Ever feel like you are drowning in a sea of data? Does opening Google Analytics create anxiety? Worse, do you often wonder, “What do all these numbers even mean?” It's reassuring to have them, but if you cannot make sense of them and use them to inform your marketing efforts, what’s the point?
B2B founders already have a lot on their plate. Determining which of the dozens, if not hundreds of possible metrics to track can feel daunting. Fortunately, understanding and tracking just six growth marketing metrics can be immensely beneficial for B2B brands. These six metrics are adapted from Dave McClure’s “Pirate Metrics.” Pirate because, well, the acronym is AAARRR.
Below, we’ll take you through the six best growth marketing metrics one by one, helping you understand not only what they mean, but why they matter.
- Awareness
- Acquisition
- Activation
- Revenue
- Retention
- Referral
Why Focus on Growth Marketing KPIs Anyway?
Growth marketing metrics focus on optimizing every step of the buyer journey. Building great brand awareness isn’t helpful if your audience isn’t inspired to act. Getting them to act becomes even more valuable if you can also entice them to stick around and tell their friends about you. All of this leads to more revenue, which fuels sustainable growth.
B2B growth marketing requires understanding your customer at every stage of the funnel, developing a strong brand value proposition, collecting and analyzing data, taking a multi-channel approach, and having a learner’s mindset.
When we focus on growth marketing metrics, we are checking in on our funnel. Where are things flowing? What’s stuck? What could be smoother? What opportunities might we be missing? We track, we measure, we test, we tweak. Always iterating. Forever optimizing. These KPIs show us the way.
Metric 1: Awareness
Awareness is at the top of the growth marketing funnel. It reflects how aware people are of your brand, product, or service. Do they recognize your logo? Maybe they saw an ad, came across your company on social media, or read a quote from your CEO online. You exist! Congratulations. Clearly, this is where it all begins. If buyers don’t know you are out there, it goes without saying that they cannot buy from you.
We measure B2B brand awareness through direct traffic, search volume, traffic source, and social media engagement and reach. The more familiar and recognizable your brand is, the better. Ideally, you want these numbers to be going up steadily quarter over quarter.
Metric 2: Acquisition
Acquisition is the stage where lead generation happens. Acquisition refers to reaching your aware audience and enticing them deeper into your website. These customers are in the process of considering different solutions. B2B customer acquisition is accomplished through paid search, content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and various other channels that are focused on reaching the ideal customer.
Acquisition KPIs include click-through rates, lead magnet downloads, and time on page. Visitors at this stage are also considered MQLs, or marketing qualified leads. Typically, the more quickly you can move customers to this stage, the more successful you will be in converting MQLs to SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads).
Metric 3: Activation
Activation happens when a website visitor or social media follower “activates” your sales process. It is the moment when an interested consumer shifts from “just browsing” to commitment, even on a micro-level. This step might be creating an account, signing up for a webinar, or booking a meeting. The action will be specific to your business and the structure of your website. At this point, the consumer becomes an SQL, or Sales Qualified Lead. Activation is often measured via lead scoring and conversion rate.
Tracking activation helps you clearly understand how long it is taking prospects to move to this stage of the funnel and alerts you to which calls-to-action, email nurtures, or offers are resonating best. It also indicates that the prospect found value in your content.
Metric 4: Revenue
If that prospect or SQL is a good fit they become an Opportunity. Of course, not every SQL will be the right fit, so what is important to track is the rate at which SQLs are becoming customers and deals are closed successfully - that is, won. If the customer isn’t a good fit or is wooed by a competitor, those deals are considered closed but lost.
The primary metric for revenue is the “win rate” of Opportunities. Of all the SQLs, how many were closed and won? Tracking this metric can also provide added insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your sales process, messaging, and behavior of your target audience. Another key metric for revenue is the CAC or cost of customer acquisition. If it costs you more to win a customer than their expected customer lifetime value – the amount of revenue you will earn from them over time – the business will not be profitable.
Metric 5: Retention
You know the saying, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?” That’s the nature of retention. Retention is keeping your existing customers, customers. It is accomplished through upselling, reselling, or add-on products. You’ve already worked hard to make them customers, so keeping them loyal is a valuable component of your growth strategy. Plus, it’s easier to generate revenue from existing customers than from prospects.
Retention is measured via churn rate, renewal rate, and revenue from up-sells or cross-sells. The goal is to monitor how many users are continuing to take an interest in your products or services after the sale. Continuing to engage them with emails, social media, and quality content are a few strategies to increase retention.
Metric 6: Referral
Do your clients or customers love your brand or product enough to tell their friends and colleagues about it? Referral is a powerful component of a growth marketing framework because we all trust our friends and colleagues more than we do marketing messaging. If your users are singing your praises, that’s a win and something that should be measured and nurtured.
Because some referral is undoubtedly word of mouth, referral metrics can be tricky to track. However, monitoring social shares, review ratings, and your Net Promoter Score (a single-question survey that measures how likely customers are to recommend you to others), are all good methods for measuring referral KPIs.
The best growth marketing metrics focus on what matters most to your business and allow you to filter out the noise. They also provide a means to determine which parts of your customer acquisition funnel are humming along smoothly and where consumers are getting stuck or exiting altogether.
Tracking these KPIs allows B2B brands to do more of what’s working and to fix what is not in a timely manner. This data is truly invaluable to helping fuel profitable, scalable growth. No more drowning in a sea of numbers. With pirate metrics, you measure only what matters.
Analyzing these 6 growth marketing KPIs is how we measure our success at Brand Theory and track successes on behalf of our B2B clients. If you’re looking to outsource your online marketing efforts, schedule a no-pressure introduction to Brand Theory today.
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