How do you measure the success of a launch or campaign when your sales cycles are 2 quarters or longer?

I think this depends on the product and tiers. Not all launches should correlate to the sales cycle. Some launches will affect the sales cycle, and sales win. Some launches are for current customers. You have to be clear about your goals, and they shouldn't be more than two goals. Ideally, you should have one goal and a max of two metrics. 

I’d keep an eye on all the indicators - leading and lagging.

For leading, do your campaign metrics indicate that people are interested and engaged? How is this helping you fill your funnel? Can you use technology like Gong, which records and transcribes sales conversations, to track keywords associated with the launch? Was there a spike in keyword use post campaign? And were mentions in a positive context?

For lagging, what did win/loss reveal? Was the product/feature instrumental in their decision? How did they find out about it?

It can be hard to measure effectiveness of an asset, launch or campaign in longer sales cycles because attribution is tricky in a 6+ month sales cycle. Measuring the number of touchpoints that influences customer behavior spanning a quarter or two will show you the bigger picture of the pipeline you have influenced.

Expect to see bookings more than a quarter out during the enterprise sales cycle, but you can still measure “created pipeline” and “influenced pipeline'' in quarter. Additionally, you can also report on cumulative bookings at the close each quarter or report a 6-9 month roll-up report to see how a campaign is performing and contributing to the bottom line.

I like to measure all marketing in terms of:

Outputs: What you did marketing-wise such as sent X emails to whom, created Y social posts, made Z video, etc.

Outcomes: How did people engage with your marketing such as clicks on the email CTAs, customers' tweets about your launch, Product Hunt results, etc.?

Outtakes: What happened downstream for the business as a result of your launch/campaign? This is often the most difficult to measure quickly, yet the most important for execs. How much pipeline did your launch/campaign create for the sales team? Within a reasonable amount of time (e.g., two weeks), how many people upgraded to a paid credit-card plan as a result of your email? How many existing customers used the feature and rated it highly in a survey?

While so many experts focus on outtakes, I believe measuring all three — outputs, outcomes, and outtakes — is important because you're a) evaluating each step of the marketing journey (making the thing, observing how the thing performed in real-time, and measuring how the thing impacted the business), and b) like you suggested, sometimes it takes months to measure the business impact and you want to report on something now.

Specific to your situation (i.e., two months or longer sales cycle), I recommend aligning with your leadership that you'll publish a few different reports at different moments in the sales cycle:

- In the first couple of days, just report on outputs and outtakes. And, if you can, report on increase in demo requests (for sales).

- After two weeks, report on any credit-card upgrades to paid plans (for self-serve/PLG) among people who engaged with your marketing. Also report on how Sales is engaging with the demo requests (e.g., sales says 10 of the 20 demo requests are sales accepted opportunities by them).

- After a couple months, report on pipeline or closed deals related to the launch/campaign, credit-card sales, and usage by existing customers. Also, share happy customer quotes from Customer Success, social, etc.

There are short term and long term metrics you can look at to gauge launch success. Here are a few!

Short-Term Launch Success Metrics:

• PR & AR: Press/media mentions, media interviews, Analysts briefed, analyst report inclusion

• Social: Social engagement, click-throughs, shares

• Web: Traffic increases, CTR on key CTAs, demo views, content downloads

• Content: Engagement, downloads, shares

• Sales: AEs enabled, opportunities opened, customer engagements scheduled

• Product: Trials, downloads, engagement

Long-Term Launch Success Metrics:

• Product: MAU, engagement, retention

• Sales: Pipeline, revenue, average deal cycle length, average deal size

• Web: Overall traffic trend changes