Marketing KPIs that C-Suite Cares About 

It’s no surprise that a marketing automation tool like Pardot can take up a significant chunk of your marketing budget. As a member of the C-suite, it’s vital that you are able to demonstrate a return on your tech stack investment and you need key marketing KPIs to allow you to calculate that.

The good news is that Pardot combined with Salesforce is set up to help you and your marketing department demonstrate ROI. Pardot’s out-of-the-box reports showcase visitor activity on your website, form fills, email click-through rates, landing page statistics, and other important marketing KPIs. Custom engagement metrics, connected campaigns, and campaign influence reports provide a more granular and invaluable look into the KPIs C-suite-level individuals care about. Before we get into those KPIs, let’s revisit why you chose Pardot as your tool for success, your “easy button”. 

Here are the top 5 uses for Pardot:

1. Customer Journey. Gain visibility into your sales funnel. From prospect to Marketing Qualified Lead(MQL) to Sales Qualified Lead(SQL) to won or lost opportunities, Pardot provides an out-of-the-box report for the customer lifecycle.
2. Integration. No more worries with marketing and sales departments being in a silo. Pardot profiles, grading, and scoring allow for them to agree on lead categorization and qualification to ensure that marketing is handing off the right leads filled with the right data. This allows Marketing to focus on properly funneling and nurturing your prospects which will empower your sales team with powerful information before they reach out and ultimately enhance closed-won opportunities.
3. Assisting with Long Sales Cycles. Pardot is valuable in maintaining consistent, strategic contact with your prospects via content and emails, tailored by your team, to help stay top-of-mind through all parts of the sales cycle. Achieve this all while reducing the sales team’s need for follow-up by automating time-based emails.
4. Existing Client Base. Pardot’s powerful segmentation along with Engagement Studio can automate journeys for each buyer/customer persona and helps ensure the right people are receiving tailored content designed to engage them. This can be perfect for existing clients, renewals, or targeted prospecting.
5. Analytics. Business to Business Marketing Analytics(B2BMA) allows marketers to understand key data points and metrics from campaigns, why the results are the way they are, and suggestions on how to maximize ROI at every stage of your funnel. It can connect to external tools, and offers enhanced dashboards and reporting.

So what KPIs should you be concerned about within C-suite?

• Annual Contract Value (ACV) – How is Marketing contributing to your overall revenue? To get this, you need to be able to track the contract value of all opportunities generated by marketing in a certain time period and what were they worth dollar-wise. B2BMA, which is included with Pardot Advanced and above, can provide reporting to show this level of detail.

• Customer Lifetime Value(CLV) – Your investment in customer relations. CLV is the total value your company gets from each customer against the amount you have spent to acquire or keep the customer. This important metric can be broken down due see overall customer lifetime, retention rates, profit margins, rates of return, and overhead and profit per customer.

• Pipeline to Spend – This ratio will tell you the cost of each campaign and ties it to the opportunities sourced by that campaign. To gauge success, you’ll want to see a 1:1 ratio or greater when summing up ACV of all opportunities sourced by a specific campaign and compare that with the total spend.

• Customer Acquisition – How much does it cost you to acquire a customer? Tracking trends on this particular metric is important, because if it starts to go up, it should be an instant red flag, and action is needed. To calculate this metric, sum all of your campaign spend, including advertising costs, sales & marketing salaries(including commissions), and divide that amount by the number of new customers for that duration you are interested in. The multi-attribution Campaign Influence model in Pardot and Salesforce can provide insight into your campaigns’ success and ROI.

• Influence by Marketing – What percentage of customer acquisitions interacted with your marketing initiatives? How many customers were touched at any point of the customer journey during the sales process? You need to have a mechanism in place to track and record your customer interaction for this metric to be useful. Campaign monitoring and reporting, customer surveys, landing pages, can all help build marketing interaction data. Campaign Influence and the out-of-the-box Marketing Manager dashboard in B2BMA are both great ways to measure influence by marketing.

How to use these Marketing KPIs for decision making

Now that you have KPIs in hand, how do you use them? Great question! 

1. The above KPIs should be taken into account when looking at overall marketing efficiency and evaluating new marketing or advertising opportunities. 
2. Annual Budget Pacing. You should know if you are over or under-pacing your budget. Discussions should be had at the beginning of the year with Finance on monthly and quarterly budgets while still allowing for seasonality and one-time large costs, and staffing considerations.
3. Collaboration with Finance. These KPIs allow for more joint decisions and viewing marketing as a growth center versus a cost center. 
4. Benchmark comparisons. Though industry benchmarks can be useful, you also have to account for where your company is in a growth stage or if you are a company in a mature vertical, when making marketing budget decisions.
5. Technology and Advertising Spends. Knowing metrics like customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value will help you in determining line items in your budget and if a particular spend is worth further investment. If you’re using digital paid media like Google Ads, Pardot will sync your paid media efforts with your Salesforce opportunity data to give you a real-time report on your advertising ROI.

Here at Cloudtegic, we want to partner with you on overall marketing strategy as well as the tactical side when looking at Pardot as a key component to your revenue optimization. Contact us today for a consultation.