What you don’t track, you can’t control, and you don’t improve. That’s why analytic dashboards reporting on KPIs are the heartbeat of any marketing team so they can get an accurate view of the impact of their messages, campaigns and marketing spend. The faster they can unlock insights, the quicker they can respond to customer needs to make knowledgeable decisions to drive business growth.
The Salesforce 8th Edition State of Marketing Report, drawing from 6,000 marketers across 35 countries and analyzing trillions of outbound marketing messages sent using the Salesforce platform, explores how to capitalize on customers’ evolving digital-first expectations. The report finds 68% of marketers say they can analyze marketing performance in real time.
“As budgets are held under the microscope, analytics can provide marketing leaders with the insights they need to optimize spending and lower acquisition costs to prove the value of marketing. KPIs in 2023 will help organizations measure ROI and track cross-departmental metrics in commerce, service, sales, finance, and IT to gauge your company’s progress.”
Measuring what Matters
Customer success KPIs help businesses track retention performance, analyze churn rates, and understand how they utilize new growth opportunities. These metrics help adopt a proactive approach that can help leaders create better data-driven strategies based on unbiased insights created with the help of multiple data sources, including multiplying communication channels.
Adopting, tracking, and optimizing the right metrics can help you:
- Streamline and optimize onboarding processes
- Elevate account transparency for better upselling and retention rates
- Analyze and understand customer journeys to offer more value
- Track customer sentiment fluctuations for better damage (churn) control
- Improve business processes and alignment with the main goal
- Boost productivity and make CS operations more efficient
- Turn customers into brand advocates (mouth-of-word)
In the Salesforce report, revenue, customer satisfaction metrics, customer acquisition costs, marketing sales funnel (B2B base), and content engagement remain high priorities. Still, the biggest growth rate on KPIs came from tracking web/mobile analytics (23%), followed by tracking a customer’s lifetime value (20%).
Marketers in the study cite measuring marketing ROI/attribution as their number two challenge, meaning there’s still work to be done to simplify the reporting process.
B2B Marketers Drive Cross-Channel Experiences with Account-Based Marketing
The report reveals 80% of marketers say their organization leads customer experience initiatives across the business, coordinating efforts across marketing, sales, service, and commerce. To orchestrate these cross-functional programs, high-performing marketers are tapping into valuable cross-departmental metrics to glean deeper insights into the customer experience.
And because B2B customers expect a personalized journey across departments, 89% of B2B marketers use account-based marketing (ABM) platforms to deliver an integrated end-to-end experience.
However, successful ABM campaigns require complex, holistic, data-driven marketing strategies that marketers have yet to establish fully. Thirty-one percent of B2B marketers say that sharing a unified view of customer data across business units is a challenge, and 62% of business buyers say it generally feels like they’re communicating with separate departments, not one company.
Consider this:
3 Tips to Make KPIs Work for You
The report reveals that 31% of B2B marketers say getting a unified view of customer data is challenging. Calculating metrics each month or quarter can be time-consuming, but when you automate KPI tracking, you can streamline the process and give a real-time look at the company’s performance. Here’s some tips that your organization can use to make KPIs work for you.
Tip 1: Making your team aware of what you are trying to accomplish and how you are doing can help them feel engaged and motivated to help the company achieve its targets. Don’t forget to celebrate the wins and recognize the key contributors when your team has rocked your metrics.
Tip 2: Companies should revisit their KPIs at least once a year. If you are consistently successful on a certain metric, it could indicate that your goals aren’t aggressive enough. This practice allows you to replace KPIs to pursue or focus on other business objectives.
Tip 3: There is nothing wrong with driving aggressive performance. However, organizations can make the mistake of focusing on too many things at once. Instead of dividing your team’s attention across a wide range of metrics, select five to 10 that will provide the most value.
It can be difficult to identify how your teams and organizations operate without KPIs and other metrics. The KPIs you select for your business could mean the difference between outrageous success and dismal failure. Whether looking for insight into the future or evaluating past performance, KPIs provide indisputable data you need to make smarter daily decisions.
If you’re struggling to coordinate technology and business analysis with different partners and technologies, rely on OSF to simplify and accelerate the technical side of your business. Contact us today.
