Difficulty measuring the success of lead generation is surprisingly widespread, even among experienced digital marketers. In fact, 46 percent of marketers cannot confidently tie marketing ROI to specific lead generation campaigns. In the data-driven world of digital marketing, that’s a remarkable number.
Although campaign delivery metrics (such as the number of impressions) and response metrics (like click-through rate) are important in understanding the penetration of a message, the real value of analytics is that they allow the management of a campaign at a much deeper level. That’s where efficiency metrics such as cost-per-contact and cost-per-MQL come into play.
At Movéo, we use these data points to focus our lead generation campaign optimization efforts, because they reveal the true effectiveness of a campaign. These metrics show when tactics that may be effective at generating contacts for the marketing database are in fact less impactful in terms of driving leads that convert to sales opportunities.
As a marketer, these ROI-focused metrics allow you to evaluate the quality rather than the quantity of leads generated. Especially in a B2B context, a small number of leads that are squarely in your organization’s target audience and are ready to buy can be far more valuable than a much larger number of unqualified or poorly matched leads.
A strong understanding of campaign ROI will benefit you and your department in two ways. First of all, as we’ve discussed, it’s a key part of understanding how your campaigns can improve. Insights into the most and least successful aspects of your lead generation efforts give you the power to identify and fix the weak links in your marketing, and replicate the most successful aspects in the future.
The ability to demonstrate ROI is just as critical to proving marketing’s worth to the C-suite. Marketing is a key aspect in the success of your organization, and if you have ever experienced pushback from leadership, you understand the need for more proof of your impact. Proper measurement and documentation of your ROI can show not only the role of marketing overall but also the need for specific initiatives, marketing software and more.
To learn more tools for success, read our newest white paper, Lead generation: Learn how to build highly effective lead generation campaigns.
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