Which KPIs Should Marketing Ops Care About?

MO Pros Founder, Mike Rizzo asks: What are some of your core KPIs as a Marketing Ops Professional?

It sparked a conversation in the MO Pros community forum that got us excited, so we decided to explore a bit further.

First off, let’s take a look at Stephen Stouffer’s response where he lists a few of his top metrics, including:

However, he goes on to say that these are specific to his unique situation, considering that marketing automation + website fall under the umbrella of marketing operations within his organization.

And that got us thinking – since no two companies are the same, the KPIs you should be tracking will be specific to your own unique scenario based on the needs of your organization. Right?

Mapping KPIs Against Organizational Goals

In that same thread, Dave Rigotti suggests that Marketing Ops goals should be aligned with that of the business and ultimately comes down to revenue growth.

Nadine Nana asks how much value we’re creating for sales and other teams within our organizations? She goes on to agree that it’s important to align with overall goals and establish shared definitions.

Bryan Daniel takes this a step further by suggesting an SLA between sales and marketing focused on opportunities created and a value per lead (based on lead quality and request type).

The goal here being to better align sales and marketing, ensuring their collective focus is on driving business growth.

A Closer Look at the Options

Okay, so we’ve established that marketing goals need to be aligned with sales and overall business objectives. That it will be different for each of us, based on our organizations, but how do we determine which KPIs will help us achieve those goals?

First, let’s take a look at our options. According to a Bizzible article, there are 3 classes of KPIs:

1) Customer journey metrics: understanding the customer journey in terms of content preference and velocity.

With this class of KPIs, we uncover details about the sales cycle, the effectiveness of content, and the influence of channels and campaigns.

• Velocity metrics – how can you increase the velocity of leads progressing through the funnel? What’s the average number of days between stage transition (by channel, campaign, and/or segment)?

• Content metrics by stage – which content influences a prospect at a particular stage in the sales funnel? Which advances them to the next?

• Number of sessions before lead/opportunity creation – how much engagement or effort is needed to create a lead or opportunity?

2) Go-to-market metrics: understanding the personas and market you serve.

These KPIs help to define and improve your go-to-market strategy. Use them to determine what content to create and where to invest more to reach target personas and accounts.

• Anonymous tracking metrics – how are you monitoring brand awareness and market penetration? How are sessions broken out by channel and region?

• Account-level metrics – Which channel or content is driving net new contacts and accounts? How is this broken out by campaign or segment?

3) Growth metrics: understanding how much business value and growth is generated by marketing.

This includes KPIs that provide information on how much growth the marketing function is influencing and driving.

• Average ROI – what is marketing’s contribution to the bottom line? What is the health of each marketing channel?

• Pipeline generated – when a lead converted to an opportunity, how are marketing touchpoints attributed?

• Revenue generated – when a deal is closed, how are marketing touchpoints attributed?

• Conversion rates – what are your conversation rates at each stage of the funnel and where are there opportunities to make an impact on growth?

Determining the Best KPIs For Your Own Organization

At this point, hopefully, you have an idea of your organization’s goals and which metrics clearly map to marketing’s contribution against achieving them. However, competing goals and initiatives tend to complicate things.

Back in the community forum, Paolo Negrini suggests measuring the impact of the Marketing Ops function using The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) model. That this may be especially useful when working on cross-functional projects with multiple milestones:

1. Focus on the wildly important
2. Lead measures vs lag measures
3. Keep track on a scoreboard
4. Weekly accountability

So, Which KPIs do YOU Care About?

Let’s keep the conversation going, shall we? What marketing KPIs do you typically measure for your organization? How has that changed because of this conversation? Let us know in the comments below or on the MO Pros forum : )

See you there!

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Source:

• https://community.marketingops.com/c/data-analytics/what-are-some-of-your-core-kpis-as-a-marketing-ops-professional-5fbfd4a139c6354ae644a0b3
• https://www.bizible.com/blog/marketing-operations-performance-metrics-list
• https://www.franklincovey.com/the-4-disciplines/