The Important Important B2B Marketing KPIs You Need to Measure

You develop and implement a B2B marketing strategy with the ultimate goal of generating sales for your business. However, your marketing strategy consists of several marketing channels working together and not all of them will have sales or conversions as an objective. Because of this, you cannot use sales as the singular metric for tracking and evaluating the effectiveness of your strategy.

Instead, you must identify Important B2B Marketing KPIs that are relevant to your marketing objectives and to the marketing strategies you are using. Here is a short guide on how you can identify the right metrics to designate as the key performance indicators of your B2B marketing strategy:

How to Identify Your B2B Marketing KPIs

There are several data points you can choose from to track and evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns. However, you cannot use all of these as your KPIs when measuring the performance of your marketing strategy. Here are some tips on which metrics will best serve as your marketing strategy’s key performance indicators:

Start with your marketing objectives

The objectives of your marketing strategy often state the metrics that determine their achievement. These metrics are what you will use as the key performance indicators for these goals. For example, if you are aiming to acquire a specific number of customers for the period, the number of conversions you have made within that timeframe will be your KPI.

However, it can be difficult to identify a specific metric if the marketing goal is not specific and measurable. For example, it is impossible to measure brand awareness without specifying a particular metric. This is why it is important to formulate your marketing strategy goals with the SMART framework.

Identify important metrics in your marketing channels

You are investing time and money in the different marketing channels you are using for your business. Keeping track and evaluating the performance of each channel can help you determine if your investment in them is worthwhile and if you need to increase, decrease, or eliminate your investment. To do this, you will need to identify the important metrics of each marketing channel you use as their key performance indicators.

Keep track of relevant negative metrics in your marketing strategy

Not all marketing metrics keep track of positive events and interactions that your business has with your customers. Some metrics keep track of negative events. It is important to include important negative metrics relevant to your marketing channels among your KPIs. Keeping track of them will alert you to any problems so you can apply the necessary fixes immediately. Examples of negative marketing metrics include unsubscribes, bounce-back rates, churn rates, opt-outs, spam complaints, and non-responders.

Include B2B marketing metrics relevant to your business’ stage of growth

Companies go through stages of growth. Certain marketing metrics will be more important depending on where your business is at concerning its growth. For example, companies at the early stages of their growth focus on validating their business model while established businesses focus on optimizing the cost of acquiring a new customer and the customer lifetime value.

Moreover, meeting your goals for these metrics indicates that you have progressed towards the next stage of your business growth and are ready to change your strategy to one more appropriate for it.

Here are some metrics to consider as your KPIs based on a business’ stage of growth:

Pre-product/market fit stage – At this stage, you have an idea of the problem you are aiming to solve and a minimum viable product or service that serves as a solution for it. But, you still need to validate it with significant positive feedback from your target market. The recommended metrics to include in your KPIs are consistent qualitative feedback (reviews), relevant brand awareness metrics, and customer stickiness.
Product/market fit stage – At this stage, you can identify your ideal customers and have a group of customers that serve as references for your target market. You have figured out how to communicate to your audience to convert some of them into customers consistently. Metrics to include for your KPIs include monthly recurring revenue, renewals, churn, and customer satisfaction
Expansion stage – Your business is in the expansion stage when you have a loyal customer base and a high upsell or growth rate. Your sales cycles are shorter due to new customers finding their way to your business through organic search, direct inquiries, and customer referrals. At this stage of growth, a business is more concerned with maximizing profit from each customer and the number of customers acquired for each period. Here are the relevant metrics that businesses in the expansion stage must include in their KPIs. Cost per acquisition, average order size, lifetime value, number of customers acquired

Identify relevant lagging and leading metrics for your business

Lagging metrics measure the results or output of your marketing strategies, campaigns, or channels. These metrics give you a picture of how effective your marketing endeavors were for the month, quarter, or year being evaluated. Also, these metrics are what you would look into when it’s time to evaluate the return on investment of your marketing channels.

On the other hand, leading metrics give you an idea of the chances of your business achieving a marketing objective. You can track and influence your business’ leading metrics actively through your marketing efforts. Examples of leading metrics include daily or monthly active users, unique website visitors, sales opportunity age, rate of sales activity, and conversion rate.

Important B2B Marketing KPIs for the Different Marketing Strategies

Here are the KPIs you need to take note of categorized according to the different marketing strategies that you might use for your business:

General marketing KPIs

Sales qualified leads – These leads are ready to talk with a sales representative with the intent to purchase your offer. They have the authority to make the buying decision and have buy-in support from the other stakeholders in the business.

Conversion rate – This is the percentage of your audience who completed a desired action on your website or social media channel. This desired action can be a signup, subscription, or purchase by your customer.

Cost per lead – This is the cost for each new lead acquired by channel, campaign, or in overall spending.

Cost per customer acquisition – This is the average expense incurred before a lead converts into a customer.

Lead-to-customer conversion rate – This measures the rate of conversion of your leads into paying customers.

Customer lifetime value – This is the amount of expected revenue from one client during their time as your customer.

Net promoter score – This is a metric that estimates your customers’ happiness through a percentage scale of -100 to 100. This estimate is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters in a customer survey.

Return on investment (ROI) – This refers to the monetary value your business gains or loses compared to its spending on marketing endeavors. Since not all marketing returns have an immediate monetary value attached, you might need to calculate the equivalent monetary value for its KPIs.

Website KPIs

Website visitors – This is the total number of people visiting your website. This metric tracks the effectiveness of your several marketing campaigns in attracting visitors to your website.

Unique visitors – This is the total number of visitors visiting your website for the first time.

Bounce rate – This is the percentage of your website visitors who left immediately after looking at a single page.

Campaign traffic – This is the number of visitors brought in by a campaign (paid ads, search engines, social media, and others).

Direct traffic – This is the number of website visitors who arrived on your domain by typing or pasting your URL or clicking a bookmark in their browser, or clicking a link in a PDF, word, or any other offline document.

Referral traffic – This is a metric for visitors that came to your website from other websites (except search engines). Referral traffic can come from a social media platform and websites with your backlinks.

Return visits – This is the number of website visitors who have been to your website before.

Time on site (or session duration) – This is the average amount of time your visitors spend on your website.

Time on page – This is the time spent on one of your pages before moving on to another page or exiting your site.

Engaged time – This metric measures the time your website users are paying attention to your content. It only counts the time that users are clicking, scrolling, or using the keyboard while the page is visible on their screens.

Total conversions – This is the total number of conversions on a website for a specific action or in general.

Website conversion rate – This is the number of website visitors who make a purchase, book a consultation, signup for a free trial, or subscribe to your mailing list.

Search engine optimization (SEO) KPIs

Search visibility – This is how visible your brand is on your target market’s search engine results page.

New backlinks – This is the number of new backlinks leading to pages on your website. This is a recommended metric if you are actively building links and need to measure the success of your outreach efforts.

Number of indexed pages – This is the number of pages in your website indexed by search engines.

Organic traffic – This is the number of visitors to your website coming from search engines.

Conversions from organic traffic – This is the number of conversions made by visitors who came to your website through their search engine results.

SEO ROI – This is an estimation of the value of organic conversions that SEO activities bring to your business in contrast to their cost.

Paid media KPIs

Cost-per-click – This is an estimate of how much each click for an ad costs in a platform, app, or website.

Impressions – This is the total number of times your ad was displayed on a website, social media platform, video, or search engine results page.

Ad reach – This is the total number of people in your target market who were exposed to your ad.

Ad click-through rate – This is the percentage of clicks that your ad received from its total impressions.

Frequency – This is the average number of times your target audience is exposed to a specific ad for a campaign.

Return on ad spend – This is the net revenue you gained from your spending on each ad campaign or overall.

Email marketing KPIs

Open rate – This is the percentage of your email subscribers who are opening your emails.

Email click-through rate – The rate of clicks on your call-to-action buttons or links found in your emails.

Unengaged subscribers – This is the number of email subscribers who do not open your messages or send your messages straight to their junk folder.

Social media marketing KPIs

Social media reach – This is the number of users who have seen your organic posts or paid ads on a social media platform.

Social media followers – This is the

Social media engagement – This is the number of likes, shares, mentions, comments, and other interactions your brand has with social media users.

Do You Need Help With Your Digital Marketing Strategy?

It can be confusing with the amount of data you have access to with your B2B marketing analytics tools. But, this does not have to be the case. Here at Big Market Solution, we can help you figure out which metrics need to be part of your KPIs to gain a good picture of your B2B marketing performance. Moreover, we can also analyze your various B2B marketing strategies and determine if your KPIs are up to shape.

If you need to know more, contact us and schedule your free marketing consultation today!

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