Marketing Effectiveness Metrics for the New Era of B2B

Editor’s Note: This LinkedIn Collective post was written by Steve Kearns, Group Manager, Global Head of Content, Marketing Solutions, LinkedIn

In today’s tumultuous economic climate, it’s more important than ever to identify reliable marketing metrics that can help demonstrate the impact of your programs. Facing increased pressure to justify budgets, marketers must figure out how to measure impact in a way that demonstrates clear financial value to the C-suite (and, in particular, to the CFO). 

By now, most marketers know that overemphasizing short-term demand marketing at the expense of brand building is never a good idea. And iIt’s a particularly bad idea during a recession. 

But in our race to show value and protect budgets, many of us still end up over-relying on short-term performance marketing. 

This is a big problem across all marketing, but all the more pressing in B2B, as sales cycles continue to get longer and involve more decision makers than ever.

Enacting the proper strategic shift, and getting everyone across the C-Suite on board regarding the value of our discipline, requires that we start with the fundamental step of measuring the right things. In this post I’ll dive into one such way to move forward: by measuring brand lift metrics.

What’s wrong with the metrics we’re using right now?

If you’re a B2B marketer right now, it’s likely that the majority of your marketing metrics are derived from performance marketing campaigns using the marketing mix method. It makes sense: Performance marketing tends to be overwhelmingly popular in digital B2B marketing for the clean, measurable, and useful results data it produces. 

Ironically, all this “performance” data actually only provides a very limited and incomplete picture of the performance it’s supposed to be measuring. These short-term marketing metrics only provide a snapshot of the response of active buyers during the time period when a given performance marketing campaign was active.

If that doesn’t sound like a huge drawback to you yet, consider that 95% of B2B buyers are not “in-market” at any given time. Then, consider how the average B2B sales cycle is now upwards of six months. How many in-market buyers are ready to commit because of one ad campaign they’re just seeing now? 

Performance marketing data provides such an incomplete view into holistic marketing performance, in fact, that it can mislead marketing teams into making the wrong assumptions about what’s working and what’s not… or even what it means for their marketing to be “working” or not in the first place.

For example, say a marketing team created two campaigns, one six months before the second. The first campaign was primarily focused on brand awareness and performed quite poorly in terms of performance marketing metrics. The second was focused on demand marketing and performed very well. 

Even though, in all likelihood, the reason why so many buyers interacted with the later campaign was because they started the sales journey during the first campaign, the only metrics many marketers have at their disposal would suggest the second campaign was the successful one, failing to recognize the critical connection between brand and demand. As a result, they might conclude that their brand awareness is ineffective or, worse, not worth focusing on. 

In order to break this cycle and prove the full value of their marketing efforts, today’s B2B marketers need metrics that prove the value of long-term marketing just as clearly as performance marketing does for short-term marketing. Brand lift metrics offer the path.

What Are Brand Lift Metrics?

Brand lift metrics clarify and measure how a given marketing campaign has improved, or “lifted,” your brand’s reach to your target audience. They are a means of converting the historically more nebulous benefits of brand marketing into more concrete and provable metrics.

There are several different brand lift metrics, including:

• Ad recall: Measures whether surveyed test group members recalled seeing your ad in the past seven days.
• Aided awareness: Measures how aware members are of a brand or product.
• Product consideration: Measures how likely members are to consider a brand or product for their next purchase.
• Recommendation: Measures how likely members are to recommend a brand or product for their next purchase.
• Brand familiarity: Measures how familiar members are with a brand or product.
• Brand favorability: Measures how favorably members view a brand or product.

Each of these metrics is measured for both a control campaign and a test campaign during a brand lift test on LinkedIn. 

How does a brand lift test work?

A brand lift test derives as many of the metrics above as you’d like to measure using two surveys: one that the “test group” who sees your new ads fills out, and one that the “control group” who hasn’t seen your ads fills out.

After a brand lift test, each of the brand lift metrics is represented as a percentage, based on how many times a surveyed member selected a favorable response in their survey.

Brand lift tests also compare survey answers between the test and control to derive Absolute, Relative, and Estimated total brand lift, which can codify exactly how much your new ads will help elevate your brand into hard data.

The new era of B2B marketing is all about measurability, but that doesn’t mean brand marketing needs to be left behind; it just means we all need to start measuring it more accurately. Brand lift metrics are the place to start.

Brand Lift Tests are available on LinkedIn with Campaign Manager or higher access on your ad account. For more tips on how to make your brand marketing valuable, measurable, and provable, keep up with the LinkedIn Ads blog.