Marketing reports may be moot after consumer behavior was so drastically impacted this year. As departments are currently preparing annual reports and 2021 budgets, it’s time to consider the impact of the pandemic on your KPIs.
End of Q4/ early Q1 is the right time to focus on determining how your prospects have reacted in this new environment. In this blog, we’ve put together some notes for your end of year marketing reports. Suggestions are based on how the pandemic may have impacted your overall lead scoring, revenue expectations, and KPIs. While we don’t yet know what 2021 will bring, we can address the possible impact for 2021.
Lead Scoring Adjustments
One of the many KPI’s that were likely impacted this year were lead scores. If you still rely on the algorithms and benchmarks you used pre-pandemic, chances are, you’ll be qualifying leads on metrics that are incorrect.
Based on everything that has happened this year in B2B, your MQL threshold may need to be higher since touchpoints may have been scored higher. For instance, asking a question at a webinar or attending multiple webinars might not mean as much since a lot of individuals may have been attending webinars for educational purposes rather than with an intent to buy. Another thing to consider – your formula for MQL should change to give certain items less weight than they would have carried in a normal environment due to the current state of the market.
Adjusting and redirecting your lead scores to capture the current market behavior, you can design timely campaigns that will extend into 2021 and beyond.
Revenue Expectations
With consumer behavior in flux, your current revenue expectations might also need tweaking. We know that many businesses could pivot and generate new sources of revenue adequately, but ensuring that each of these revenue funnels is accurate is a crucial need for your EOY reports. Making sure that you understand how your content, systems, and workflows are working together as a well-oiled machine will help with year-end reporting as it will be a better indicator of where key revenue opportunities lie.
The pandemic was able to present some opportunities, as well as threats. As soon as you can identify these, there are some quick wins that you can address concerning revenue goals. This can be done when your marketing efforts are measurable, repeatable, and scalable. Also – always be ahead of the game by using Revenue Cycle Explorer (RCE), a great tool that allows for deep analysis of your overall revenue funnel. Often considered one of the highest pinnacles of program analysis, you will be able to see your marketing channel and program effectiveness, leads by revenue stage, develop robust revenue opportunity models, and much more using this.
Insightful KPIs
The pandemic can abruptly change the potency of your marketing efforts. Now, more than ever is the best time to review your KPIs and see if they align with your marketing automation program. You don’t have to spend hours manually generating metrics and reports to analyze your business. Come up with a couple of key KPIs that you can review month over month and then benchmark these compared to last year.
Some KPIs that we recommend? These KPIs are here to “show off” the effectiveness of your marketing efforts during 2020.
- Customer Lifetime Value – how has this differed based on new potential revenue streams that you’ve created?
- Overall Online Marketing ROI – with many marketing budgets down, what have you done to maximize yours in 2020?
- Form Conversion Rates – what types of optimization have you made on your landing page and form experiences that have driven better metrics?
- Organic Search – what have you worked on to improve your overall position in your target market through non-paid means?
- Mobile Traffic – with more and more individuals at home and on their phone scrolling, how have you taken advantage of this portion of the market.
With an effective and efficient reporting system, you can quickly view your KPIs. This offers an in-depth analysis of a business channel and marketing programs. Remember, your KPIs are the mile marker of your business’ success, and after 2020, quite a few of these require re-evaluation. Additionally, this is a great year to look through some KPIs you may have ignored before, including individual marketing channel statistics, overall user behavior, among others.
Want to learn more about reporting in 2020 and some key reports that will assist you in painting a better overall marketing story for the year? Contact us at hello@digitalpi.com and we’ll be happy to discuss.