the site and of the individual landing pages, ratio between leads and MQL;
From MQL to SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): nurturing email open rate, churn rate, engagement, quantity of interactions, MQL/SQL ratio, response rates;
From SQL to Sales: Relationship between SQL and opportunity and between this and actual sales.
Despite the above indications, it is important to keep in france whatsapp number data 5 million mind that there is no set of KPIs that is valid for all companies . Its definition always depends on the strategy and its objectives, the specific campaign and the return that you want to obtain.
Business KPIs and Return on Investment
Performance indicators are also used to understand the impact of marketing strategies on the company's business , which requires the definition and use of higher-level KPIs than those mentioned. Specialist indicators measure the effectiveness of individual activities, such as the email conversion rate or the cost per single lead, as well as the company's ability to accompany the customer along the funnel; systemic indicators identify the impact of strategies on the business, focusing for example on increasing sales or the average customer value. Combining the two types of indicators provides a holistic picture available to company management, starting from the CEO to digital marketing specialists.
Two very important indicators for evaluating the effectiveness of B2B marketing activities are the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) .
Customer Acquisition Cost is the cost incurred by the company to acquire a new customer . It is obtained by dividing the investments in marketing and communication by the quantity of customers acquired. To be particularly effective, the CAC should take into account the value of each customer.
