"It's difficult to imagine the power that you're going to have when so many different sorts of data are available."  Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the world wide web.

The purpose of marketing is to drive leads to the sales pipeline.   Regular analytics reporting from marketing channels, like your website, social media and email campaigns, should generate qualified leads to the funnel, fuel your sales team's pipeline and steer the deal-closing process. This is why it is so important for marketing and sales teams to come together to discuss, plan and execute growth strategies that work for both the client and your business. 

Here are six areas of marketing analytics that, with a proper growth strategy leading the way, should generate sales.

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that ranks a website's relevance to  industry-related search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater likelihood of ranking. 

Some factors that affect domain authority are (a) your website's search engine optimization (SEO), (b) the quality, quantity and age of content on your website, (c) number, quality and relevance of incoming links that point to your website, (d) general brand authority of your website on other channels, like social media platforms. 

A DA between 40 - 50 is average and 50 - 60 is good.  If you're DA is lower than 40, you can improve it with a focused strategy by running an analysis of other sites that you compete against and managing the factors listed above for your own site.

Universally available for "free", Google Analytics provides you with a wealth of insight into your website traffic, domain authority, search engine optimization and marketing. Once the Google Analytics code (add Google Tag Manager for deeper insight) is implemented on your domain, all traffic to your site will be tracked and activity insights will start populating. 

KPIs to track from Google Analytics are too many to count. A few basic ones to get you started include traffic volume, duration on page, bounce rate (how long it takes for users to leave your site), ratio of new versus returning users, source of user acquisition by channel/geography/device, search terms that lead users to your site, and content that generates the most traffic.  Google Analytics is also a key platform in calculating your cost of acquisition and/or return on ad spend.

Reports from Google Analytics are not only a source of information for how users interact with your site, but it can also be a vital tool to inform your go-to-market strategy. You may not know your audience as well as you think. Let Google direct you towards a more lead and conversion-oriented marketing strategy.

Your digital footprint in social media platforms is a canonical element of your overall branding. Within the business-to-business space, LinkedIn and Twitter carry a disproportionate weight compared to other platforms, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit...etc. While your knee-jerk reaction may be to set up a profile in all platforms, a more effective approach is to select the ones where your audience resides, even if only one platform, and commit to it with high quality content.

 It's difficult to generalize recommended behavior across all social media because each have their own algorithm and content ranking preferences. General best practices in digital marketing are on point: stick to pain-point-centric and customer-first content. Utilize hashtags to jump in on topical discussions and mindshare. Avoid posting anything that doesn't add value to the audience reading it. "Look at me!" content that doesn't share useful information or impart value add for the reader is less likely to gain traction.

Follower quantity reigns in social media KPIs but don't be fooled by it. Follower quality is of utmost importance especially because it will (often) direct to whom the algorithm prioritizes sharing your content. For example, if you're gaining followers in a geographical region you aren't selling in, you're better not having those followers. Engagement rate and click rate are two other KPIs. In the legal business-to-business field, you'd be harder pressed to see heated comment posting, but if you can generate discussion in the comments, consider yourself a marketing maven!

The analytics from email campaigns should be integrated and auto-populate a separate “Campaigns” module within your CRM. 

The integration will allow you to update certain fields in the Leads/Contacts records that can provide a roadmap for the benefit of the sales team.  This will allow the sales team to pull any given Lead or Contact record and see which email campaigns are being sent, opened, and clicked.  Additionally, a proper integration can map a field specific for “Subscriber Scoring” which will reflect the amount of engagement for each subscriber. The higher the score, the more engaged the subscriber.  If your system has advanced tracking, like Zoho does for instance, it can also provide the day and time the Lead or Contact engaged with a campaign. 

This leads to what is termed closed-loop marketing, a bidirectional view into the amount of engagement, time of engagement and which campaigns/topics in which they are actually engaging. Sales teams will have better information for their sales calls, meetings and follow-ups and this will ultimately lead to closing deals – faster and more effectively.

Digital advertisement comes in many forms offered on a variety of platforms. Some platforms require a much larger investment to effect positive return on investment, while others can generate return with smaller budgets. In making the choice on what platform deserves your advertising dollars, identify where your audience spends the most time and what your spend appetite is. 

Divide your digital ad campaign initiatives to two buckets:  ads for brand awareness to keep your branding top of mind for customers and ads that are meant to directly generate MQLs (marketing qualified leads) for the sales team. Running effective ad campaigns is possible when you have a healthy digital infrastructure already in place. High ROI is possible with ads if your website, collateral, and tech stack are all optimized. This is one digital marketing channel with that absolutely cannot be run in a silo.

When choosing the platform, Google Adwords can afford you one of the largest internet real estates for your brand to appear while LinkedIn affords the opportunity to target your audience down to unrivaled precision (company name and titles for example). For your ads to work and KPIs to have value, be prepared to constantly track and tweak your ads as the results come in. Keep an eye not just on basics like cost per impression/click/conversion, but on the backend of how users interact with your assets once they engage the ad, what they do on your website when they land there, and if/when they convert.

At the completion of a well-executed marketing campaign, a healthy set of MQLs should exist. At that point, how do the salespeople prioritize which of those MQLs to pursue first or most aggressively?

Here is where your automation tools definitely come into play. Set them up correctly and you can automate the prioritization of leads. 

Set lead scoring amounts that correspond with the various marketing channels and the activities a lead would take with each one. Most solutions like Zoho, Hubspot and Marketo are designed with default scoring built-in, but take a close look at that because you want to make sure that all of your channels are accounted for and that within each channel there are levels of scoring. For example, you are not going to score a lead that registered for a Webinar but did not attend the same as someone who registered and then attended the full live session. 

Salespeople need to know who rests at or near the top of the leaderboard, and understand the data associated with those leaders to be most effective. Getting more granular with your lead scoring will help down the line when you go back and assess the success of an event.  When the systems talk to each other through integration and lead scoring, the targets are more certain.

Analytics provide clear indicators about what marketing strategies work, where improvements can be made and, most importantly, where your strongest leads are for the sales team. Limiting yourself to speculation and intangible (or difficult to quantify) metrics hurts business efficacy.   Analytics are the backbone of data-driven decision making for tactics and executing your overall growth strategy. When marketing and sales are aligned in the planning, execution and follow-up of marketing activities, everyone in the organization wins.