Welcome to our blog series on B2B Attribution! In this series, we’ll explore real-world use cases and understand the signs that your company is ready for attribution. Marketing might seem intuitive – after all, it’s all about getting the right message in front of the right people at the right time, right? However, developing and executing a solid strategy involves more than intuition.
Marketers need to stay ahead of the latest trends, understand how updates from platforms like Google or LinkedIn impact their ads, and keep a keen eye on their data to make informed decisions. It’s a time-consuming task that extends beyond regular working hours. A major challenge lies in analyzing the data and convincing the broader company that your results are valid.
Here’s where a marketing attribution tool comes into play. Marketers know that a significant amount of the activity they generate will never be reflected in regular opportunity source reports. Yet, they need to justify continuing their early and late funnel tactics. The trick is to leverage the data so convincingly that the rest of the company buys into it.
We’ll look at several successful use cases in action, helping you avoid common mistakes when building your attribution models. But remember, attribution isn’t a silver bullet that magically reveals the “digital golden path” for every buyer. It’s not a simple plug-and-play solution either – you need a dedicated team member to translate the insights into action items.
When done correctly, multi-touch attribution can be an excellent way to demonstrate marketing ROI in terms that the rest of the business understands. It’s a project usually undertaken later in a company’s maturity curve when other metrics for estimating marketing’s impact on the business are no longer sufficient.
Read on as we discuss real-world attribution use cases and the signs that your company can no longer delay your attribution project.
Three Real-World Attribution Use Cases
Measuring the Impact of Awareness
Customer A, after recruiting a new CMO six months ago, has focused mainly on top-of-funnel strategies. They revamped their website, revisited their brand narrative, enhanced their social media presence, and invested in content development and competitive advertising. While executives have shown patience, they’re now seeking revenue-tied results, eager to discern what marketing budget is required to meet next year’s targets.
In the wake of COVID-19, like many B2B businesses, Company A shifted from in-person events to digital strategies. They faced budget cuts but reallocated a significant portion of their trade show budget. However, despite an increase in web activity due to paid search advertising, low conversion rates were observed as visitors often left without filling out the landing page form, only to return days later.
To address Company A’s problem, we opted for a novel approach known as “virtual campaigns” instead of segmenting the chat campaign. These campaigns record web interactions, which are typically missed in standard Salesforce campaigns as visitors’ identities aren’t always known at the point of interaction. Leveraging CaliberMind’s powerful data engine, we can now retroactively track a visitor’s actions, tagging them as we learn more about their identities.
A campaign hierarchy helps us organize the data by channel, associate ad spend, and segment campaigns by other identifiers:
Because CaliberMind can parse or segment touches based on funnel stages, we can hone in on which campaigns are generating activity at each stage of the funnel. This means we can inspect whether or not digital content has an impact on awareness.
Examples of Attribution In Action
Let’s look at some campaign stats using hypothetical data to determine which content is working when.
In the example above, the Everything Analytics Guide is the number one driver to this company’s website for the first time. Even their older guides still perform well. The data is also telling us they should focus more on Social Media activity.
Stepping up a level, let’s look at how campaign channels influence revenue across the funnel over an undisclosed time using Chain-Based Attribution:
Using Marketing Attribution to Prove Late Funnel Value
At Company B, the marketing operations manager was tired of having the same conversation over and over. The conversation often revolved around the prioritization of major trade shows as the primary campaign source, even for opportunities that seemed to originate from demo requests and content downloads. This was due to the belief that the personal meetings held at these shows played a significant role in securing sales.
However, this clashed with the perspective of the VP of Sales, who was strongly against attribution models, viewing them as a method to overstate marketing’s contribution. This skepticism was further fueled by the fact that some tools only accounted for marketing campaign data when calculating opportunity influence, leading to a biased view. This one-sided approach resulted in virtually all credit being assigned to marketing, creating tension and dissatisfaction within the sales leadership.
In this example, we exclude non-marketing touches from our attribution scoring to replicate what the sales VP hated:
If you have an attribution tool that only takes marketing activities into account, you shouldn’t use your reports to state department pipeline influence. Sales leadership will protest loudly, dig up data to prove differently, and cast doubt on all of your numbers–not just marketing attribution data. If you’re only incorporating marketing data, your reports should be used as a way to gauge whether or not campaigns are influencing deal closure, not calculating marketing’s contribution to revenue.
Company B incorporated sales-generated activity and partner data (deal registrations, etc.) into its attribution model. They understood that the volume of sales emails would skew the data in the direction of sales, but that was acceptable. Particularly after we met with sales leadership to click through specific opportunity examples and show them the math.
Muting Campaigns
Customer C faced a challenge where their successful chat sessions led to their CFO proposing a reduction in paid search and social campaigns. The VP of marketing knew that paid advertising was one of the key tactics for getting people to the website in the first place, and without it, they wouldn’t generate enough pipeline for sales to hit their number.
The underlying issue was a lack of visibility. The chat tool failed to send UTM parameters to their CRM, obscuring the sources of demo requests.
To address this, we implemented virtual campaigns for tracking web activities and adjusted the chat integration call to include UTM parameters. This provided a complete picture of all contacts’ activities at a given account, reducing dependency on the immediate pre-opportunity action.
There are cases when we do suppress campaigns. It’s common for organizations to have parent campaigns for organization purposes or campaigns that all accounts run through by default. We help them develop a clear strategy for flagging which campaigns are relevant and which are not.
Using buyer journey mapping, Customer C provided a visual that demonstrated how people commonly progressed to a chat request. Here is how our demos usually come about as an example:
We’ve found that transparency is just as crucial to executive leadership as a strong data foundation is to stellar attribution reporting. Make sure you only commit to as much as your tools are capable of, and don’t be afraid to dig into a few key opportunities to illustrate how your models work.
So, is your company ready for B2B Attribution? Or is there something you should need to fix before that?
Five Signs Your Company Is Ready for B2B Attribution
If you believe your company is ready for B2B attribution, the following five signs can confirm your upcoming marketing strategy. By following CaliberMind’s recommendations, you can avoid common mistakes your peers run into when building their attribution models.
1. The Questions From the C-Suite Have Evolved
Many companies begin measuring marketing impact by web traffic metrics, social media metrics, and some other softer stats. Over time, a CRM administrator will implement mechanisms to measure name acquisitions, qualified lead volume, and, eventually, opportunity “source” reporting. These changes are either driven by different objectives rolled down by your investors or a pre-emptive attempt by your CEO and CFO to understand and influence customer acquisition cost and cost of goods sold.
There are four major signals from your executive team that a multi-touch attribution project is around the corner:
- Sales are disputing marketing’s positive impact on their team and struggling to hit their pipeline generation and booking numbers.
- Your leadership team understands that a single “source” for an opportunity isn’t realistic and that marketing is helping more than it appears.
- Your marketing leaders are pressured to prove return on advertising spend or justify significant investments that can’t be measured with a single-touch CRM model.
- Your sales leader is wary of opportunity influence reporting because it’s “marketing-biased.”
These signals mean that your leadership team is no longer comfortable with “feeling” like marketing is working. They want to understand exactly what is and isn’t working. The focus on the marketing team shifts from scrappy marketing tactics to bringing anyone in the door to an emphasis on efficiency.
These changes mean your business leaders want to see that marketing is spending its money on only the most impactful campaigns, focused on the most ideal of customer profiles, and a responsible steward of the budget awarded to the department.
2. Delays in Delivery are Causing Issues
Early in a company’s “life,” there’s a fairly large degree of comfort with ambiguity and managing by gut. However, the feedback loop between marketing and sales is generally tighter because marketing has nowhere to hide, and sales aren’t shy about sharing–which means marketing constantly gets qualitative feedback whether they like it or not.
Eventually, the feedback loop diminishes, and marketers must rely more heavily on data to decide who they target, the messages that work, and the creative that resonates.
This also means waiting for a quarterly business review to evaluate campaign results is no longer reasonable. Marketers need early indicators that their campaigns are or are not working, so they adjust as they go. This real-time reporting also allows marketers to design better campaigns in the future instead of sticking to a strategy that no longer works.
The other major symptom is frequent fly-bys or online requests from your CMO. They’re being asked how lead generation is going early in month one of the quarter so the rest of the business can understand if their pipeline health is at risk or healthy. They’re also being pressured early by the rest of the team to report how significant investments produce ROI.
3. We’ve Exhausted What Our Tools Can Do
We frequently work with prospects who want to see CaliberMind because they’re tired of struggling with their CRM reports. Most in-app attribution depends on sales being diligent about the contacts they associate with their deals or opportunities (depending on the CRM). No salesperson likes to be stuck with a list of NSAs (Non-Selling Activities).
There are ways to automate opportunity contact roles and force more stringent data entry, but you risk a revolt. Most marketers are very interested in hearing about ways to collect account-wide interactions in an attribution model passively in the background.
We also hear from people because cross-functional adoption of influence models is very low. Most in-app attribution relies on campaign data, and replicating the tasks, events, and other signals your sales, product, and channel teams produce isn’t sustainable.
4. Pressure to Prove ROI is On Like Never Before
As companies mature, their goal is to make pipelines and bookings predictable. They want to know how much they must invest in the go-to-market teams and strategies to hit a specific number. This often leads to an awkward conversation with the CFO about how not every marketing interaction has a straight line to a sale – and that marketers still need to do things that aren’t considered lead generation for the company to be successful.
Proving ROI has as much to do with running internal campaigns and educating your executive team as it relates to multi-touch attribution (which you can read more about here). But if your executive team insists on a dollar-in-dollar-out ratio, you’ll need the flexibility to use more than one metric and buy-in on your multi-touch attribution model.
5. Too Much Time is Spent Analyzing vs. Doing
Data is great. It helps us verify what we’re doing is working or informs us that it’s time to change. But if our systems aren’t connected, it can be a pain in the backside to wrangle everything together and try to make sense of it.
In a 2020 CaliberMind survey, operations professionals shared that they’re still spending a week out of every month either cleaning their data or pulling it into spreadsheets and running formulas to make sense of it. Judging from our conversations with B2B professionals, that stat hasn’t changed much (if at all).
The juice isn’t worth the squeeze at that point, and marketers fall back to using their trusted applications to estimate whether a campaign is or isn’t worth repeating. This means they’re using insights like click-through rates and cost per lead rather than opportunities and pipeline generated. The hard truth is that your executive team cares much more about hitting their pipeline numbers and cost per opportunity than whether a campaign generates interest with an audience that isn’t ready to buy.
The dirty secret in companies with a business intelligence (BI) team supporting marketing is that it can take weeks or even months to connect a new marketing tool to their data warehouse or data lake and incorporate that data into their data models. Marketers like to change tools often, which wreaks havoc on data schemas and advanced models like account scoring and attribution.
If you’re going to DIY or attempt to build this yourself, we don’t have a silver bullet to avoid that last point unless you’re willing to work with a vendor that has already mapped out and incorporated major marketing tools into their schema – which is obviously no longer DIY. Read our “Ultimate Guide to DIY B2B Marketing Attribution” for more information.
CaliberMind is Here to Help
Our team consists of marketers, marketing operations professionals, and business intelligence analysts with a background in B2B technology companies. Because we’ve been there and done that, we’re very passionate about helping our customers experience a painless approach to data-driven marketing.
Need help? Don’t hesitate to contact us for more information on attribution best practices.
