The 6 Best B2B Marketing KPIs to Track (& How to Align them with Business Goals)

When was the last time you checked your marketing metrics?

For busy CEOs and entrepreneurs, it’s all too easy to let monitoring your B2B marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) get pushed to the back burner. However, there’s no better way to know – and we mean really know – if and how well your marketing is working without measuring the KPIs.

Thankfully, there are just 6 essential KPIs to track. Below, we’ll walk you through each one and provide guidance on how often you should be measuring them to keep your marketing, and your business, moving forward.

The 6 Best B2B Marketing KPIs

KPIs should always be tied to specific business goals and measure how successful the business is at reaching those goals. These 6 metrics parallel the B2B buyer’s journey and provide insight into how effective your marketing efforts are at each stage. Tracking these metrics regularly will also let you know if your customer acquisition funnel is working smoothly or if prospects are getting hung up, or bouncing out entirely, along the way.

1. Awareness – How familiar is your brand to your target audience? Do they know your brand name, values, and products or services? Awareness kicks off the buyers’ journey by introducing your ideal audience to your brand. The main metrics tracked to measure awareness are direct traffic, traffic source, search volume, social media engagement, and reach.
   
   
2. Acquisition – This next stage of the buyer’s journey reflects the second step prospects take on the road to becoming customers. Here, your audience is aware of your brand and engaging with it in a direct, measurable way – spending more time on your website, or commenting on your social posts. Customers at this stage are generally considering different solutions. The main metrics associated with acquisition include click-through rates, lead magnet downloads, and time on page.
   
   
3. Activation – The moment a website visitor books a meeting they have activated the sales cycle and the activation stage has begun. For B2Bs with higher ticket items, longer sales cycles, and/or large buying committees, nearly all of your marketing efforts have gone into selling this first meeting. This is the stage where prospects become SQLs or sales-qualified leads. Activation is commonly measured via lead scoring and conversion rate.
   
   
4. Revenue – This stage isn’t just about tracking dollars flowing in, it’s about measuring how many of those SQLs become customers vs how many chose another solution or weren’t a good fit in the first place. The key revenue metrics to track are the win rate of opportunities and the cost of customer acquisition.
   
   
5. Retention – Once you’ve won a customer, do you keep them? Retention refers to keeping your existing customers through upselling, reselling, and add-on products or services.  It’s frequently measured through churn rate, renewal rate, and revenue from up-sells or cross-sells.
   
   
6. Referral - Do your customers recommend you to other business owners? Do they take the time to write reviews? Tracking referrals lets you know what customers love best about your brand and allows you to further nurture those clients. Referral KPIs are sometimes difficult to track because many will be word-of-mouth recommendations, but trackable metrics include Net Promoter Scores, review ratings, and social shares.

How to Align B2B Marketing KPIs with Business Goals

Because the B2B sales cycle is typically long and transactions are often substantial investments, it’s useful to consider your longer-term revenue and business goals and tailor your KPI benchmarks to them. It’s a reverse-engineering approach that focuses all your efforts toward a longer-term objective. 

For example, consider what your revenue goal is for your business in 3 to 5 years. Then ask yourself what kind of deal volume and leads you will need to get there. Next, compare that to where you are today. How many leads does it take to generate a deal or sales opportunity? How many deals are won? How many new customers are you winning? 

Comparing these two sets of numbers will provide a clearer picture of exactly what it will take to get from point A to point B – and how much year-over-year growth will be required. Informed by these numbers, set a goal for 12 months from now. What kind of growth rate is it going to take to get there? Next, create monthly or quarterly targets that will help you meet first the annual goal and then the longer-term goal. 

Once you know what you are aiming for, check in on your metrics. It’s important to know where you are starting, but resist the temptation to track them too frequently, as sudden spikes or dips can make it easy to become reactionary. It’s better to track B2B marketing KPIs monthly or quarterly, comparing them to previous periods and looking for broader patterns over time. 

Marketing metrics can feel daunting. But understanding these specific KPIs, how they relate to your business goals, and the relevant metrics to measure can help you see the forest for the trees, identify areas that could be improved, and avoid wasting time and money on marketing efforts that aren’t generating measurable results. Focusing on these six areas will help you consistently measure what matters and make informed decisions about your marketing direction and dollars going forward.

Still not ready to tackle this in-house? At Brand Theory, we provide a strategic approach to growth marketing for B2B businesses that includes regular reports and updates on essential KPIs. It’s how we measure our success as a company, both for ourselves and for our clients. Curious to know more? Book a no-obligation introduction to Brand Theory today.