How would you define the difference between metrics, analytics, and insights in the context of Account Based Marketing strategy?

• Metrics are the data points you are measuring the success of the campaign around (either leading or lagging indicators). This can be # of meetings from your account list, # of campaign responses per account, # of impressions or CTR by account, # of opportunities, $ pipeline generated, etc. Any goal you’re measuring yourself on.
• Analytics is the process of acquiring Insights from the data. Why should the team care about these metrics?
• How are those metrics driving the business?
• What action items can we take from here?
• How will we apply these learnings to future campaigns?

What a great question. I never thought about data in this way. Thanks for forcing me to think through the differences as it relate to KPIs vs. data to help inform vs. pure noise.

Metrics: These are the key performance indications that, you as a marketer, should evaluate your programs and your teams against. At the end of the day our job as marketers is to drive revenue alongside our go-to-market partners. Key metrics I've outlined in another AMA question that is worth mentioning here:

• What’s the revenue impact we are driving - early indicators include what’s our contribution to pipe generation

• How are we helping our seller build relationships? These can be measured in the form of marketing responses or event attendance and executive engagement from decision makers in our ABM accounts (ie. VP+)

• How are we aiding in contact acquisition by account? Not only are we driving new contacts for the sellers to build new relationships with but is marketing identifying the “change agents” or decisions that are advocates of your brand who can then become a champion for you during a deal.

I'm going to group Analytics and Insights together because analytics to me is the data that backs up (or inform) the insights.

Analytics: What problem are you trying to solve for? You have to have succinct questions before you (or submit a request to your analytics team) dig into the data to pull analytics. Analysis paralysis is the cause of unnecessary cycles and it will lead to dead ends.

Insights: These are an individual or a group's point of views or someone's analysis based on the analytics being pulled. It is a hypothesis backed by data to gain understand of your business.

Here's my thinking process when solving for a specific hotspot for the business and how I would go about looking for the analytics and surfacing insights.

Problem/hotspot: Account X is not hitting the ACV target. Why?

Logic: "Analytics is showing us that the pipe gen is flat YoY and we are behind target attainment by X percentage points - the trend was surfaced up last week as well." The hypothesis here is that we are behind on pipe gen, an early indicator that we'll miss our revenue target. This requires an action/get back to health plan right away.

In search of insights these are the questions I would answer and gather the analytics for:

• Are we simply not piping enough?

• What's the close rate/win rate this quarter compare to last quarter and last year (is the hypothesis we're losing to a competitor or is this an enablement problem?)

• Is the pipe stuck in a certain stage? What's the average days/weeks it's been stuck in that stage for? The action plan is to figure out how to leverage marketing touchpoints to progress the pipe.

• Is there deal compression happening because Account X is putting projects on hold or swapping licenses in an effort to drive vendor cost down?

These questions then become guidance to help us surface up the right analytics so we are not lost in analysis paralysis.

Metrics are the quantitative measures of ABM performance. They provide a snapshot of what is happening at a certain point in time, such as website visits, leads/ MQLs, engagement rates, and conversion rates.

Analytics is the process of organizing, interpreting, and displaying ABM metrics to identify trends and patterns--often in a dashboard. It involves understanding the data for trends into why things are happening the way they are.

Insights are the conclusions drawn from the ABM analytics process. Insights provide a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of ABM campaigns and identify areas for optimization. Good insights can be turned into stories that explain to stakeholders why ABM is a good investment.

What a great question!! I'm certain I'll totally fail to give an answer half as good as the question but here goes.

• Metrics - How the ABM processes, campaigns, etc. are measured. Are we meeting benchmarks. E.g. click through rates, conversion rates, account penetration rates, etc. This helps ascertain the health of the program.

• Analytics - This is looking at the trends and what they tell you about your strategy. E.g. this type of content does better on these metrics for those segments. Or we're getting more of this kind of feedback from customers from CS so need to address with content.

• Insights - The knowledge you gain when you truly understand the above and your external data (e.g. industry reports). Insights are when you create a new understanding. For example when you find a product gap all your competitors have that you can leverage to win a particular segment easily. Or that a particular channel is best when targeting a specific segment and persona. These are your advantages.

In the context of account-based marketing (ABM), metrics, analytics and insights are related, but not the same.

• Metrics are the quantitative measurements that you’ll use to track the performance of your ABM campaigns. For example, target accounts reached, booked demos and generated pipeline would all be metrics to track.
• Analytics refers to the process of analyzing the data and trying to glean insights from the data such as how engaged are your target accounts. This can also refer to tools and techniques.
• Insights refer to the actionable learnings you have teased out from the data.

All of these components are critical to an ABM strategy and are equally important.