TLDR:
Keeping your data organized and relevant to the B2B buyer’s journey helps from getting lost when mapping out the journey.
Now that what engagement looks like is spelled-out, as well as the marketing activity having been defined, the big question now is, how do marketers measure it? How does any B2B marketer measure success, for that matter?
Due to the fact that ABM takes a considerable amount of time to go through, by the time the deal is done, there are few chances for any retrospection. Any opportunity to learn post-sale is down the tubes.
But just because these are the way things go in B2B doesn’t mean marketers shouldn’t look back. On the contrary, specifically, when looking at revenue attribution, it will be more of a reflective exercise than one marketer can take action on. This is because what marketers see has already happened.
That’s not a realistic approach, especially with ABM. A way around this is to define metrics—top-to-bottom—for the whole funnel. Keep data organized in order not to get lost in the shuffle. Basing it on the B2B buyer’s journey is a good idea.
Another good idea is to plan out and determine what exactly each of the stages of the buyer’s journey mean for a marketer’s organization, as the buyer’s journey is different for every business.
One metric that’s popular among the B2B marketing crowd is the sales pipeline. It’s a solid choice to make to begin your attribution process. Generally, chances are that it is already well-established in a marketers organization at the onset. And because it’s already ingrained into most organizations, sales and marketing alignment efforts produce little to no resistance.
This metric is also cross-functional throughout the funnel—meaning it is good up and down the funnel. For the upside, it’s great because the metric is up the funnel enough to garner influence. At the same time, it’s also down the funnel enough for marketing to have influence that matters.
Getting down to the assigning value part of attribution, marketers need to collect and sort the meaningful data from the junk. Simply put, anything that helped drive a desired outcome, but wasn’t initiated by the customer, marketers can throw out.
From here, marketers can implement a variety of attribution models based on first-touch, last-touch, or equal-touch. Marketers can also implement an engagement-based attribution model. It adopts conventions of previous models but also has a component for scoring time-spent-engaging. It captures data for anonymous and known activities, as well as ones done by marketing and sales.
Things to keep in mind when building attribution models for large organizations:
- Large companies need to track account-based attribution.
- Using time to score engagement is beneficial.
- Storytelling supported by data is powerful.
Original article from Engagio on 20 March 2019.
