What are the key metrics you use to measure the success of your industry marketing program?

As industry marketers, our hope is to get a message that we author deeply embedded into the minds of as many target buyers across as many accounts as possible. Some measurements of this ‘influence’ are quantifiable (measurable) and some are not.  

When we are trying to reach a new audience of target buyers, we may look at our investments on channels where those audiences congregate and ask questions about our content’s reach (SEO, how many unique page views, impressions?). We may want to measure how engaging the content is through scroll depth, time on page, duration, social shares, comments, etc., and we may want to measure if that prospect or existing customer is moving onto the next step with us via click-throughs, MQLs, subscribers, survey completions, LMS training badges. From leads (MQLs) we want to measure our conversion to sales opportunities. 

Often my partners in our industry demand generation team will want to measure how many contacts at an account are listed on a sales opportunity and how an integrated marketing journey (campaign) is “touching” those contacts to mature an opportunity through its stages.  

However, there are many activities that my industry marketing teams perform that are very difficult to measure. If for example, my banking marketing team publishes an internal sales enablement video and a presentation about a solution which is consumed by hundreds of sellers around the world, those sellers may use that knowledge to engage their accounts and drive revenue. I may be able to see how many times that video is watched and how many times the presentation is accessed or copied, but the impact that it has had on revenue is difficult to measure. We've tried the honor system of tagging sales plays to sales opportunities, but it is difficult to mandate. It does takes a bit of trust that investing in that scalable activity will result in impact. 

At the end of the day, the one metric that does not lie is revenue, and so we look closely at revenue throughout the quarter to understand its velocity, the big deals and to do the best we can to forecast revenue attainment.

I love this question -- and it's actually one I ask candidates during my interview process as well, because the way that Product Marketing is measured overall varies widely across organizations. 

Right now, I think of it across these five areas:

1. Stakeholder alignment. This sounds "soft", but in industry marketing, your stakeholders are often even more broad than product marketing, and each group -- this includes Sales, P&T / R&D, Demand Gen / Campaigns, Enablement, Customer Success, and Partners.
2. Command of Message. This is can be measured in a varient of ways -- but in general includes what positioning you've put in market, to each of your key industries and segments, across all of your channels, and parts of the marketing funnel (ads / third party sites, your website, your sales collateral, how your sellers and CSMs tell stories to the market. 
3. Industry / audience / segment NARR. Maybe self-explanatory, but revenue coming in the door in the form of Net Annual Recurring Revenue is where the rubber really hits the road.
4. Gross Pipeline. This is a shared metric with demand generation or campaigns, and often with web, but is an area that great content, messaging, and positioning can help a lot.
5. Win / close rates. This is the flip side of the pipeline coin; do your sellers have what they need to close the deal? Do you understand your market or industry well enough? 
6. Segment/Audience ASP. Tracking deal sizes, not just velocity.

As an important note, "amount of content produced" -- number of blog posts, number of webinars, number of slicks -- simply doesn't make my list, and I recommend being tied to business outcomes, not how many acts of marketing that you do.

There are multiple key metrics I look at to see how our industry programs are performing and positively influencing the right outcomes, sliced by industry:

• Company-level metrics: growth, profitability and retention
• Marketing metrics: pipeline, campaign/content performance, brand perception
• Sales metrics: average deal size, average win rate, pipeline conversion

At the end of the day, it all comes back to revenue, but it’s hard to directly quantify impact to revenue without seeing how you’ve influenced the other areas.

Metrics around awareness and demand in a given industry. For awareness, web traffic and enagement, press coverage and customer reference stories are key. If there are industry associations and trade publications, there are no shortage of lists and awards that tend to lay out the landscape. If your company is in the mix there, you're doing the right things. For demand, marketing-driven and marketing-influenced pipeline from programs targeting an industry whether the products or verticalized or horizontal. What's your penetration in the top 10 commercial banks or top 10 online retailers etc? If you don't have an industry lens for these measures, your sales teams can hit their numbers while your industry footprint is spread so thin as to not be relevant in the space.

In a proper program, Industry Marketing & Campaigns have joint ownership of communicating the right messages, in the right channels, at the right time, in order to build pipeline and win NARR. I say this as a preface because Industry and Campaign leadership should work together to: 

• Establish business objectives
• Set targets, goals, and key intiiatives
• Help with cross-industry efforts

This should then yield to: 

• Pipeline generation
• Open Pipe
• NARR

As such, they should hold each other accountable for the primary areas of responsibility, be able & willing to step up and help the other when appropriate, and escalate challenges as necessary.

Industry Marketing metrics to look at: 

• Global NARR
• Rep Productivity (monthly)
• ASP (monthly)
• Close Rate (monthly)
• Cycle Time (monthly)
• Market Penetration (quarterly)

I recommend holding shared KPIs across PMM - the classics: Qualified Pipeline, Win Rates, Opportunity Velocity/Duration. Looking at how your industry marketing investments are improving your sales effectiveness overall. 

Secondary metrics could be growth of bookings and sales in a target or priority vertical, but those are sometimes too trailing. Good to look at over multiple quarters. 

In short, however you're measuring success of your marketing programs today, cut by industry and trended over time.

A couple things are critical to setting yourself up for success in measuring the impact of industry marketing:

• Alignment on how you track industries & getting the data coverage you need so you can segment your user & sales data. You're likely not explicitly asking for "industry" in lead or signup forms, so you probably need to enrich your dataset with sources like Hoovers, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Clearbit, DataFox or others that pull in account-level data based on the contact's email address domain. The gold standard would be to leverage SIC or NAICS industry codes and map those to sub-category and category.

• Deciding on the key metrics you want to influence and establish a baseline. In many cases, you already have a revenue stream from the industries you're focusing on, so pull the historical data to use as your baseline for benchmarking.

Here's a summary of some metrics you may want to consider tracking over time for the industries you're targeting:

• Top of funnel, early indicators

  • Campaign metrics like clicks & conversions could help you see if your new industry messaging is resonating. In-market AB tests are great for this too if you're just starting out.

  • Web metrics like keyword rankings, organic traffic and engagement rates are also great for seeing if new content you're publishing is gaining traction.

• Product metrics

  • Signups

  • Product usage

  • Paid conversions

• Sales metrics

  • Opportunity & pipeline volume

  • Funnel conversion rates like MQL->SQL, SQL->Opp, and Win Rates

  • Average deal size

  • Length of the sales cycle