It is extremely important for marketers to prove the ROI on B2B marketing efforts. Consider this scenario - a particular marketing campaign, ‘A,’ brought a potentially high-paying customer to your business website. However, due to some reason, the lead had to ditch the purchase. A few days later, the same lead revisits the website by searching for your company on Google and makes the purchase. While the final purchase was made via the organic search channel, the high paying lead was brought to your website via the marketing campaign ‘A.’
The B2B customer journey began from the efforts of the marketing campaign ‘A’; however, only the final organic search purchase is recorded. These scenarios occur way more often than it is expected, and there needs to be a way for marketers to prove the worth of their high investment marketing efforts. This is where marketing attribution comes into the picture. The actionable data insights obtained from marketing attribution and its corresponding reports help you build a strong case to prove the worth of your B2B marketing efforts and also helps you work in the right direction if you have been working cluelessly until now.
In the B2B marketing sphere, customer journey mapping refers to when businesses look into the B2B customer journey of a customer from its starting point to the endpoint, including every touchpoint from the point of view of the customer. Marketing attribution allows businesses to learn which touchpoint the customer interacted with on their B2B customer journey before they finally made the purchase.
Marketing attribution allows B2B marketers to identify high growth channels in their B2B marketing scheme. It gives a clear insight into which channel or campaign is working best for your business and which channel needs to receive less credit or be eliminated. Marketing attribution promotes multi-touch modeling so that businesses can look into and put efforts into multiple channels that bring high growth and not waste time and resources on the low paying ones.
Effective B2B marketing schemes are the ones thus run on previously understood actionable data. Marketing attribution enables you to look at a B2B customer journey from your customer’s viewpoint. You see what brought them to the website, what caused them to ditch a purchase, and what are the several gaps in their journey from initiation to purchase. When the B2B customer journey goes in a logical order, it can help you divide credit intelligently and strategically among multiple growth channels. This decreases investment in low performing channels and allows you to shift focus to channels that matter. When you identify the best high paying B2B marketing channels, you work more on them, thus promoting your growth.
Simply looking at first touch attribution - when 100% credit is assigned to all touch points that simply lead a visitor to your website for the very first time - or last touch attribution - the complete opposite of first touch attribution thus losing focus on non-converting customers - is not what brings about the highest optimization. A multi-touch marketing attribution model allows you to track properly every tiny touchpoint in the B2B customer journey.
A viable lead that has a high potential for spending comes to the website of a company six to eight times before they finally make the purchase. Tracking a multi-touch marketing attribution model will help you identify which touchpoints pushed them to keep visiting the website and which touchpoint finally triggered the purchase. The first and last touchpoints are merely two pieces of a 1000 piece puzzle. Every encounter a lead has with your website pushes them one step forward to make the purchase.
When a lead has visited you two or three times and ditches the purchases at the same point of their B2B customer journey every time, you can make a few changes to generate more interest. If they ditch you at your social media post where you have mentioned ‘no free shipping’ or ‘additional taxes,’ you could maybe eliminate that part from your social media copies. If they have ditched you when they are looking for different products, you could maybe lower the shipping price on the item or include more colors in the same product.
To diligently keep a check on all these touchpoints and check which marketing attribution model is working the best for you, all B2B marketing tools have an option to generate marketing attribution reports. It gives you a complete insight into every minute touchpoint in the B2B customer journey, thus allowing you to truly prove the worth of every B2B marketing effort. Moreover, even if your efforts aren’t paying off, analyzing these marketing attribution reports can help you refocus and work in the right direction.
Google Analytics is an okay B2B marketing tool to use if you are looking to track your B2B customer journey. Setting up marketing attribution models is relatively simple and straightforward, and the attribution reports generated to give you a detailed insight into what is going well, what is not going well, and where should be your new focus. However, you can also look into other B2B marketing tools available to track your B2B customer journey with marketing attribution, such as Dreamdata, HubSpot, and so on.
To begin creating a marketing attribution report, report all your goals and transactions to your Google Analytics account, and make sure that you are using the ‘Campaign’ tag. Next, you need to move on to your Adwords account in Google Analytics. Your Adwords account in Google Analytics has the ‘Tools’ tab. From this, select the ‘Attribution’ option. Numerous marketing attribution reports of different categories will be ready for you to learn actionable steps for your B2B growth.
If you want your B2B business to grow with strong B2B marketing and highly optimized marketing attribution models but cannot figure out how to go about it, book a consultation with Filip Galetic today and allow us to help you with your B2B marketing endeavors.
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Stop killing the channels driving the most of your ROI by harnessing B2B marketing attribution. Learn more in our upcoming ebook 'The B2B Marketing Attribution Handbook'. |