Keeping Score: Marketing Success Metrics for Companies Running on EOS

Marketing is an investment in your business’ growth. Your marketing function should be creating brand awareness, generating demand for your offerings, bringing in high-quality leads, and helping your sales force more efficiently close deals – but marketing can also be costly.

That is why you should carefully measure the success of your marketing efforts so you feel confident about the return on your investment. Scorecards are essential tools that enable the success of all companies running on EOS. Marketing scorecards, specifically, are a great way to detect trends, spotlight breakdowns, and provide a barometer that tells you if your marketing efforts are “working” or not. Scorecards can help you take corrective action and adjust your efforts to optimize your marketing spend.

What should you be measuring with your marketing scorecard?

Every company is different. How they go to market, their business model, their commercial activity, their long-term business strategy, etc. Therefore, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing scorecards. What an e-commerce company measures vs. a large industrial B2B firm could be completely different. The same is true for startups vs. established enterprise-level companies. Your marketing strategy should tie closely to your business strategy.

How do you determine what is suitable for your company’s marketing scorecard? Ask yourself the following:

• What is essential to your company in the next five years, 12 months, and quarter?
• What do you need to do to make those things happen?
• What can be accurately tracked and reported on?
• What will marketing’s role be in helping the organization achieve those goals?

Once you have explored those questions, you should be on the right track to knowing the essential things that need to be measured.

Consider leading indicators vs. lagging indicators

Revenue is, of course, the granddaddy of all marketing metrics. It should be on your marketing scorecard. The problem with revenue as a metric is that it is a lagging indicator and, therefore, is not informative for guiding corrective actions. Revenue is the byproduct of a lot of other actions. Those are the leading indicators. For instance, let's say you have a six-month sales cycle on average with an 80% close rate on opportunities in your pipeline. Now, for some reason, you see your leads drop by 50%. You can expect that you will see a 50% dip in your revenue in six months. Not good, but it helps you forecast revenue better and explain your current performance.

In marketing, there are a lot of leading indicators to consider. Some that we work with commonly with our clients are:

• Brand impressions
• Website engagement
• Social media engagement
• Email marketing engagement
• Sales and marketing qualified leads
• Content downloads
• Advertising performance

There are many subsets to all of the categories listed above.

Reporting the numbers — scorecard visibility

Having an abundance of leading indicators is a blessing and a curse. One issue we see with companies running on EOS is that many leading indicators make their way to the management scorecard. Your marketing team should own their numbers and report on them in their L-10 meetings, and the ones that matter to the management team should make their way to the Management L-10. Visionaries and Integrators shouldn’t be looking at email open rates and click-through rates. It’s easy to get bogged down in the numbers that don’t matter to the leadership team of your organization. Still, your marketing people should be looking very closely at all of them to explain the performance of the numbers that do matter to the management team.

That is why we recommend having a marketing section on the management team scorecard with 2-3 key performance indicators (KPIs) along with a separate marketing scorecard that your marketing team owns. For instance, new website sales qualified leads (SQLs) are something that many companies want visibility on at the management level. Here’s why. Let’s say there was a major increase in SQLs on the management scorecard. It raises the question — “What happened?” If marketing can say, “We launched a new advertising campaign targeting a new market segment,” that is news you can use. If no one is watching the leading indicators, lagging indicators are mysterious and seem chaotic. (See figures 1 and 2 for examples of marketing and management scorecards.)

What’s your Number?

The various marketing team members should be responsible for reporting and owning their numbers. For instance, the person in charge of your social media should be responsible for determining the most important metric for the company, be it new followers or some aggregate score such as LinkedIn Engagement Score. The same goes for any other specialists on your marketing team. If you have a small team, let’s say one person, then have that person work with the appropriate marketing partners to provide the metrics they need. Have them own the one metric that matters most for each channel they are working with.

Bringing it together

Once you have all of the metrics, load them into your scorecards and report on them for a few weeks. Look at the scorecard critically and ask yourself the following questions:

• Is this data useful?
• Is it giving me insights into the progress of our key initiatives?
• Can we delete some of the data that isn’t contributing?
• Do we need key information that could provide deeper insights?

Adjust the scorecard accordingly and test drive it for a few more weeks. Once you have dialed it in, continue to report consistently and track the numbers over time. This is where you will get the most significant impact from your scorecard and, ultimately, your business.