In order to create predictable marketing campaigns, it’s necessary to build on an existing foundation of data. As a marketer, you need to be able to look back on the successes and failures of past campaigns to determine how to maximize your marketing time and spend in the future.
However, you can do better than that. If you’re a marketer who wants to ensure that your department is a key business driver, you can and should forecast your metrics to provide insight into likely financial outcomes of your marketing efforts. Today, we are looking at three ways marketers like you can forecast your next campaign.
There’s a good chance that your business already has a revenue goal for the next quarter or month. By aligning your forecasting with business growth goals, you’ll be able to prove your contribution and perhaps more importantly, set yourself up for maximum growth. A strong metric to forecast is average revenue per sale, which marketing can influence by changing targeting strategies and tactics.
Lenskold Group’s 2011 Marketing ROI Study found that among the 77% of marketers who were forecasting metrics, those who tracked sales opportunities reported higher company growth overall. However, revenue isn’t the only way to track how marketing influences sales. Ensure you are tracking multi-touch attribution of leads and noting how marketing has contributed to the development of sales qualified leads (SQLs). Multi-touch attribution is, at its core, an attempt to outline the buyer’s journey through data. Building a system that allows you to see if and how your marketing efforts have reached a lead, and how marketing is working to move them down the funnel toward sales won’t just help you understand how your marketing campaigns are performing today. It will also help you plan for the future.
Measuring opportunity influence can be difficult: it involves determining how previous touches from multiple departments have influenced a lead’s movement down the funnel, and the numbers can become inflated if not handled properly. However, when this information is used appropriately, it can be a great tool to help you see how players from various areas of your company are influencing buyers’ decisions in the past, present and future.
There’s no doubt that choosing which KPIs to monitor can be difficult. While it’s easy to consistently measure the same things, taking a step back and setting up KPIs that allow you to understand current performance and forecast future results will give you a leg up in delivering value and demonstrating your ROI.
Photo Credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr Creative Commons
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