Most marketing departments are still attached to the notion of creating a 12-month marketing plan, taking months to plan & implement their marketing strategies. These marketing departments are usually pigeonholed to planning out their year so that the executives at the company have an idea of what to budget on marketing for the fiscal year.
However, this isn’t the reality of marketing today; the days of planning out and implementing a 12-month strategy are dead.
In today's day and age, the marketing departments that succeed are those that can test their strategies in short iterations and make quick and calculated pivots to get the optimal results. This might not be viable for some marketing departments because it doesn't leave much room for planning out your budget for the year.
Part of what makes these short and quick strategy implementations so successful is being able to immediately analyze your results to see if it’s the right strategy for your business. Most top marketers can rattle off their campaigns average click rate, their MQL rate (Marketing Qualified Lead), and their cost per lead.
While this gives you a great idea of the monetary cost of your campaign and its results, it doesn't take into account the efficiency of the marketing team, just the effectiveness of your campaign once it has been built.
To dive into how efficient the marketing team is in relation to your lead volume your focus should be on your marketing velocity.
Taking the time to calculate your strategy's marketing velocity will not only allow you to see the efficiency of your marketing team but also allow you to see what deliverables your team should prioritize. This will enable your marketing department to determine how much time and, in turn, money is spent on an item allowing marketing teams to work optimally on a limited budget.
What is Marketing Velocity?
HubSpot defines marketing velocity as a measure of your marketing team’s productivity. Marketing Velocity allows you to measure how effective your team is on an hourly basis in relation to the number of leads each deliverable produces. This allows you to clearly determine what your marketing team should be spending their resources on and which tasks should take priority over others.
How to Determine Your Marketing Departments Marketing Velocity
The best way to determine the effectiveness of your team's marketing efforts is to breakdown and analyze each type of deliverable your team creates.
To do this, use the table below to list all of the items your marketing team produces.
If this is your first time measuring your team's marketing velocity, we recommend using the past year as your time range to get a full picture of your team’s efficiency & effectiveness.
After you’ve listed all of the assets your team has created, add how many of those items your team produced, under the “volume” column, how many leads one item produces on average under “leads”, and how many hours one asset takes to produce in your specified time range, under “hours”.
Example
If you wanted to calculate marketing velocity for blog posts, you would enter “blog posts” in the “Item” column. Next, you’d input the number of blog posts produced in a specified time range, for this example, we’ll say 15 blog posts were produced and use the last quarter as our date range. Each blog post got us an average of 6 leads and took us 3 hours to complete.
Once we have all of the information above input into our chart, we can calculate our leads per hour by dividing the number of leads by hours. This will tell us how effective each blog post was in relation to how much time it took to produce.
Leads per Hour = Leads ÷ Hours
To calculate total hours, simply multiply the volume by hours to see how many total hours were spent producing blog posts last quarter.
Total Hours = Volume × Hours
Once you’ve completed your table it should look something like this, we’ve added some additional items onto our table for context.
After your table is complete, you’ll be able to determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts on an hourly basis. This will allow you to evaluate all of your marketing efforts and put your time and energy into more effective marketing deliverables to increase the efficiency of your marketing department.
You’ll notice that even though our network events bring in the most leads per event it has the lowest leads per hour rate.
If we were to use the time we spent on our 2 networking events and use it to create an additional 16 blog posts (50 total hours on networking events divided by 3 hours for each blog, gives you roughly 16 blogs) we would have produced 96 leads, compared to 40 leads from our 2 network events - an additional 56 leads.
Final Thoughts
Leveraging your marketing velocity is vital for every marketing department to help determine which tactics your team should implement to drive the biggest impact on your lead volume.
Coupling your marketing velocity with testing your marketing strategies in short time periods will allow you to stay a step ahead of your competition and allows your marketing department to be as efficient as possible. You’re able to see, down to the hour, how efficient your marketing team is.
This will give your sales team consistent high-quality leads and, if the marketing & sales departments have a clearly outlined SLA (Service Level Agreement), increase your bottom line through implementing more efficient marketing tactics.
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