No matter what area of the B2B market you're involved with, change is a constant. In order to stay up to date with frequent changes and plan your marketing strategy accordingly, you should utilize B2B marketing analytics. But with the ever-expanding mix of tools and measurements, what are some of the more important trends to look at?
Here are 7 hot trends to consider when planning your analytics strategy:
1. Measuring outcomes - For B2B marketers, it's all about measuring outcome metrics. Consider some of these business results to measure:
- What and how many leads were created?
- What and how many sales were converted from qualified leads?
- How are you engaging with your customers and what leads are coming from that?
- Where are prospects coming from? Social media? Organic search results? Which are converting highest?
2. Integrated search and social metrics - There's no denying that SEO and social media go together. The benefits of leveraging content distribution and linking in the social web combined with cross linking and keyword use in your content provides both search engine and social web benefits.With the power of search optimized content and social web strategies, you should be sure you are tracking your efforts. A few tools to help with this include:
- Google Analytics - A free, but extremely powerful analytics package from Google - this gives you the power to track all your site stats and referral sources, including from social sites. Be sure and tag campaigns appropriately so you're able to capture all traffic.
- Bit.ly - If you are using a URL shortening service to push out links to your content, bit.ly is one of the most widely used. This and most other services include analytics to track how many and who are clicking on your links.
3. Platform-specific analytics - You are engaging prospects on different social platforms inside and outside of your business, but do you know what's happening? Are you measuring each tweet, blog post or other interaction? When you need to measure your platform specific engagements, consider these tools:
- Facebook page insights - Facebook has a built-in analytics system for those that run Facebook pages for business. You are able to get different metrics such as page views, interactions, quality of posts and detailed insights into your fan base.
- HootSuite - This tool is an integrated system that allows you interact through different social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and more. It also has powerful analytics as well.
- Tweetreach - A simple system that gives you a detailed report of your search term on Twitter. With this tool, you are able to discover your reach over Twitter.
- PostRank - This service monitors and collects social interactions with online content in real-time across the web. This is a good one to checkout for a great way to monitor content published on your own blog.
4. Revenue cycle analytics - There is always the pressure to measure your marketing ROI and how marketing programs impact revenue. This data is always changing and to properly measure it, you should leverage revenue cycle analytics.A powerful revenue cycle analytics system will work to touch each of the areas below:
- Revenue cycle modeling
- Gather information into one area
- Planning and forecasting
- Executive level insights
- Powerful analytics
5. More interested individuals across the organization - Marketing analytics isn't just for marketers and data crunchers. When you implement a complete marketing analytics solution, more individuals across the organization become involved. When you have detailed, actionable reports and easily accessible data, everyone around the organization takes more of an interest in making data-driven decisions that will elevate results.
6. Greater focus on taking action - Taking action is key in B2B business, but how do you know what to take action on? Most marketers know a focus on taking action is essential, and with proper B2B analytics, you have the information on what to focus business strategies and tactical plans on.
7. Create actionable goals that are realistic - Every B2B marketing forecast has goals and objectives, but how do you know if those goals are realistic? Utilizing B2B analysis, you are able to focus and predict realistic goals for your organization. Some possible goals may include the following:
- Improve engagement and conversion rates
- Increase organic search traffic to your site
- Decrease costs and improve efficiency through the lead management process
For more resources on B2B marketing analytics and how it will increase your marketing ROI, subscribe to the Modern B2B marketing Blog or follow @Marketo on Twitter.