There might be lots of things that matter to your business, but at the end of the day, the bottom line is what keeps the doors open.

Marketing should have a positive impact on your bottom line.  It’s not just an overhead expense that you can’t measure.

Why we love cost per conversion

If a new client is worth $20,000 over 3 years, then spending $1000 to acquire them is worth the investment.  If you don’t know what it’s costing you to acquire leads or customers, you should start to measure it.  This data impacts your profitability – that all important bottom line.

When it comes to digital marketing, a conversion is generally when someone reaches out to you and initiates a conversation.  The start of the end of the sales process.

The good news is that you can measure what led to those conversions – whether it’s paid ads, email campaigns, or organic traffic to your website.

But we all know that marketing campaigns and tactics don’t work in isolation.  Someone may have read your email, visited your blog, and then clicked on a remarketing ad to fill out your Request a Quote form.  So, who gets credit for that conversion?  How do we attribute that to a specific campaign?

You can see so much data if you really want to dig into the details.  In fact, for one client, I back track using Google Analytics and data from their CRM Active Campaign to see everything a new lead did before they converted.  Sometimes they converted the first time they came to his site, and other times they’ve been reading his blogs and emails for years before making the move.  If you really want to dive deep into this kind of info on a customer-by-customer basis, it’s there.

On the other hand, if you’re just getting started, you can use your entire marketing budget to determine the cost per conversion or you can calculate the cost per conversion based on the last “touch point” of a campaign.  This helps you understand the impacts of your marketing budget and if specific campaigns need to be adjusted.

Why we love cost per customer more

It’s one thing to know what it costs you to generate a conversion or new lead for your sales team.  It’s a whole other to know what that cost is per new customer.

The math is simple, but the answer speaks volumes.

The same campaign measurements apply, but instead of measuring per conversion, you measure per new customer.  This data reveals a lot about you and your sales team’s ability to close the deal.  If your close rate is poor, your cost per customer goes up and so should the red flags.  Marketing and sales go hand in hand so figure out how they can work together to improve your close rate and ultimately your cost per customer.

Connecting campaigns to the bottom line

When we work with clients, we set out marketing KPIs they can use to measure and direct their marketing budget.  Part of our process is to outline how specific campaigns and tactics contribute to specific KPIs that they can monitor.

There’s a lot out there you can monitor, but as a starting point, here’s what we often recommend for B2B campaign KPIs.

Content development campaigns

KPIs to monitor

• Organic site traffic
• Conversions – attributable to organic traffic
• Return user traffic
• Shared content
• Keyword ranking

Paid advertising campaigns

KPIs to monitor

• Site traffic – paid
• Conversions – attributable to paid
• Paid follower growth on social

Organic social campaigns

KPIs to monitor

• Site traffic – social referred
• Conversions – attributable to social
• Social engagement
• Social shares, likes, etc
• Social followers

Email campaigns

KPIs to monitor

• Site traffic – email referred
• Conversions – attributable to email
• Open rates
• Click thru rates

If you don’t want to look at a screen full of numbers, keep it simple.  Take your monthly marketing budget and divide it by your number of conversions (people who reach out to you that month).  Take that same monthly marketing budget and divide it by your number of new customers.  Watch those numbers closely.  If they’re going up – you should look at how you can make changes.  If they’re going down – keep doing what you’re doing.  If you want to dig into more data, it’s there when you’re ready for it.