B2B Marketing Attribution: When Are You Ready For A Robust Solution?

October 12, 2020  |  
By The Pedowitz Group (TPG)
October 12, 2020
By The Pedowitz Group (TPG)

Multi-touch attribution is an increasingly important part of the B2B marketing stack. The ability to measure ROI of all marketing channels to derive insights that can guide future strategy is essential for businesses to scale and adapt. 

According to the State of Pipeline Marketing Report, marketers with a sophisticated attribution solution are 71% more likely to report positive ROI.

An attribution platform, such as Bizible, connects all marketing efforts (both online and offline) to revenue, allowing revenue credit to be accurately distributed to the marketing channels that are making an impact. And as any revenue marketer knows, proving impact on true business value only bolsters credibility within the organization.

Multi-touch attribution also helps marketing optimize for the right outcome. Rather than saying, “This piece of content got downloaded 500 times last month,” marketing can say “This piece of content contributed to 50% of our new monthly revenue,” and then follow-up with “We should create more content like this!”

You may already know all about attribution’s benefits, but how do you know if … and when … your organization is ready to implement a marketing attribution solution?

Here’s a few key indicators.

Your marketing automation platform (MAP) is integrated with a CRM

If you’ve already made a substantial investment in a marketing automation platform, and it’s accurately connected to sales data in your CRM, then you’ve already overcome the greatest hurdle to effectively tracking marketing attribution. These two systems are critical to storing and managing the vast amount of data collected throughout the entire customer journey – from the anonymous first visit to the closed-won opportunity.

Attribution aligns both the marketing and sales teams around a common goal – revenue – which, in turn, aligns all of their efforts. When marketing is held accountable for revenue, they are no longer incentivized to bloat their lead volume with poor quality leads to achieve certain goals. They can also optimize their efforts based on what really matters – creating business value – rather than focusing on top-of-funnel engagement metrics.

The State of Pipeline Marketing Report showed that 84% of marketers with a multi-touch attribution model in place said that they have a well-aligned relationship with their sales team.

Your customer journey is long and complex

Does your sales cycle require dozens of touchpoints with prospects before the sale occurs? Perhaps you have dozens of contacts attached to each account, each of them on a unique customer journey, and entering the funnel at different stages.

Long sales cycles generate a lot of data, and much of that data will be ignored with a single-touch attribution model. By reducing the entire customer journey to a single interaction, a single-touch attribution model ignores marketing efforts that affect the lead farther down the funnel. In multi-touch attribution models, however, revenue credit is distributed across multiple interactions throughout a long, complex, multi-channel customer journey.

Related: Map an Amazing Customer Journey

You use a multitude of marketing channels regularly (both online and offline)

While no customer journey can be called “typical”, most of them do span a wide range of marketing channels. Between offline channels such as tradeshows and conferences, and a vast array of online channels such as social, email, display, etc., the customer journey is more complex today than ever before.

Marketers need to be able to accurately measure and compare online channels with offline channels to decide how to best allocate the marketing budget. They may be earning twice as much revenue per dollar from tradeshows compared to AdWords, but without omnichannel attribution they’d never know.

As marketing teams add more channels to their mix, advanced attribution becomes more necessary and more valuable. According to the State of Pipeline Marketing Report, marketers who use eight or more channels use advanced, multi-touch attribution models.

You’re investing a significant amount of money on paid media every month

Paid media includes display advertising, pay-per-click campaigns and promoted social posts. These efforts tend to impact the top of the funnel directly, so it’s imperative to track anonymous first touch and connect it to downstream engagement and sales data.

The more money you spend on paid media, the more valuable an attribution model will become. Once marketers know what paid channels generate more leads that eventually become customers, they can increase spending on those channels and reduce spending on the less effective ones.

You’re tracking traffic using UTM parameters and on-site JavaScript  

UTM parameters allow marketers to determine what specific marketing effort drove a person to their website. Once the person lands on the website, on-site JavaScript code allows marketers to follow that person’s actions as they click on different links and view different pages during their visit.

Because B2B marketing relies so heavily on form fills to create leads, tracking this on-site behavior is a crucial element of understanding the customer journey. If you’re already tracking this behavior using these methods, then you’re well on your way to implementing a marketing attribution solution.

An example: Bizible allows marketers to build and organize UTM parameters, as well as manage web and channel analytics all in a single place. This centralization is important for robust, omni-channel marketing.

If the statements above ring true for your organization, then you’re well-positioned to implement a sophisticated marketing attribution solution such as those for Bizible or Salesforce Marketing Cloud!

To be successful in today’s landscape, marketers must understand the big picture and strive to align with and impact business objectives. Multi-touch attribution is a critical step in that journey, enabling marketers to make smarter decisions and optimize for the ultimate outcome of marketing: revenue. 

So, what should you do next?

  • If you don’t have robust attribution, that may be the next step in continuing your team’s marketing maturity. You can ask us a follow-up question, or connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more!
  • Curious how to bolster your revenue marketing capabilities? Start here!

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