5 KPIs You Need to Measure for B2B Marketing Success

So, you’ve officially run your first marketing campaign, and now you’re ready to demonstrate to your boss how well your brilliantly crafted strategy performed. You understand how important it is to be able to tie your campaign to data that supports business metrics, but aren’t sure which key performance indicators (KPIs) will best demonstrate its value to your organization.

Not only will the right KPIs help you evaluate the overall performance and success of your current marketing campaign, but they can also be used as a benchmark when it’s time to strategize your next big marketing investment.

Below are five KPIs that we’ve found to be the most crucial to track:

1. Organic Website Traffic

Usually measured on a monthly basis, “organic website traffic” is the number of site visitors that are referred via search engines like Google or Bing. This traffic doesn’t include social media visits or clicks from paid advertisements.

Organic traffic to your website is extremely valuable, and most marketing professionals value it higher than paid traffic. High organic traffic means that people value your brand and find your content to be useful and interesting. In fact, studies show that leads resulting from SEO have a nearly 15% conversion rate—while only 1.7% of paid leads ultimately lead to conversions.

So, how can you improve your organic website traffic? As B2B marketers, it’s crucial to leverage the power of digital content—from blog posts and webinars, to downloadable resources like e-books and whitepapers. By incorporating this content onto your website, you will not only attract more visitors organically, but keep them coming back for more.

2. Click-Through Rate

Your click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage, or rate, at which visitors who see your content—such as a paid social or search ad—click through a link. It is calculated by dividing your total number of clicks by your total number of impressions.

Evaluating your CTR is incredibly important because it is the reason why you are investing in the digital advertising in the first place. Having a lower CTR on organic content can be easier to bear, but when your organization is spending valuable dollars each month on paid ads, you want to make sure they’re resonating with your audience.

In order to improve your CTR, consider the classic marketing triangle. If you’re unfamiliar, the marketing triangle consists of three M’s: Market, Message, Media. In simple terms, a business should clearly identify its target market, craft a compelling message and determine which media channels should be used to deliver that message to its target audience. By doing so, your business will greatly increase its success rate.

3. Conversion Rate

Tracking your conversion rate is extremely important, especially for B2B marketers. It can be calculated by dividing the total number of conversions by the total number of interactions during a specific time period that can be tied to a conversion.

In a nutshell, conversion rates are the key to unlocking valuable insight into how well a product and/or service resonates with your customers. For example, you may have two different e-books on your website that you use as lead magnets. One e-book may have a much higher conversion rate than the other, which indicates it’s seen as more valuable.

In order to improve your conversion rate, research is your best friend. By conducting some market research, you can determine why customers choose your brand over your competitors, and how you can further lean into this competitive advantage.

4. Return on Investment

Arguably the most important metric to your organization is the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing campaign, which measures how much money a specific activity earns as a result of the initial investment. In order to get future buy-in from your organization, you will need to demonstrate that the investment will reap dividends.

For example, if the total initial cost of running a paid social ad is $500 and you earn $15,000 back as a result, you have effectively made a $14,500 profit on your investment—or an impressive ROI of 2,900%!

When executing your marketing campaign, it’s crucial to track and evaluate your ROI. In order to do so, add up all of the expenses outlined in your campaign budget, and then divide that figure by the perceived revenue that was generated as a result. This ROI can be further improved by assessing underperforming efforts and adjusting accordingly.

5. Customer Lifetime Value

Your customer lifetime value measures the tangible worth of a customer to your business over the entirety of its relationship. For example, a customer that you’ve had a $30,000 yearly contract with over a five-year period would have a customer lifetime value of at least $150,000. This metric can also include the customer’s future expected value as well.

The reason why customer lifetime value is so important for B2B companies is a no-brainer. After all, it’s much easier to increase your bottom line by increasing the value of your contracts with existing customers—as opposed to finding new business. Plus, enhancing your existing relationships helps to supports customer retention.

In order to increase customer lifetime value, you need to provide more value to your customers. This can be achieved through improved quality of work, or by growing your contract to include a greater scope of work.

Now that you’ve identified the five most important metrics for B2B marketing success, it’s time to put them into action. Not only is your boss sure to be impressed with your marketing efforts, but these KPIs will help you get the most out of your future investments as well.