In today’s digital world, marketers have the ability to track hundreds of different inbound marketing metrics, and almost all of them measure something of some kind of value. These include organic traffic, MQL’s, SQL’s, blog, landing page, and email analytics, social media engagement and the list goes on and on. The problem is that most of these metrics mean almost less than nothing to your CFO, CEO and board.
Now don’t get me wrong, it is important to internally track the metrics that will help you make future marketing decisions, but in general, truly prove your department’s worth to your CEO, you’ve got to also report on the one metric that they care about: revenue. Though revenue is just one metric, it can give you insight into many different parts of your marketing. Here are a few non obvious scenarios in which you can use a revenue report.
Where should you invest your marketing resources?
One of the best parts of being able to track your marketing down to the very last twitter is that you are able to look back on your marketing to see where you performed well and pinpoint the areas you can improve. It’s up to you how often and when you review these metrics. It could be at the end of a campaign, at the end of a month, the end of a quarter, or at the end of the year depending on your business’ sales cycle. The best way to figure out where you succeeded in your marketing is to run a revenue report based on marketing channel.
NOTE: HubSpot customers, here is a link to a HubSpot Knowledge page that gives you step by step instruction on how to create this report
Once you have run the report and you can see where you are performing your best it’s time to dig and see what exactly caused the peaks and valleys in your campaign. Say you find that you had a stellar email marketing campaign. These are the questions you can ask to pinpoint why it was so successful.
- Did you run a new email marketing campaign?
- Did you revamp your lead nurturing strategy?
- Did you change the timing of the emails you sent?
Once you figure out what may have led to a spike in your email marketing, try it again the next month to see if you can replicate — or exceed — your results. Track your process in that channel (as well as your other channels) to help you decide where to best invest your team’s time and resources.
What content resonates with your customers?
Now that you have a better understanding of which channels are generating the most revenue for your business, you can dig even deeper and find out which piece of content is generating the most revenue. Was it that whitepaper you spent a month working on? Running this report in HubSpot can help you easily figure out the true ROI of that ebook — which could help you unlock even more budget for future ebooks you’d like to write.
After you run the report, take a look at your top performing content and see if you can pick out any trends.
- Are there trends that you see based on the most popular topics?Are there certain formats that seem to be successful in driving conversions?
- What about timing — when were these piece of content released?
You can also this report for contacts — not just companies — to see how many people were influenced by various pieces of content.
How much revenue have you generate by different personas?
So you know channels content are generating your organization revenue. Now, you can figure out how much revenue your different buyer personas are generating. Before you track the revenue generated by your personas you first need to set up your personas in in HubSpot. This gives you the ability to track the activity success of each persona. To track revenue generated by customer type, Once you have your personas all set up and running with some data, you can run a Revenue Report to see which personas are generating the most revenue.
Once you have this information you can see the amount of revenue each of your personas generates. At a basic level, you can use this information to help you make decisions such as how many resources you should invest in marketing to each persona. You can also segment this data more to get even more telling results.
- Break down that persona’s revenue data further by running reports that show the marketing channels they first came to your site through as well as the content they viewed before becoming a customer.
- By combining some of these reports mentioned above, you can get more nuanced information about the metric your executives care about most
Pro tip: By creating your inbound marketing campaigns specifcally around your buyer personas you will drive the greatest results for your company.
These are just a few of the revenue reports that you can generate for your CEO, CFO, and Board to prove ROI on marketing.
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