B2B Marketing Accountability: 5 Ways To Prove Your B2B Marketing Efforts Are Paying Off
December 2, 2009 by: Mac McIntosh
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=19321c37-3b1d-48d8-833c-595819197dc7)
Your boss wants to see evidence that the money and resources invested in the company’s business-to-business marketing activities are really paying off. You start to sweat.
Relax. It is surprisingly easy to prove that B2B marketing is contributing to your company’s bottom line. Here’s how.
Show the relationship between your marketing and your revenue
Start by looking for sales and revenue that can be linked to marketing activities. Simply compare lists of new customers or invoices to companies or prospects in your marketing database and look for matches. You don’t have to find every sale that resulted from your marketing activities. Sometimes all it takes is one big sale to justify a campaign.
If sales haven’t closed yet, count the number of qualified leads and use estimated conversion rates and average sales size to quickly determine the sales potential of those leads. Or look at the forecasted sales in the company’s CRM system and compare them to the database of prospects, inquiries or qualified leads.
You can also send “Did you buy?” surveys to inquirers and qualified leads, using their answers to show that the prospects being targeted by your marketing are buying from you or the competition. Ask if they bought, and if so, from whom. Ask why and how much they spent. If your sample size is large enough, you can also use the answers you receive to estimate the number of sales and the amount of revenue that are represented by all the inquiries and leads you’ve generated.
Show how much you saved the company
Just give it some thought and you’ll probably come up with a list of things you’ve done to save your company money or time. For example:
- Printing and postage savings after cleaning the mailing list or delivering the company newsletter by e-mail.
- Savings accomplished by offering electronic versions of literature.
- The money you saved by eliminating non-productive marketing activities
- Time and money saved by automating the capture of Web forms and eliminating some manual data entry.
Show other ways your marketing is more effective
This can range from showing how many more prospects you reached with your marketing messages to indicating the improvements that have been made in cost per impression, cost per inquiry, cost per attendee or cost per qualified lead.
List all the marketing projects your marketing team completed
Marketers often don’t think about their own productivity when justifying the money the company invests in marketing. Unfortunately, people quickly forget what happened last month or last quarter. Or they simply have no idea what’s involved in creating a mailing or designing a new Web site.
Pointing out the number of marketing projects completed, and all the work steps involved, can be a real eye-opener to others who are completely unaware.
Always be ready to make your case
I recommend that you block out a couple of hours to create your business-to-business marketing accountability reports every month so you’ll always have up-to-date results at your fingertips. If you’re pressed for time, use an intern or temp to do it for you.
Your results may vary, but consider this …
A marketer I know recently reported to her management that awareness of their company and products among target prospects more than doubled, the cost per qualified lead delivered to sales by marketing dropped by nearly 40 percent, 58 percent of the opportunities in the sales pipeline were found first by marketing, and 48 percent of the sales closed and 62 percent of the revenue during the past 12 months came from marketing-generated leads.
The result? She received a bigger marketing budget and senior management executives no longer doubt marketing’s contribution to the company’s success.
Author: Mac McIntosh
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Guest blogger
Thank you for visiting and reading Wordzopolis Blog. I hope that you are enjoying our posts. Please feel free to comment and let us know what you are thinking. Don't forget to tell a friend about our blog. JennB2B Marketing Accountability: 5 Ways To Prove Your B2B Marketing Efforts Are Paying Off
By the end of the day each investment has to pay out, and marketing than anything else.
To measure your success is essential.
If you do not measure you can be successful but you will not know why. And more worst you can not duplicate and refine your success!
When I am asked from clients, on how to compare, if the actual results pay of? I have a very easy tip for them:
Just check out your ‘server stats’ write down the actual daily traffic.
Write also down the number of customers you can tie directly to you web activities.
Next, go to Google AdWords and type in your industry keywords, check the PPC price, and write it down.
Now, six month later, we do the same process again!
The client discovers that his traffic went up.
During the six month he was able to generate more business through the web.
He has been set into the position to tie more of his clients to his web activities.
Last but not least we multiply the actual grown (Targeted Traffic) with the actual PPC price for his industry.
And there is the ohhh ahhhh effect.
The client discovers that the sum he invested in holistic inbound marketing activities is much lower than he would have paid for PPC.
And the best thing is, this integrated system will do this on a ongoing and growing base.
Sure you should use Analytics, Lead Capture pages, etc.
Super post, Need to mark it on Digg
Thanks
Truden
Thanks for addressing an issue that marketing folks have been talking about for decades. Dr. Ramesh Rao at UT Austin is working on a second phase of research on the topic of marketing accountability. He is a finance guy first, so he approaches marketing value by attempting to link marketing expenditures to shareholder value. He claims that marketing is more important than marketers say it is, but not for the reasons they give us.
I posted a short interview with Rao here: http://iduniversity.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/closing-the-marketing-accountability-gap-an-interview-with-ramesh-rao/