The Definitive Guide to Lead Generation

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: METRICS
METRICS PLANNING
Establish Goals and
ROI Estimates Up Front
When planning any lead generation
campaign or marketing investment,
your first step is to quantify your
expected outcomes. All too often,
marketers plan programs and commit
their budgets without establishing a
concrete set of expectations about a
program’s impact.
The solution is to form up-front goals,
benchmarks, and Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs) for each lead
generation campaign. Modeling your
ROI goals will help you to:
• Identify the key profit drivers that
most affect the model and
ultimately your profits
• Create “what if” scenarios to see
how changing parameters may
vary the results and
impact profitability
• Establish the targets you will use
to compare actual results
As part of planning any program, you
need to answer these three questions:
• What will you measure?
• When will you measure?
• How will you measure?
In almost every case, you will need to
take specific steps to make your
programs measureable. This often
includes setting up test and control
groups, or varying your spending levels
across markets to measure relative
impact. You’ll also need to track the
appropriate attributes of your
marketing programs—target audience,
message, channel, offer, investment
level, or other relevant attributes.
Set the Right Goals
It’s important to set goals, but they have
to be the right ones. According to Brian
Carroll at MECLABS, marketers should
ask themselves the following about every
goal or KPI they set:
• How does this goal drive revenue
or profit?
• Does this goal give the executive
team something they’ve asked for
or want?
• How does this goal align my
marketing team with sales?
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