Report: B-to-b marketers don't measure campaigns

Twenty percent of b-to-b marketers don't measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, particularly when it comes to generating marketing-sourced sales leads, said Adam Blitzer, COO of Pardot, a marketing automation company that specializes in b-to-b.

The statistic, said Blitzer, comes from Pardot's “Marketing Metrics Survey” that asked 65 b-to-b marketers—many of whom from Pardot's own pool of 900 clients—what metrics are important and how those metrics are measured.

“The results were a bit surprising to us,” Blitzer said. “We would've guessed that close to 100 percent were measuring at least basic metrics.” The survey found, for instance, that 20% of b-to-b marketers don't measure the number of new sales leads generated by each marketing campaign.

The current survey was inspired by Pardot's Q4 2011 study on how marketers used and measured social media, Blitzer said. The 2011 study found that one-third of marketers don't measure the results of their social media campaigns.

“If this was five years, ago, this wouldn't be surprising,” Blitzer said of the findings. “You didn't have the tools for it or, if you did, it was just too tedious to do. I'm surprised that this is still the case because there are so many measurement tools today.”

The Pardot study also found that 30 percent of marketers lacked the tools they needed to track marketing leads. Another 30 percent weren't tracking marketing-sourced opportunities, or other metrics, he said.

Blitzer attributed this to the fact that b-to-b is a heavily sales-centric field. One way to help change this culture would be to “justify the existence of the marketing team as a revenue driver as opposed to a cost center.” Marketers, he said, ought to use CRM just as much as their sales-team counterparts; they should leverage CRM to track marketing campaigns from lead generation to sales, which would allow marketers to quantify success. The should also determine exactly how much revenue each campaign drives.

Ultimately, marketers and sales teams need to work more closely together to get the most from marketing campaigns, he said. “I think when those two sides work well together, things really hum from an operational standpoint.” Salesforce.com, Blitzer said, is an example of a large company that does this well.

“They always spend a lot of money on sales and marketing compared to more traditional software vendors,” he said. “They've had a lot of growth that way. They have a good, tight play between marketing and sales.”