To craft a results-guaranteed marketing strategy, it’s crucial to balance qualitative insights with quantitative analysis.
Numbers alone are superficial metrics; they may reveal patterns but not the underlying motivations or sentiments that drive consumer behavior. When your team relies solely on quantitative data, they risk overlooking the emotional connections and personal reasons that attract people to a brand or sway them to favor one product over another.
However, solely focusing on qualitative data, such as interview anecdotes, can be restrictive. While these narratives are rich in detail, they may not reflect the broader market reality.
A robust marketing strategy demands a harmonious blend of both data types, resulting in a well-rounded, evidence-based marketing strategy with the power to guarantee results.
Let’s start with one of the most essential pieces of quantitative data: a marketing performance audit. This audit should include an objective breakdown of what strategies have and haven’t worked during the previous year; which investments paid off and which were wasted; which strategies require additional testing and which you should torch; and, most importantly, where there are optimizations that could boost your MROI. It’s important that your audit compares your performance to both industry benchmarks and your own performance over time.
Branding and Messaging
Your branding and messaging play a significant role in shaping customer perceptions. Assess how well they resonate with your target audience. Does your positioning break through with your target market? Is it contributing to brand loyalty? Is it driving conversions? To determine this, evaluate the consistency of your messaging across channels and how well it aligns with the needs and values of your audience by asking them in your upcoming customer and prospect survey. Examine conversion rates and attribution data to understand how your messaging influences customer decision making and the overall conversion process.
Marketing Disciplines
Next, assess your marketing performance by discipline. Compare your results to the previous year’s baseline to help you assess growth or regression. Benchmark against industry standards and competitors to gain insights into your relative position. Disciplines to evaluate include:
Website
- Website traffic: Measure the number of visitors, page views, and unique visitors.
- Conversion rate: Track the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form.
- Heat map: Track visitors’ website behavior based on where they most commonly click and scroll on your site through a process called heat mapping, which uses visual overlays to highlight the areas of highest user engagement. This visual representation helps you identify which sections of your website attract the most attention and which may need optimization.
SEO
- Organic search traffic: Measure the number of visitors who find your website through unpaid search results.
- Keyword rankings: Track the position of your website for important keywords.
- CTR (click-through rate): Monitor the percentage of users who click on your search engine listings.
- Lead generation: Track the number of leads generated through organic marketing efforts.
The most efficient way to track your SEO performance is to leverage a comprehensive SEO analytics tool that can provide a centralized dashboard where you can monitor organic search traffic, keyword rankings, CTR, and lead generation metrics in real time.
Content marketing
- Content engagement: Measure how users interact with your content, such as time on page and social shares. Understand which medium is driving traffic to your most important content pages.
- Lead generation: Track the number of leads generated through content marketing efforts.
Social media
Assess the following for each platform:
- Follower growth: Measure the increase in followers on social media platforms.
- Engagement rate: Monitor likes, comments, shares, and clicks on social media posts.
- Conversion rate: Track the percentage of social media users who take a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter.
- Lead generation: Track the number of leads generated through organic social media efforts.
- Social media advertising: If you’re running paid social media ads, evaluate the following:
- Ad impressions: Measure how often your ads are viewed.
- CTR: Monitor the percentage of users who click on your social media ads.
- Conversion rate: Track the percentage of ad clicks that result in a desired action, such as completing an online form.
Email marketing
- Open rate: Measure the percentage of email recipients who open your emails.
- CTR: Monitor the percentage of email recipients who click on links within your emails.
- Conversion rate: Track the percentage of email recipients who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase.
PPC (pay-per-click) advertising
- CTR: Monitor the percentage of users who click on your ads.
- Conversion rate: Track the percentage of ad clicks that result in a desired action, such as downloading a free online resource from your site.
- ROAS (return on ad spend): Measure the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising.
- Search impression share: Measure the share of targeted searches you receive.
Marketing automation
- New lead volume: Measure how many total unique new leads visit your website.
- Customer journey progression: Measure how leads move through the ideal user journey experience—the results of which are evidenced by the conversion rate at each of your ascending offer tiers.
- Email campaign performance: Monitor the effectiveness of email campaigns in nurturing leads through this marketing funnel.
- MQLs (marketing qualified leads: leads that have engaged with company marketing efforts and are deemed to be more likely to make a purchase than other leads): Track the number of leads that meet specific criteria and are ready for sales engagement.
When my team conducts Marketing Clarity Assessments for our clients, we are struck by how often there is misalignment between the strategies and channels where a company spends and those that most effectively drive sales. Armed with the data-driven insights from our assessments, we help each company reallocate its budget toward the marketing strategies that will reap more profitable outcomes.
Pitfalls
When building a marketing performance audit, be sure to avoid these four common pitfalls.
Avoid making excuses: Allowing your team to make excuses for underperforming marketing efforts can hinder progress. Instead of identifying areas for improvement, this approach deflects responsibility and prevents constructive analysis and improvement. An honest assessment of marketing performance allows for the identification of issues and the development of strategies to overcome challenges.
Avoid bias: A lack of objectivity can lead to a biased analysis and skewed perspective, which may result in the misinterpretation of data or the reinforcement of preconceived notions and potentially flawed decision making. Avoid assumptions and evaluate data and outcomes impartially or hire a market research partner to do it for you.
Don’t skip the benchmarks: Without benchmarking against industry standards or competitors, it’s challenging to gauge the relative performance of marketing efforts. This limits insights into where improvements are needed. Benchmarks provide a basis for comparison and more informed decision making.
Avoid analysis paralysis: Overanalysis, overthinking, and excessive data gathering can lead to indecision and delayed action, which can result in missed opportunities. Effective marketing analysis strikes a balance between thorough examination and timely decision making.
Download our free marketing performance audit template, and start getting clarity on how to use your marketing to break through the noise.
By Lori Turner-Wilson, RedRover CEO/Founder, Internationally Best-Selling Author of The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes
Taking Action
Documenting processes is one of hundreds of best practices found in The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes — the playbook that middle-market B2B CEOs and marketing leaders lean on to scale. Backed by a groundbreaking research study, this book offers time-tested best practices, indispensable KPIs for benchmarking, insights on where your dollars are best spent, and, above all, the proven 12 BattlesTM Framework for generating guaranteed marketing outcomes. The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM is a battle-hardened approach to becoming an outcomes-first leader who’s ready to shake up the status quo, invest in high-payoff market research and optimization, and — yes — even torch what’s not serving your endgame. Download more than 50 templates, scripts and tools from the book on the Battle Reader Hub.
If you’d like to talk about how to build a marketing engine that delivers predictable results — whether you want to build it yourself or tag in our team to lead the way — we’d be delighted to help you get started.
