Was Your Last Campaign Successful? 6 Questions To Ask

So you’ve launched an amazing campaign or marketing program. You nurtured this baby from conception to birth. Now, it’s time to sit back, pat yourself on the back, and watch the MQLs roll in… or is it?

There’s so much more to a successful campaign than a solid plan and execution. You have to set strategic goals and track the right metrics. Then, there’s always the issue of how leads are handled once they are passed to sales.

The sad reality is that almost half (49%) of B2B firms limit marketing to a tactical role within the business, rather than a strategic one. Just pump out those programs and fill the top of the funnel with more leads. This is a huge missed opportunity. Marketing can be a huge strategic lever for B2B organizations by focusing on the right campaign outcomes. But with so many metrics to choose from, it can be hard for B2B marketers to know what to focus on in order to ensure those leads they are filling the funnel with are the highest quality ones.

After launching your next big campaign, ask yourself these 6 questions to make sure you’re keeping your eye on the prize and setting yourself up for future success.

Question #1: Did you reach your ideal customers?

Having your message reach eyeballs is great…but are they the right ones? Any campaign will fall flat if it doesn’t reach the right people. Measuring the percentage of responses from your target personas and accounts is critical when determining the success of any campaign.

Knowing who the right people are takes some work. The best way to paint a detailed picture is to build out your ideal customer profile (ICP). Here on the PathFactory marketing team, we did this by working closely with sales to analyze a specific cohort of current and past customers, and late stage opportunities. We then uncovered a subset of firmographic, psychographic, and technographic attributes shared by these types of accounts since they are the ones we’re most likely to have success with.

Once you’ve built out your ICP, you can cross-reference leads generated by your campaign to know if it attracted the right type of eyeballs. The ones that are most likely to turn into high value customers.

Question #2: How engaged are the leads generated from this campaign (and how do you know if it’s “good”)?

Ok this is a 2-part question but both parts are equally important to consider.

The B2B status quo for measuring “engagement” is typically clicks, downloads, form fills, etc. However, these data points don’t actually give you any information of how engaged a prospect actually is. Truly savvy marketers know it’s what happens after the click or download that matters most.

Time spent on the destination content and the number of assets consumed in a single session (also known as the binge rate) are true engagement metrics. They indicate a prospect’s genuine interest in your message, product, and solution and are far more powerful indicators than measuring vanity metrics like the ones mentioned above. But how do you know how much consumption is “good”…

It’s just as important to consider time spent as it is to consider the type of asset you’re measuring engagement on. 1 min spent viewing a 2-min video is far more valuable than 1 minute spent on an eBook. To truly realize the power of measuring content consumption, compare consumption time with how much time it should take to read or watch the piece of content. Obvious with video length vs view time, but we don’t always consider this for text-based assets.

Questions #3: Did the content do its job?

Only 41% marketers report having clarity on content marketing success. That’s less than half. How can you know if your campaigns are working if you can’t gauge whether or not the content itself is working? Understanding which pieces of content your leads are actually engaging with is powerful intel for marketers. You can use this insight to optimize existing campaigns and improve future ones.

The Adobe marketing team uses content insight to improve customer marketing campaigns. They look at how customers are engaging with onboarding content to improve their experience and make sure they have what they need to get the most out of their investment. As Adobe Product Marketing Manager Joe Klinker explains: “The biggest benefit of content insight is the deactivation of content. I can see when it’s not being leveraged correctly. I provide customers with a lot of vital information about their investment and I need to know if they aren’t reading it. Engagement data (or lack thereof) allows us to understand our customer’s experience and find new ways to get them the information they need.”

Questions #4: What are the quality of the leads generated from this campaign?

This one seems obvious at first glance. Tracking MQL-to-SQL conversion rates through the funnel seems like a no-brainer. However, the definition of ‘quality’ varies greatly from marketing team to marketing team.

Can a prospect simply click on a few things to become qualified or is the bar set higher? Forward-thinking marketers score leads based on how much time someone spends with their content. They not only track time spent, but also exactly which pieces of content and how many they’re engaging with. An MQL is only generated if someone reaches a threshold of consumption (or binges) in a single session.

Shifting the focus to what ‘quality’ really means is having a transformative effect on marketing outcomes. Take Kareo, for example. They doubled conversion rates by reimagining their entire lead scoring model to focus on quality of engagements rather than just actions like clicks. You can learn more about how they did this here.

Questions #5: Did this campaign “show you the money?”

At the end of the day you have to prove that your marketing efforts are moving the needle, so to speak. Tracking the pipeline and closed-won revenue attributed to your campaign is vital to getting executive buy-in (and budget to launch more amazing programs in the future). According to Hubspot, marketers who calculate ROI are 1.6X more likely to receive more budget, yet almost half (43%) say proving it is a top challenge.

According to Bizible, revenue and ROI is the ‘north star’ metric for many marketers. And a small change in ROI can have a large impact on the bottom line. It’s important to focus on lower funnel metrics when painting a holistic picture of your campaign.

In order to have a chance at making a positive impact when it comes to ROI, you have to answer this final question:

Questions #6: Does sales know how to follow up with these leads?

Supporting sales for the best follow-up is essential for achieving sales and marketing alignment, and maintaining healthy lines of communication.

If 70% of the buying process is complete by the time a lead reaches sales, sales reps need as much knowledge about the interaction between the prospect and the content as possible so they aren’t going into the conversation blind. It’s important for marketers to gives sales insight they need to close the deal – insight like how how much time the person spent with each piece of content and what topics they were most interested in. This is data you can capture in your lead scoring model and also serve in your CRM to paint a fuller picture of the prospect’s interest and interaction with your company.