Fridays are always valuable days for reflection on the week, applying lessons learned to prioritizing the next week's tasks. One of they key variables in this always-learning cycle is the actual results of specific tests, ie. how a particular marketing campaign or internal effort paid off as far as results.
Oftentimes, a key piece of missing information is the industry standard, which offers a clear litmus test on how a particular performed not just according to internal standards but industry-wide.
Thankfully the venture capitalists over at Insight Partners have put a little elbow grease into this black hole and shared the "Periodic Table of B2B Digital Marketing Metrics."
Keep in mind that this is focused on B2B, and here's how the metrics all shake out:
Full version can be downloaded here.
Of particular note is the budget breakdown in the bottom right of the chart, which shows that 34% of budgets are being spent on digital marketing and 20% on content marketing. Content continues to drive much in-bound traffic, which becomes even more stark when the digital marketing program (DMP) budget is broken down into its component pieces. Most notably, only 4% of the sample's budgets are spent on SEO.
And yet 41% of the traffic comes from organic search - a very odd pairing that shows much more of the digital budget (42% when including both search and paid ads) geared towards paid traffic that ultimately only delivers 16% of inbound traffic.
Hilary Gosher from Insight told Tnooz more background about the table:
The data came from our portfolio companies and 2) publically available data from public companies and also reports published by investment banks like Pacific Crest. We triangulated the information to come up with the averages and medians of the metrics and then used the Periodic Tables as a way to convey the information.
The purpose of the Periodic Tables was so that our portfolio companies could benchmark themselves on the key metrics. It was also so that they could understand and see what metrics are important to manage. We wanted a standard set of core metrics that everyone knows to track: the idea being that if you don’t measure you can’t manage.
By ensuring everyone is aware of the appropriate metrics, and managing to improve them, we can help ensure our portfolio companies are growing. This was meant to set up a dialog with company management and to ensure we have a standard way of understanding one company vs. another. Once we distributed this out, there was a lot of interest and company executives passed this along to their colleagues – we had many requests to opensource this, hence our decision to put these on our website and make them generally available.
NB: Medecine image courtesy Shutterstock.