How to Use Analytics to Get a Promotion: 10 Metrics That'll Help Your Cause

The sad truth is this: You can work really hard, check all the boxes, come in early and stay late, and still not earn the promotion you want. What's missing? What do you need to do to actually show your boss you've earned it?

An important part of justifying a promotion is showing your value through metrics. If you can tell a story to your boss using data -- your value in leads or revenue generated for the company -- then you'll make a much more compelling case for why you deserve a promotion.

Let's look at which metrics can help you show your work in certain areas. (For all you HubSpot customers, we'll go over how to find them in HubSpot, too.)

1) Track Lead Sources

Once a marketer creates a piece of content, their work isn't done. The next step is promoting that piece of content on various channels to drive leads for their sales team. The burning question is: Where's the best place or places to promote the content?

Tracking the original source that your leads come from is key in figuring out your most effective promotion channels -- whether it's social media, email marketing, organic search, or something else.

As a marketer, to show you've earned a promotion, you need to show your boss that you're hitting your lead generation goals. These goals are what drives your business. After you generate leads, they go to the sales team and ultimately turn into revenue. Showing you're consistently hitting your lead goals will be important when you make your case.

To do this in HubSpot:

In your Sources report, you'll see how many leads you are generating as a result of different channels. Use this to make sure you are on track to hitting your goals.

2) Use Tracking URLs

Depending on the software you use, you may not always have built-in tracking for your content. Even if you do, there are times when you need to work on an offline campaign -- like a tradeshow -- where it isn't as easy to track contacts you met who then visited your website.

This is where tracking URLs come in. Tracking URLs allow you to differentiate how people found your website based on UTM parameters in the URL. These parameters can show what channel a contact came from as well as what campaign they were a part of. (Learn more about them in this blog post.)

An experienced marketer understands the impact that offline and online campaigns have on their goals. It isn't always easy to track everything that happens offline, but it is possible. If you can show the impact of your online and offline campaigns -- and why you are investing time and resources in each of them -- it'll showcase your ability to use your time and resources properly.

To do this in HubSpot:

Go to "Reports Home" and select Tracking URL Builder on the right-hand side. There, you can create as many tracking URLs as you'd like. (Alternatively, you can create them with Google's Tracking URL Builder.)

3) Score Your Leads

Not all leads are treated equally. Some are much more likely to close than others. You can qualify your leads based on whether or not they share similarities with other leads that have closed into customers -- a process we call lead scoring. Lead scoring allows you to give each lead in your database a score based on certain characteristics. For example, if you know a certain title or industry is more likely to close, you can give your leads five points. If you know that contacts with .edu email addresses are less likely to close, you can subtract points from your leads score for those contacts.

The best thing about lead scoring? You can pass along that information to your sales team to help them prioritize their time and get in touch with the leads that are more likely to close. Not only does this drive higher revenue for your company, but this promotes sales and marketing alignment. Driving revenue and alignment among departments is a great reason to give a promotion.

To do this in HubSpot:

Go into "Contacts Settings." Click on "Custom Lead Scoring" and you'll see the option to create your lead scoring criteria.

4) Report on Your Revenue

Marketers are responsible for generating leads for their sales team. But in order to figure out whether or not these are quality leads, a marketer needs to understand how the leads are impacting the company’s bottom line. After all, you can generate thousands and thousands of leads, but if the majority of them don’t close, something needs to change in your marketing.

That's where revenue reporting comes in. Revenue reporting allows you to tie revenue numbers back to the promotional channels or marketing activities that you are working on. For example, you can tie revenue back to a piece of content or a marketing channel.

Marketers are often measured based on lead generation. But, ultimately, those leads turn into revenue for a business. Take that extra step by showing your boss how your work affects revenue for the company.

To do this in HubSpot:

Go to "Reports Home" and select a Contacts or Companies Report. (For more details on how to run a report like this, see this blog post.)

5) Identify the Content that Drives Conversions

When deciding what content to prioritize, it's important to look at more than just the views of content. You need to figure out which content drives your conversions -- and you can do that by looking at your attribution reports.

Attribution reports show you which content or marketing channels drive conversions throughout your entire funnel. If you want to see the content that drives lead conversions, you can do that. If you want to see the content that drives MQL conversions, you can do that, too.

Show attribution reports to your boss to show her that you know how to prioritize what you and your team focuses on.

To do this in HubSpot:

Go to "Reports Home" and select "Create a new report." Choose "Attribution Report." (For more details on how to run a report like this, read this blog post.)

6) Don't Treat All Leads Equally

Lead Scoring will help you see what leads are the most qualified. But once you have that subset of leads vs. marketing qualified leads vs. leads that are not qualified, you need to strategically think about how to nurture them differently. Most of your leads will still need to be nurtured into a more qualified stage whereas your marketing qualified leads need to be nurtured with more product-centric information.

Figuring out a way to scale how you nurture your leads and marketing qualified leads is a great way to show you deserve a promotion. If you're going to move up in your career, you need to understand how to scale the work you are doing. That may mean setting up a process or automated workflow to nurture your leads or marketing qualified leads. Or, it may mean another way that you are achieving the same or better results with less time and effort put into it. Think about ways that you can scale your work to earn that next promotion.

To do this in HubSpot:

As soon as you log into HubSpot, you'll see the number of leads and marketing qualified leads you have right on the dashboard.

7) See How Your Blog Subscribers Grow Over Time

When we think about the important blog metrics, we often think about the number of visits coming to our blog posts and the number of leads generated. However, blog subscribers is a key metric that should not be overlooked. Without blog subscribers, a lot is missing: You have less visits to your content; you have a smaller chance of your regular readers promoting your content on social channels; and it's ultimately harder to grow your blog.

Focusing on growing your blog subscribers is a great way to show how you are thinking long-term about the success of your blog. While you are most likely working on projects to impact the blog short-term, having the foresight to know what needs to be done to make your blog successful in the future is key and deserving of a promotion.

To do this in HubSpot:

Go to the blog dashboard. Here, you can toggle the dashboard from views to subscribers (by clicking "Subscribers" in the top right-hand corner of the dashboard) so you can see how you're tracking against the previous month's blog subscribers.

8) Understand What External Content Drives Conversions

Some attribution reports will help you analyze which pieces of content on your website is driving conversions. With others you can see what marketing channels are driving conversions to your website. But there's also a third option: understanding what external content drives conversions to your website. This is key to see what external relationships should be nurtured and what websites may be linking to your content.

Understanding the importance of external content and relationships in addition to the content on your own website can help you strengthen your case for getting a promotion. It showcases a deep knowledge of the industry and whom you should make connections with. It also shows what relationships you may want your PR team to focus on. This can make a huge difference between a good marketer and a great marketer.

To do this in HubSpot:

You can follow the same steps from the this blog post on running reports for your blog leads (mentioned in #5) -- except this time, select "By referrer" and "All interactions" when you go into your Attribution Report options.

9) Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rates

One of the most important metrics for any marketer is the lead-to-customer conversion rate. This number shows whether you're generating the right amount of leads in comparison to how many customers you are closing. If your lead-to-customer conversion rate is extremely low, it's a good indication that you aren't generating high quality leads and may need to adjust your strategy. You should look at this metric as a whole but also broken down by channel and specific pieces of content.

Why is this important for showing you deserve a promotion? It helps your boss understand how you're approaching your marketing strategy -- specifically, by showing which channels and pieces of content have high lead-to-customer conversion rates.

To do this in HubSpot:

Go to your Sources report to see the lead to customer conversion rate by different marketing channels.

10) Track Behavior On Your Website

When a lead comes to your website, you can see which pages they visit and which forms they fill out. But what about what links they click? And how they get from one page to another?

In addition to the information your leads provide to you on forms, you also want to take into account behavioral actions they take on your website. Even though they aren't giving you this information, this is important to understand how they are interacting with your website.

Segmenting based on behavior on your website, not just information on a form shows that you approach your marketing in a unique way. While most marketers rely on the information that is given to them in forms, you show you can take it to the next level by combining with other types of data. Your boss will recognize your ability to think outside of the box, experiment, and analyze data.

To do this in HubSpot:

Install our Events Bookmarklet, which allows you to track clicks on any webpage without installing any code. (For more details on how to use this app, read this blog post.)

What other metrics do you think are a good indication of getting that next promotion?