How to establish KPIs for your B2B marketing campaign

As every seasoned marketer knows, planning is everything when it comes to the success of your marketing campaign. Without a clear idea of where you’re going and what you want to achieve, it’s impossible to establish an effective strategy, get results, and impress the C-suite. 

B2B marketing goals can include things like raising brand awareness, launching a new product or service, supporting expansion to new regions or audiences, and more. You might even include internal goals, such as supporting talent acquisition and retention, or communicating process transformation.

Once you have established your priorities, it’s essential to express goals in measurable terms to ensure you can measure progress and stay on track. That’s where key performance indicators (KPIs) enter the scene. 

Why set measurable KPIs?

KPIs are measurable metrics that allow you to assess the performance of your activities over a period of time, in an objective and impartial way. 

Setting KPIs at the beginning of a campaign and revising them at regular intervals is essential to give structure and purpose to your marketing activities:

• KPIs can support decision-making around your marketing spend, helping you prioritise areas where you need to invest to reach your true goals

• They help you stay focused on what you truly want to achieve with your campaign – preventing marketing teams from being pulled in a million directions and getting involved in too many side projects

• They help you keep track of achievements and come up with solutions if progress is not happening as fast and you would have hoped

• They ensure marketing efforts align with wider business goals, encouraging the marketing team to reach out to other departments rather than working in a silos

• Meeting your KPIs can also help you prove the value of your campaign to stakeholders, making it easier to secure budget for further marketing activities

• Finally, having solid KPIs in place can provide precious data for further marketing activities, such as award entries, reports etc. 

Be SMART with your KPIs

The SMART framework is a helpful way to help you establish effective KPIs. According to this methodology, KPIs should be:

Specific – KPIs should be clearly defined and focus on a specific goal or aspect of the campaign. Avoid setting KPIs that are too vague, and explain how metrics will be measured.

Measurable – Ensure your KPIs are expressed in quantifiable terms.

Achievable – Set challenging but realistic goals to motivate your team to hit targets. 

Relevant – KPIs should relate to the business’ wider objectives and the activities that are likely to have the biggest impact. 

Time-bound – KPIs are meant to be met within a specific and realistic time frame.

Setting SMART KPIs is a great way to stay on track with what’s needed to achieve your goals, as well as to demonstrate the impact of your campaigns. It also helps you compare your marketing results to your competitors’ to highlight areas for improvement. 

These are some of the  reasons why SMART KPIs are so important when submitting an award entry, and why so many organisations rely on these indicators to establish whether a campaign truly is award-winning. 

However, it can sometimes be difficult to express wider goals into a set of well-defined and quantifiable KPIs. If this is the case, our handy guide could help you establish solid KPIs for your next marketing campaign. 

Revise and refine your KPIs

Remember that setting good KPIs is just the first step. Having periodic campaign reviews is essential to make sure those initial KPIs are not left in the backburner. It's important to establish if progress is being made – and what can be done if not – to assess the nature and pace of the next activities.

However, campaign reviews can also offer the chance to adjust and refine KPIs that were maybe too ambitious, not ambitious enough, or that are no longer relevant because of changes in the industry or the business.

If you’d like some support in establishing and achieving your B2B marketing KPIs, our Podsters can help. Get in touch today, and let us know what you want to achieve and how we can help you get there. 

How can I set measurable KPIs?

Download our at-a-glance guide to expressing your goals in objective and measurable terms.