6 B2B Digital Marketing Metrics Service Businesses Should Measure

With typically longer sales cycles and multiple stakeholders at play, there’s no dollar-in-dollar-out formula to good quality and a good quantity of leads. 

Sales teams participating heavily in the pre-sales process also makes it harder to justify chunky media budgets. However, there are some indicators of success that we just can’t ignore. 

Expanding your organic first-party database is growing in importance with the debate around the use of third-party cookies. Smart marketers know that it’s imperative to grow a subscription base that they can nurture via email. 

Each month, you’re likely to lose a part of your database as they unsubscribe, move companies and make their email addresses obsolete, or just lose interest and need in your B2B services.

We recommend measuring the number of contacts you generate Month-on-Month or if your business is seasonal, quarter-on-quarter, sorted by source. This will give you clarity on which channels are “working” and which require more attention.

A lead in this report is defined as someone who makes a genuine business enquiry (consider: an inbound phone enquiry or Contact Us form submission) vs take a middle-of-funnel action (consider: downloading an ebook or registering for a webinar).

For many marketing teams, this is the #1 KPI.

An opportunity is a lead with an associated dollar value that’s been passed on to the sales team to nurture and close. 

Essentially, this report will help you answer the golden question - ‘How many leads does marketing need to generate one deal?’

Based on sales targets of your team and the average deal size, the sales team can determine how many opportunities they need to hit their target. The Lead to Opportunity Conversion Rate should then be used to reverse engineer your KPI - the number of leads you need to generate on a month-on-month basis for the sales team to hit goals. 

This is perhaps the most important metric for any B2B marketing team. 

Since only a fraction of your web traffic converts on your site as a subscriber or lead, we recommend keeping an eye on your website traffic Month-on-Month by source.

This metric will help you ensure that your SEO campaign, Paid Search, Paid Social campaigns are driving traffic to your site as intended. A sudden drop in website users is a quick prompt for a site health check - confirming that Google is crawling your site and that there are no broken links floating around.

When it comes to paid campaigns, you can be more surgical with your digital marketing spend. Track your CPA per channel Month-on-Month (or more frequently, depending on your business).

This metric will help you dive deeper into those channels and make smart decisions based on campaign performance; when to pause certain campaigns, where to reduce or increase or decrease media spend and in certain cases, when to optimise the copy of your ads and landing pages.

You can’t ignore email marketing when it comes to B2B service marketing. Emails are the most reliable way to stay top-of-mind with your prospects; more so when it takes longer for them to sign on the dotted line. 

The three metrics that are most widely used include - Open Rate, Click Through Rate and Unsubscribe Rate. All three metrics indicate how relevant your brand, service and email message are to your prospects. 

Be sure to measure automated nurturing emails separately from manual/broadcast emails. The first automated follow-up emails after a user downloads a resource are likely to have significantly higher engagement than a broadcast email sent to a larger audience. 

At Rocket, we collaborate with clients to agree on specific digital marketing KPIs and work towards those specific goals via SEO, PPC Advertising and Social Media Ads. Check out our case studies on how we’ve achieved award-winning marketing results for B2B clients like Upguard, AV Lawyers, Amazon, Bio-Molecular Systems and Rezdy.