Five Important Key Performance Indicators for Chief Marketing Officers

Lead Scoring

One of the most essential Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for marketers is the generation of high-quality leads. High-quality leads are leads that are sales-ready as a result of passing through various lead nurturing campaigns in order to get to the sales-ready point. Lead scoring is used by marketers to designate the stage of a lead in the sales cycle. There are 5 categories within the sales cycle:

1. Inquiries
2. Marketing Qualified Leads
3. Sales Accepted Leads
4. Sales Qualified Leads, and;
5. Won Business.

Moving down these categories into the closing stages of the sales cycle means a lead is gaining a higher score and becomes more sales-ready.

Lead Nurturing

Marketers are responsible for demonstrating which lead nurturing campaigns have produced specific results and which have had the most impact on conversion rates. Marketers employ lead nurturing campaigns via content distribution: blogs, articles, email campaigns, whitepapers, webinars, seminars, etc. – all these are used in an effort to answer the most pressing questions that prospects have at particular sales cycle stages. The effectiveness of a lead nurturing campaign is dependent on testing which publications and mediums yield the most results in order to optimize these efforts and improve the lead nurturing process.

Customer Profiling

When we are able to understand our best customers and why and how they buy from us, we learn how to cater to prospects using more targeted campaigns. Customer profiling means understanding what triggers prospects to behave in a way that would bring them closer to making a purchase decision and increase their propensity to buy. When we understand the behaviors of our perfect consumers, we are able to prioritize leads by determining which opportunities will be better to pursue.

Benchmarking Marketing Automation

From lead scoring to lead nurturing and campaign management, measurements have to be yielded with each new activity and campaign. By recording data pertaining to the initial results of a marketing initiative, a CMO is able to better assess if the activity should be executed again or if it should be replaced by a campaign that can yield better results.

Campaign Management  

Determining which campaigns yield the most results and which hinder more successful conversions is one of the most important data pieces at a marketer’s disposal. There are various avenues by which we generate traffic and nurture leads: from our corporate website, to email marketing, from webinars to trade shows, and social media channels like Twitter and Facebook – if we know that our website is the number one source for lead generation, then we know that this is the area that we should spend more time perfecting.

Image courtesy of Flickr, haeshu