Marketing without analytics is like a shot in the dark. When running campaigns, tracking incoming data and insights to see whether your efforts and investments are paying off is paramount. But what numbers should you be tracking in a B2B setting where the audiences are very specific and almost every purchase requires previous negotiations?
B2B marketing analytics require a particular approach, and we’ll discuss its ins and outs in this article with the help of our marketing experts.
Table of Contents
About B2B Marketing Analytics
As the name implies, B2B analytics refers to the process of gathering, organizing, and scrutinizing the marketing data you’ve gathered from campaigns, shedding light on insights that are indicative of your overall marketing performance.
The data can be gathered with the help of different analytics tools, enabling you to pinpoint areas where you can improve your campaign and get better results in the future.
What Can You Gather From B2B Web Analytics?
Marketing analytics allow you to learn so much about your campaigns. Still, there are three main insights you can extract from your data that will benefit different areas of your business.
Client-Business Interactions
One of the most important benefits you can gain from B2B analytics is the knowledge of how your clients interact with your company. When you go over the data gathered from different marketing platforms and campaigns, you can better understand what prospects do when engaging with your business and how they discovered it.
Analyzing these insights allows you to better understand your audience: you will have a better idea of what draws them to your company, where they are coming from, what information intrigues them, what content they like to consume, and more.
For instance, when studying the data, you may find that your SEO campaigns drive the most website traffic, but your newsletters have the best ROI out of all of your campaigns. You may also discover that PPC initiatives are your best-performing campaigns for form submission completion. With this data, you may choose to optimize your newsletter campaigns, put more money into PPC, or seek ways to drive even more traffic and conversions from SEO.
Simply put, by understanding how other companies interact with you online, you can adjust your marketing campaigns to improve engagement.
Potential Prospect Struggles
B2B web analytics also help you understand where your prospects may be struggling in your sales funnel. Even if you are sure that your ad campaigns are foolproof, and your website has no navigation issues, there still might be something that you couldn’t have predicted.
When monitoring your analytics, you can see where potential clients stop interacting with your business or drop out from your funnel. Through further investigations, you can also uncover the challenges they may be facing that lead them to abandon your site or stop taking further action, enabling you to remedy the issue.
Let’s say that your PPC ads have exceptionally high clickthrough rates but most prospects seem to go inactive once they arrive at your landing page. With analytics and other solutions such as heat maps, you may uncover that your call to action needs to be optimized to generate more clicks, or that your copy needs a complete overhaul.
Best-Performing Marketing Strategies
By leveraging B2B marketing data, you can also pinpoint your most effective marketing strategies. You can see which campaigns drive the most engagement, and which approaches improve your company’s bottom line the most.
In a B2B setting, your ultimate goal is to implement strategies that help you achieve your business goals while nurturing existing client relationships and setting up a clear pathway for prospects to become clients. The latter is especially important, as the B2B close cycle can be particularly long (between one and three months on average), meaning that you need to invest in sustainable strategies that will continuously bring back prospects to your business.
Knowing your best-performing strategies can help you make more actionable decisions to help you achieve the desired results.
The Benefits of Tracking B2B Marketing Data
Why should you bother tracking your B2B marketing metrics? Below are some of the obvious benefits of keeping tabs on your campaigns’ performance.
Smarter Decision Making
As hinted above, with the help of metric tracking, you can make data-backed decisions that will surely improve your current or future campaigns and improve your company’s bottom line across the board. From creating a better social campaign, through improving SEO and web design, to better product development, making decisions based on data allows you to maximize every budget.
Making changes on pure gut feeling may help you in some areas, but those based on analytics will ensure that you get the best ROI with every strategy, driving more revenue and closing deals with more clients.
Improved Customer Experiences
Another major benefit of regularly reviewing B2B marketing data is that you can use your findings to improve client experiences. As explained earlier, analytics can assist in pinpointing the areas where prospects and clients struggle the most in the sales funnel. In addition to fixing these issues, data can also help you better understand what engages your target audience the most.
This will allow you to create a better content marketing strategy that resonates more with your target market, generating more awareness, and driving more traffic to your site. Data can also help you identify other processes you can improve, from price negotiations, through logistics, to customer support.
Delivering positive experiences online and offline is crucial for turning leads into clients and keeping your current clientele happy. Negative customer experiences can potentially cost more than a few negative online reviews and angry emails. They can keep prospects from turning into clients and may turn away longtime partners too.
While lost clients result in a measurable loss, the reputational damage negative experiences can bring to your brand can only be estimated. It entails all lost potential clients who, despite being ideal prospects, never clicked on your ads due to your brand’s tarnished reputation.
Improved Marketing Strategies
As mentioned earlier, with the help of B2B marketing data, you can gain critical insights into your current campaigns and marketing strategies. The data can help you adjust your approaches to maximize your results and optimize budget allocation.
Let’s say that your content marketing strategy has the most engagement on your listicle pages. Having that data enables you to focus more on this type of content to enhance engagement even further and improve your online visibility in the process.
All in all, analytics can help you improve your ongoing strategies, helping you boost revenue and better returns for your efforts.
Must-Have B2B Marketing Analytics Services
But how can you get the most out of your B2B marketing data? You can leverage several services, along with expert help, to maximize the value of your insights. Here are the two most common data analysis options that can help improve your marketing tactics.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics can help you look at the performance of your PPC and SEO campaigns, uncovering valuable data that can help you improve your efforts. These services will usually include:
- Tracking setup for Google Analytics
- Setting up customized goals, unique for your business
- Monthly performance reports
- Conversion funnel setup and analysis
If you opt for Google Analytics consulting, experts can also help you identify the most valuable relevant keywords for your business to drive more traffic, help improve page rankings and more, to get the most out of your online visibility.
For PPC, experts can help you get more detailed PPC reports and identify the keywords that would generate the most leads. Having this data available can help you implement better PPC practices which can in turn lead to improved conversion rates and better ad budget optimization.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
CRO is another area where you can highly benefit from tracking B2B marketing data. This is an effective marketing strategy that revolves around optimizing your marketing initiatives to take direct action on your website. These can be anything from subscribing to your newsletter after viewing a service presentation video to becoming a client.
By working with conversion rate optimization rate experts, you can expect:
- Clickstream analytics and heatmap testing
- Conversion tracking code setup
- Goal funnel setup
The insights gained from these services can be used to optimize your conversion processes and improve the results of your lead-generation efforts. CRO analytics can help you tweak your forms, web pages, and other marketing strategies to drive more results with the help of data.
Finishing Thoughts on B2B Marketing Analytics
To bring it all together, data drives growth by optimizing your marketing campaigns and improving branded interactions with your prospects throughout the B2B sales cycle. Analytics also enables you to nurture your relationships with existing clientele, which is essential for scaling your business.
By tracking the right data, you can improve every aspect of your online presence and establish yourself as a reputable company that’s worth your clients’ attention.
However, data analytics can be overwhelming, so we highly recommend partnering up with a seasoned B2B marketing agency to get the analytics that matter most to you. These experts can also help you implement the necessary changes to your current strategies, ensuring that you get the most out of the partnership.
B2B Marketing Analytics FAQs
1. Can you track marketing metrics by yourself?
Yes, you can track your B2B marketing data alone. However, partnering with seasoned experts makes more sense, as they have more experience with identifying the right data and implementing it into your current campaigns or creating new campaigns based on the reports. By partnering with consultants, you can also focus on other areas of your business and leave marketing to the experts.
2. Can you do marketing based on trends and instinct?
While making decisions based on instincts can sometimes yield short-term results, it’s rarely a sustainable approach in marketing. Following trends can be useful, however, without data-based decisions, you can’t maximize the benefits of the trends you are following.
3. Is data important for creating a marketing strategy?
Data is crucial when you want to create an effective B2B marketing strategy. Data provides you with the necessary insight into campaign performance, client behavior, and market trends, helping you rely on what works and avoiding guesswork. While good campaigns are also often creative, data is essential to coming up with tactics that maximize the potential of said creativity.
