Measuring B2B Marketing Success

By Michael Goldrich, CHDM, Global Head of Digital Marketing, Club Quarters, and member of HSMAI’s Marketing Advisory Board

How do we know we are being successful when it comes to our marketing strategies? HSMAI’s Marketing Advisory Board (MAB) members took a deep dive into measuring the success and ROI of B2B marketing on their latest call, including sharing some of the metrics and tools that they use. Here are key takeaways from their discussion:

ON MEASURING B2B SUCCESS:

• “Only 25 percent of hotel marketers have active B2B SEM campaigns. The reason is the associated challenges to track the ROI. We’ve recently solved the tracking issue. We’ve set up full-cycle tracking from AdWords to WordPress to Salesforce and back to Adwords. Now we can see the full opportunity and funnel. The challenge is, how do you implement this kind of tracking for hotel groups with a less integrated martech stack? I think you go back to old school. Let’s match up how many leads the marketing team delivered this month and talk with your sales team. How many of those closed? Come up with a number, and at least it’s a raw estimate.”
• “We have a couple of B2B campaigns where we want to track the full ROI. Specifically, I have an ongoing campaign encouraging people to book extended stays with us. So, how would know if it’s been successful or not? We’re working with Google and they’ve helped create this Google trackable ID called that GCLID that goes directly onto our website form as a hidden field. When the website form is submitted, the GCLID automatically goes to our CRM. And once the lead opportunity is actualized, the associated revenue gets passed to AdWords. Now you can have the end-to-end tracking in place and you can see the full ROI.”

ON LOOKING AT DATA:

• “The Hotel Network (“THN”) has a widget you can put on a booking engine to see the pricing of your rates compared against other OTAs. They also have the capability to put highly personalized segmented messages directly on your website and booking engine. They recently created a program called BenchDirect and a new metric called the Direct Booking Index (DBI). It is basically an amalgamation of conversion, rates, booking, demand, disparities, and revenue. And each of those has a different weight in the DBI calculation. If you dig a little bit deeper into their dashboard of charts and data, you can now compare your hotel against itself, the brand, the destination, and 50 hotels from their network that they feel are similar to your hotel. This program just launched in early March.”
• “I think comp set scores should be more important, because you can have a great ROI on your book-direct campaigns and you can have a great ROI on your social or AdWords, but overall the hotel could be underperforming against a comp set or underperforming against budget.”
• “So usually, we’re comparing ourselves against ourselves, whether it’s our ROI, our year-over-year or our-month-over-month, a little bit against the Demand 360 in terms of the comp set. But I think most hotels are really looking at themselves. So, in theory, you would think that if you’re a hotel owner, you would want to make sure that you’re doing probably as well as the brand across all KPI measures. Now expand this further with data you pull in the destination. Now you can see whether your hotel is getting its fair share of direct business from the destination market. And I think something like this, at least to me, would help to diagnose where your direct booking experience is doing better or worse against all the key metrics.”

ON B2B CHALLENGES:

• “I had this conversation earlier this week asking a brand, ‘How do you expect me to measure the success of the programs that we’re talking about?’ And I knew exactly what the answer was going to be: ‘We don’t. We’re going to send all leads to your website and then you’re going to get RFPs.’ Then you’ve got to ask the sales department to qualify the information and the RFPs that are coming in. And right now, maybe 90 percent of our hotels have no one on property still. So, it’s tough right now.”
• “I think from a hotel perspective, one of the challenges is that a lot of companies don’t even have a B2B form on their website. And then if they do, it probably goes into an inbox where nobody knows where it is. That’s the first step, is getting the form up and making sure somebody’s responding to it.”