How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Demand Generation Efforts

Every marketer works tirelessly to plan, build, and execute on their campaigns. From lead and pipeline generation to bookings and revenue, we all strive to create effective programs that will reach our team and company goals. But how effective are your overall demand generation efforts, really?

If there’s one thing we as marketers struggle with, it’s quantifying the impact and effectiveness of our demand generation programs. With demand generation impacting our fellow marketers, sales teams, executives, board members, as well as the company’s overall bottom-line, it’s no longer acceptable to be unsure of just what is and isn’t working in our marketing efforts.

The solution to identifying how effective your demand generation efforts are no longer lies in manually pulling data and sweating over the creation of spreadsheets and pivot tables - it’s time to leverage a single, clear view of your campaign performance.

Analyze your campaigns, lead sources, and bookings

Every demand generation-focused marketing plan includes a mix of channels and activities - some of which are more impactful than others. One of the most important areas you should measure when it comes to the effectiveness of your efforts, is your campaigns and lead sources.

When you look at your Salesforce campaigns, channels, and lead sources, to really understand your impact and ROI, you need to layer in your budgets and overall spend. From there, what’s your average cost per lead, pipeline ROI, and booking ROI?

With a united full-funnel view, you can effortlessly pull all of this data into one place, so you can easily analyze the impact of each campaign and lead source at a glance. Did your latest low-cost webinar lead to a high amount of pipeline and bookings? You may want to consider scaling your efforts or investing in more webinars. On the other hand, did that conference you attended 8 months ago and spend tens of thousands of dollars on not lead to the pipeline and bookings you were hoping for? Might be worth crossing that conference off your list for the next year, so you can ensure you are focusing on the campaigns and channels that are bringing you the greatest ROI.

One of the most taxing tasks as a marketer is predicting the pipeline and bookings your marketing campaigns and activities are expected to hit. But with insight into the historical ROI performance of your campaigns, you can eliminate the guesswork and feel more confident in your plans.

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Monitor the velocity of your sales cycle

Do you know the velocity of your end-to-end sales cycle?  To fully understand the effectiveness and impact of your demand generation efforts, it’s important to understand the velocity of your leads from each campaign and lead source.

How long are leads from your one-to-few ABM campaign spending in the funnel compared to leads from your latest product launch? What about leads from content syndication compared to your LinkedIn ads?

While the ROI of your campaigns and lead sources is a critical component to evaluating the effectiveness of your demand generation efforts, it’s also important to understand the length of a leads’ sales cycle by campaign or channel. For instance, let’s say your ABM campaign and product launch both led to a similar booking value and ROI, but your product launch leads moved through the sales cycle at a much higher velocity than your ABM ones. While both can be deemed successful activities with a positive ROI, it’s important to understand the difference in the length of time it took the average lead to close. This can be a huge help when it comes to the timing of certain activities in your marketing plans.

To take it a step further, it's important to understand where your leads may be getting stuck in the funnel. Why might they be getting stuck, or maybe even dropping off at this stage? Identifying blockages or leakages in your funnel can give you important insight as to where you may need to tweak your efforts, helping to increase your average velocity.

Achieving data-fueled demand generation effectiveness

With access to data-fueled dashboards that clearly illustrate the effectiveness of your demand generation efforts, think of how you could pivot your demand generation strategy to the mix of activities that yields the largest impact on revenue.

Ready to easily pinpoint the campaigns and channels most likely generate pipeline and revenue, so you can effectively optimize and maximize ROI? Book a demo today.