Ask a marketer how they measure success and you’re likely to get some variation of the same answer: revenue growth, ROI, or increased conversion rates. Increasingly, however, customer-focused metrics are factoring into reporting, and B2B marketers could learn something from B2C marketers when it comes to the importance they place on customer-centric metrics.

In our latest research report, The State of Marketing Leadership, we asked over 900 senior-level marketers just this. Below are our some of our findings around how marketers are measuring success.

The State of Marketing Leadership

How Senior-Level Marketers are Redefining Success and Integrating the Customer Journey
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How Marketing Leaders Are Measuring Their Efforts

We asked marketing leaders how they measure marketing success. Results are shown in the chart below.

Across the board, senior-level marketers rate revenue growth as the most important metric (51% rated as most important), followed by return on investment (29%), and conversion rates (23%).

B2B vs. B2C Metrics

Metrics aren’t one-size-fits-all, and that truth emerges when comparing B2B and B2C companies’ metrics:

• B2B marketing leaders focus on metrics related to leads, such as pipeline directly attributed to marketing activities (25% use this metric), quality of leads generated (21% use this metric), and number of leads generated (17%).
• B2C marketing leaders place a heavy emphasis on customer-related metrics, including customer satisfaction (25%), customer retention rates (21%), and lifetime customer value (20%). 

Of course, the importance of marketing-influenced revenue growth will never (and shouldn’t) disappear. But customer journey ownership means that marketers must measure and act on data about customers, not just data about dollars. As one senior-level survey respondent wrote, “We are gathering metrics on our customers in order to find out what makes them choose us.” Marketing success now sits squarely on the shoulders of data and analytics expertise.

When measuring metrics that can predict future conversion rates (like lifetime customer value), data and analytics become even more important. Considering that only 17% of respondents said their company had fully integrated their customer data across all areas of the organization (i.e., sales, operations, customer service, marketing, etc.), we expect to see more marketers integrate data to improve personalized interactions
and customer satisfaction.

Today more than ever before, customers are in charge. With technology’s constant changes and the resulting business impacts, companies must become helpful, accessible, and always-on resources for their customers. A customer doesn’t care what your marketing ROI is, but he or she can surely affect
it—pointing to a need for more “state of the customer” metrics across all marketing teams.

For more data and insights from our latest survey of more than 900 senior-level marketers, download the full report — The State of Marketing Leadership. This latest report was a joint research report with LinkedIn and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.