The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: How to Measure Industrial Marketing Success.

Measuring industrial marketing success

The tough news for most marketing professionals in this digital era is that they can no longer hide behind subjective results. Today’s marketing and business development ecosystems are data-driven and entirely measurable. The B2B marketer who tries to justify his price tag by helping you “build a stronger brand image” is just taking your money.

Today, marketing results must be tangible to be credible.

In the earlier section of this guide called “Planning for results before choosing tactics,” we looked at how to set goals for each of the following:

· Revenue.

· Sales-qualified leads.

· Total new contacts.

· Visitor-to-lead conversation rate.

· Website traffic.

When you take that critical step of establishing tangible goals before you build your marketing plan, you naturally put benchmarks in place against which you can measure results. Have your reached each of these targets? And most importantly, have you met your revenue goal?

Tools for measuring marketing results

Thankfully, today a plethora of measurement tools exists for marketers (from free to very expensive) that serve a variety of purposes. The table below outlines a few of our favorite tools and what they help you measure.

Data is useless unless you take action

Tools that help you collect and interpret data make it easy for us to say, “Awesome, this worked” or “Dang, this didn’t work.” But that’s not enough. Data collection and analysis must ultimately be used to hold your marketer accountable and enable positive change. If something didn’t work, why? What went wrong? Can we correct our tactical approach or do we need to revisit our higher-level strategy? How about the things that are working? What did we do right? Where can we replicate those successful strategies and tactics?

An effective marketing plan is always in flux. The smartest marketers deploy their strategy, collect data, interpret the results and refine on a consistent basis. The tools above are designed to help you do just that.