The buyer's journey has never been more complex in the B2B landscape. With an explosion of digital channels and a deluge of content, tracking what marketing touchpoints or marketing efforts influence prospects and drive revenue has become increasingly difficult. For B2Bs, understanding attribution is pivotal to optimizing budgets and improving marketing’s impact on the bottom line.
Many B2B marketers face increasing pressure to quantify ROI and accelerate pipeline velocity. But complicated attribution models actually hollow out budgets through analysis paralysis.
Today, the average B2B buyer consumes over 11 pieces of content and requires more than 31 marketing touchpoints before talking to sales. Their journey is far from linear and looks much more like a pretzel than a straight line.
B2B marketers need more visibility into which content and marketing campaigns are most effective in influencing the purchasing process. Misaligned Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) between sales and marketing worsen the problem, leading to wasted opportunities.
This blog post explores the emerging best practices for blending left-brain metrics with right-brain creativity by walking you through proven digital marketing attribution methodologies tailored for B2B marketers. You’ll learn how to:
Say goodbye to guesswork and the pressure to constantly prove your worth and hello to the insights and confidence needed to grow marketing’s bottom-line impact.
B2B Marketing attribution is a mix of art and science. Different analytics platforms and attribution models have caused a disconnect between the two, leading to an overload of information. Yet, with all the tools and models available to us, we still struggle to answer some of the most important questions:
The following challenges are often why you ask yourself these questions.
Marketing is often blamed when sales funnel performance is low. However, marketers struggle to defend their budgets due to poor attribution and inability to prove the effectiveness of their efforts. Marketing attribution should focus on pipeline and closed revenue rather than campaigns or marketing channels to address this issue.
One of the biggest challenges faced by B2B companies today is their reliance on the outdated demand waterfall model. This model assumes that converting sales leads into customers is a linear transition from marketing to sales to revenue, with each department solely focused on achieving its success metrics. However, this approach has become a challenge with shifting buyer behavior. It puts departments in competition, competing for lead credit instead of working collaboratively to serve the customer.
B2B buyers passively learn by consuming content about products/services through various channels. Tracking buyer touchpoints across these channels or multiple devices is challenging, making it difficult for marketing and sales teams to understand the customer journey. Although it may seem necessary to connect all the data dots, the good news is that it is not always required.
Sales and marketing teams have different goals and KPIs, which leads to conflicts and finger-pointing. If Marketing and Sales can't agree on measuring or defining a lead, then B2B marketing attribution is stopped dead in its tracks. Solid Sales and Marketing alignment begins by asking:
Once you have the answers to these questions, you can develop metrics to gain insight into the ideal buyer journey and then collaborate to optimize it.
Most B2B companies quickly throw marketing tech at their sagging pipeline when unsure what marketing strategies to try. But disjointed systems that use different tracking methods breed confusion, not clarity. Using too many tools for marketing and sales operations can lead to inaccurate data, poor handoffs, and a lack of a single source of truth for decision-making. Consolidating marketing and sales operations in a single tool like HubSpot helps collect, synchronize, and update information for better decision-making.
Why Do B2B Marketing Attribution and Metrics Exist in the First Place?
There are three main reasons why marketing metrics matter, and it's not JUST about job security (i.e., proving that marketing is working)
- To make better investments: Analyzing data can help you decide where to invest your time, energy, and resources in tactics that drive sales and ROI.
- To optimize campaign performance: By measuring the right things, data can act as dials and gauges that can be adjusted for better performance.
- To show that marketing is working: You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Analyzing data can help you validate that your marketing efforts are practical and demonstrate this to your superiors.
Data analysis should be about improving marketing, not just proving it works. Analyzing data can be simple if you know what you're looking for.
B2B marketing attribution is a journey from data confusion to strategic clarity, moving from 'Ad Hoc' tactics to 'Prescriptive' mastery. Attribution isn't a project or even a moment in time. It's an evolution where data drives all marketing decisions. Check the chart to assess where your business stands.
Plot your path below to reach the next level for wide-scale business impact and job security.
It takes both art and science to overcome these marketing attribution challenges and connect marketing efforts to revenue. Here are the eight fundamental principles to keep in mind:
Marketing must optimize performance against business KPIs — not typical marketing metrics. Using closed revenue, pipeline creation, and sales velocity proves your marketing is working. When we work with clients, we conduct a bottom-up and top-down analysis to build an attribution model and dashboard that ties activities directly to corporate revenue goals, higher customer value, and profits.
From the top down, your organization must accept that buyers now take more complex, primarily independent journeys. They formulate their mental shortlist of vendors before they prioritize a project. Winning business in this new context requires being one of the vendors on their mental shortlist. They won't talk to Sales until they're ready to understand how your solution will fit into their world. We call this the 'tipping point.' You need to optimize all of your marketing and sales activities for this moment in time. Your pipeline depends on it.
Driving revenue growth in B2B requires an integrated, company-wide effort. For B2B companies to capture more revenue, all departments must synchronize around the customer's needs:
MarTech alone can’t track the complete buyer journey. Balance quantitative analytic insights with qualitative feedback. This gives visibility into the dark funnel missed by cookies and pixels by uncovering the invisible drivers that technology can’t see.
Quantitative metrics (Science) provide a crucial understanding of what captured demand (tipping point) before a customer entered your pipeline.
Qualitative perspectives (Art) uncover what created demand for your business by learning the backstories of what first sparked interest and separates your brand from competitors in the customer’s mind. Examples include:
Check out this hot lead we received recently. The prospect cited a podcast interview with our CEO as their source in the 'how did you hear about us' field. However, when we checked GA4 for data, it falsely showed that the lead came from direct traffic. This emphasizes the significance of having quantitative metrics, as we would have had no way of knowing which tactics are effective without them.
Quantitative and qualitative marketing measurement will help you build a measurable scorecard that becomes an actionable blueprint for growth.
Most B2Bs build their go-to-market on an assembly line approach that focuses on the department, not the customer.
This results in siloed attribution that forces sales and marketing initiatives into territorial tugs of war. An integrated allbound revenue team eliminates turf wars and creates a shared mindset around optimizing for the customer's buying process. This enables you to build KPIs focused on their journey and your business outcomes. Shifting to allbound becomes a true win/win.
Instead of using a random approach to marketing, focus on targeting specific channels, audiences, and content. Once you have found success, then scale up to larger campaigns. Use bullets to Identify what's working using data-driven insights and attribution; then, you can launch your cannon balls.
When we work with clients, we like to start with a niche audience or a target account list. We then identify which channels we believe their audience goes to learn and focus our efforts there first. We monitor channels and content to determine what works and what doesn't. Once we confirm what's successful, we invest more in those tactics and reduce spending on the rest.
Marketing metrics quickly breed analysis paralysis and are bloated with technical jargon and mind-numbing dashboards and reports. Decode KPIs like marketing-qualified leads and pipeline velocity into understandable, insightful data aligned around decisions and strategy. Your attribution must translate noise into clear signals to inform the next moves.
We saved this principle for last because it can be the solution to the other seven principles. Many B2B companies need to correct marketing attribution, but it can be simple. By looking at the first touch or last touch only, you can determine what initially brought people in and how they ultimately made their decision. You can effectively scale your marketing campaigns with confidence in these data points.
Now that you understand the principles that can help you see the big picture, align teams, and focus your business on the right objectives, let's prioritize what drives results.
Instead of just looking at the "marketing-sourced" pipeline, track the marketing investment across the entire pipeline. Marketing metrics should focus on identifying and nurturing the most sales-ready prospects in your pipeline regardless of source. By looking at the total influenced pipeline, you can prioritize opportunities historically, resulting in higher win rates.
Is your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) improving over time? Monitor total marketing spend / new clients and new opportunities to indicate progress in marketing and budget efficiency over time. This shows marketing investments generate momentum, move buyers down the funnel, and nurture sales-ready prospects.
Monitor customer acquisition cost (CAC) quarter-over-quarter trends to assess your progress. While monitoring spending and results by channel is also necessary, keeping an eye on the big picture is crucial.
How long does it take for a lead to become a customer? How quickly do leads move through the funnel? Monitor sales cycle length quarter or quarter to understand what efforts are making the best/worst impact on pipeline velocity. The faster leads move through the funnel, the more efficient and effective marketing efforts are.
Regardless of marketing campaign or channel details, the ultimate sign of marketing health is driving incremental revenue growth for each dollar invested. Connecting marketing metrics to actual Return on Investment (ROI) provides evidence of marketing effectiveness beyond just the influence on pipelines. Divide your total spend by the Closed/Won revenue to determine the total ROI. Use this metric to show the revenue generated by marketing campaigns and predict future revenue growth.
Align your marketing metrics with these actual outcomes to understand the results of your marketing performance. It's not just about the performance of individual campaigns but the return on your entire marketing investment. Ultimately, the goal is to determine whether you are making progress in terms of revenue.
With frameworks elevating attribution's role in driving growth, what should B2B marketers focus on to connect marketing metrics to revenue? Here are the top recommendations to boost B2B marketing performance:
In today’s fragmented B2B journey, marketing attribution is no longer a nice-to-have - it’s a must to drive growth. Optimizing your model connects media dollars spent to the pipeline delivered and guides strategy. By taking an integrated, qualitative + quantitative approach to attribution, you gain the clarity needed to:
Don’t let another year slip by without unlocking marketing’s true revenue potential. Check out our January 2024 Demand Gen Jam Session replay for more insights and tips. You can also schedule a Free Marketing Attribution Consultation with one of our experts.
We’ll assess your current data ecosystem, identify attainable next steps, and provide actionable recommendations tailored to your goals. Within 30 days, you’ll have clarity on high-potential areas to target to boost marketing performance substantially.