For a b2b marketer engagement is the metric of choice for determining the value of a campaign but what, exactly is an engagement and how do you measure it?

Historically, lead development was based on getting a single person to interact with your marketing campaigns. Getting the attention of one person within a company that you would like to do business with will no longer get you the success for your company that you want.

According to Google, 64% of C-Suite executives have the final say on purchases, while 81% of non-senior employees influence the decisions. With this in mind, if you only track one person’s activity, you may overlook important metrics. It’s essential to have a combined view of everyone interacting with your marketing efforts.

All Engagement Is Not Equal

Not all engagement is created equal. You have to be able to separate the non-valuable engagement from the valuable engagement. It’s helpful to view engagement through the two separate lens, one being called “engagement” and the second being called “meaningful engagement”.

Define Meaningful Engagement

Meaningful engagement will look differently for every business so you’ll have to develop a model that makes sense for you. As an example, one type of meaningful engagement could be having a decision maker from a targeted account visit a specific page on your website and that page was about a product that you recently presented to that targeted account. That would be a “meaningful engagement”!

Once you have a clear understanding of what meaningful engagement means for your company you can start tracking the metrics that will show meaningful engagement.

The metrics that you will want to start to follow are:

  • Engagement Rate: The percentage of your target accounts that are engaging in any way (meaningful or non-meaningful engagement) on your website.
  • Rate of Meaningful Engagement: The percentage of accounts that are engaged at a meaningful engagement level.
  • Non-anonymous Rate: The percentage of unidentified people coming to your website from a targeted account.
  • Account Penetration Rate: The number of people that are engaged from a targeted account.
  • Cost Per Engagement: How much money are you spending on paid advertising channels to get the engagement of the people that you want to engage with you from your targeted accounts.

It’s NOT About Lead Count!

Want to increase your leads? Reduce the quality of the accounts that you hand off to your sales team!

Yup, it’s really that simple. Every time you have a non-meaningful engagement, like someone downloading a white paper from your website for the first time, toss that persons contact information into a salespersons lap and send them out on a sales call.

This will certainly increase your leads and it will certainly create a divide between your marketing and sales departments as your salespeople continue to experience leads that aren’t ready to talk with them.

If you’re moving a lead to sales after minimal engagement you don’t have the knowledge of their need or pain points to provide any real help to their situation. B2B marketing must contain a strategy that moves the buyer through their buying process with personalized content.

Conclusion

B2B marketing is tough! But it can be done successfully and in a controlled way by identifying the accounts that make the most sense for you to do business with, find the right people within that account that will be influential in the decision making process, then get your marketing message to them in a highly personalized context and then monitor who is engaging with you and who isn’t.