Attribution is a trending discussion topic since many of us have been burned in the past. Is not implementing attribution the right thing for us as B2B professionals? The top consultants in the marketing attribution space are joining us to debate if and when people need attribution. Join us to hear what your options are when the executive team is no longer satisfied with MQL volume or pipeline sourcing.
The video below will detail DIY signs that your company needs/is ready for attribution.
Signs That Your Company Is Ready For Attribution
Marketing attribution helps you understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and allocate your budget wisely. Here are signs your company might be ready for it:
- Diverse Marketing Channels: You use multiple channels (e.g., email, social media, PPC, SEO, content marketing) and need to evaluate their contributions.
- Steady Lead Generation: You consistently generate leads and want to identify the most effective channels.
- Robust Data Collection: You gather data from various touchpoints, including website analytics, CRM, and marketing automation platforms.
- Clear Goals and KPIs: You have defined business goals and key performance indicators.
- Complex Customer Journeys: Your customer interactions span multiple touchpoints, necessitating an understanding of each one’s role.
- Budget Optimization Needs: You aim to optimize your marketing budget by identifying the best ROI channels.
- Analytical Skills: Your team can analyze data and extract insights, or you are willing to invest in these capabilities.
- Sales and Marketing Alignment: Your sales and marketing teams are aligned and collaborate on customer journey insights.
- Optimization Focus: You’re committed to improving your strategies through data-driven decisions.
- Tech Readiness: You have or are ready to invest in the necessary technology and tools for marketing attribution.
Implementing marketing attribution can greatly enhance your understanding of how your marketing activities contribute to business outcomes and help you make informed decisions.
Why Marketers Need Engagement Scoring & Attribution
There are a lot of tools on the market that specialize in either engagement scoring or campaign attribution. While they serve two very different purposes, they rely on very similar data sets and demand a reasonable level of data hygiene.
Even with the structural similarities, marketers are often forced to choose one investment over the other because these platforms are costly.
This is a shame considering companies need both engagement scoring and campaign attribution to optimize their go-to-market motions in both marketing and sales.
Engagement Scoring
There are many “flavors” of engagement scoring, but the purpose of each is to score the level of engagement the prospect is demonstrating with your company. The model could include web activity, knowledge base views, support tickets, and any number of internally logged activities depending on how you wish to use the model.
In general, marketing automation platforms offer lead engagement scoring focused on campaign engagement, and customer success platforms offer account engagement scoring that focuses on internal activity logging and support tickets.
Marketing Attribution
The purpose of multi-touch attribution models is to assign multiple campaign activities a percentage of pipeline or revenue dollars. These models acknowledge that marketing interacts with an account numerous times during a sales cycle and attempt to balance attribution across those interactions.
Attribution provides a better way to estimate return on ad spend for awareness campaigns such as competitive search campaigns pulling in visitors researching more established vendors. In this example, people who haven’t heard of your company before aren’t likely to fill out your landing page form, but they may revisit your site multiple times and eventually request a demo. Lead generation or source reporting alone for paid search would look abysmal and create an argument that search ads aren’t worth doing. Attribution reporting better demonstrates the value of awareness campaigns by highlighting opportunities that may not have happened without paid search driving the traffic to your website in the first place.
Attribution allows marketers to see what works at different points of the funnel on a macro level (e.g., is paid search or paid social more effective at generating awareness?) or at the individual account level (e.g., which pieces of content resonated with which audience members at different points of a key sale so I can optimize look-alike campaigns?).
Some vendors only incorporate campaign member data in Salesforce and limit customization, so choose wisely.
Why Care About Engagement Scoring?
From the viewpoint of a marketing ops professional, I would like to say, “Everyone.” More realistically, engagement has broader-reaching applications.
Engagement scoring is a great way to improve handoffs between marketing and sales if your model is thoroughly tested. Oftentimes, organizations with best-in-class marketing tech stacks layer an ideal customer profile (ICP) score on top of their engagement score to help pre-qualify accounts even further.
Suppose your stack has a data normalization layer. In that case, you can aggregate the engagement score at the account level to flag sales when multiple people are engaging with your company (digitally and in person). In B2B, this is a huge benefit because of the impact buyer committees have on a sale.
While the number of engaged accounts and people can be interesting to the executive team and gauge brand awareness, the real value is in shortening the opportunity life cycle.
Why Care About Attribution?
If we’re honest, attribution matters most to marketing. Marketers can use attribution to understand when their campaigns are resonating with audiences at different points in the buyer journey. It also helps them prove to the rest of the organization the effectiveness of their programs.
With attribution, marketing can prove that although a given campaign may not look impressive when using traditional lead generation metrics (names acquired, MQL, etc.), it may be pushing opportunities that are already in flight over the finish line. For example, an ROI calculator may be a great asset for your champion toward the end of the deal, or a user group may give your prospective client the final reassurance they need that your company is the right business partner.
Flavors of Engagement Scoring
Which engagement scoring model or technology you choose should be evaluated based on what you’re trying to achieve. Ask yourself what your goal is. Some common goals include:
- Improving customer retention
- Accelerating new logo acquisition
- Increasing the number of expansion opportunities
If you’re a B2C company trying to retain your subscribers, a solution that measures a person’s engagement using stats pulled from your service portal, knowledge base, and logged support activity is probably the way to go.
On the other hand, if you’re a B2B company trying to scale up new logo acquisition–and these initial purchases are over six figures (indicating you’re dealing with a buyer committee)–you’ll want to measure Salesforce campaign data, web activity, inbound calls, and other early-indicator data and aggregate the score at the account level.
Flavors of Campaign Attribution
Campaign attribution models can be as elaborate or simple as you’d like, but selecting a model should be driven by several factors:
- Are you B2B or B2C?
- How long are your sales cycles?
- Do you have different sales cycle lengths across product types?
- Do you have regional variations in buying behavior?
We will say that single-point attribution (common models being first touch or last touch) is probably sufficient for B2C companies with a low price point and abbreviated sales cycle. You’ll want to know what drove them to your website immediately before they made their purchase.
B2B companies with a six-month sales cycle and expensive products should invest in solutions that incorporate data beyond traditional Salesforce campaigns (web activity, paid search visits without a form fill, etc.), ideally include activity logged by your channel and sales, and consider interactions across the account (including leads).
We also recommend using chain-based attribution to eliminate human bias, which you can read about more here.
Why We Need Them in the Same Place
Integrating scoring into your system of record, particularly the one used by the sales team is crucial. These connections should be dynamic, allowing engagement models to decay over time—the score drops the further you move from the last interaction.
Engagement scoring is valuable for sales teams if they trust the data but often resist logging into multiple systems. If they’re already using Salesforce, a chat application, and an email platform, additional systems may hinder adoption.
Some platforms handle data export, normalization, scoring, and reintegration into your CRM. This dual functionality is efficient, unlike having two companies clean the same data for different purposes. Other platforms integrate directly with your CRM but require proper configuration and clean data.
The most efficient solution is a platform that normalizes your data, processes it through attribution and lead scoring models, and automates the pushback into your CRM.
If it were me, I’d hit the easy button and invest in a platform that can do it all 🙂
