TLDR:
ROI efforts have historically been hard for marketers to measure, and it’s complicated by many of the factors that make ABM necessary. Using an engagement-based attribution model for ABM can make it run more efficiently.
Something that’s been a thorn in the side of marketers since the very beginning is ROI calculation. Specifically, marketers have trouble trying to prove their worth to sales because they can’t always get accurate measurements. This is because marketing tends to be more indirect than their sales counterparts.
Instead of competing with sales to justify the purpose of marketing, resources can be allocated so that marketing is improved, allowing for better collaboration with sales. Despite their best efforts, attribution remains a challenge.
In the B2B marketing sphere, a variety of factors complicate attribution, such as long sales cycles, interactions among numerous channels, sizable buying committees. and other aspects, like macroeconomic flux.
Many of these factors are fundamental to promoting ABM efforts, which makes accurate ROI calculation difficult. Simply put, attribution can be broken down into three benchmarks: prospect action, expected outcome, and the assignment of worth.
When establishing the specific set of prospect actions needed for an attribution model, engagement might look like anything from downloads, website visits, and even offline activity, such as conferences.
Due to the fact that attribution can become complicated by the long sales cycles and buying team size found in ABM, account information can easily be lost.
The solution?
Organize different engagement actions and tie prospects to the appropriate touch-points. This way the data is in one place. Then, assign value based on the amount of time the customer engaged with the product. This is inclusive of time spent talking about your product, or spending time with sales.
By mixing personal elements (talking about the brand) with business ones (interaction with marketing/sales), you get a good idea of what it means when customers engage with your brand.
With these specific insights, MQAs can be identified easier. If engagement is tracked at the account level instead of the individual, buying signals can be read with more accuracy.
For buying signals to be interpreted more readily, marketing activity needs to be defined more clearly. This means marketing activity needs to be broken down.
Fundamentally, marketing activity requires eight components:
• The activity
- The activity
- Its status
- Who did it
- From which account
- The data
- The channel
- The content topic
- How long it was engaged.
Different data sets won’t provide you with the same consistency in detail spelled out in the bullets above so, at a minimum, these four overarching themes should be sought out:
- History: How the deal becomes a deal over time
- Order: How data will be shown on dashboards
- Channel: All channels customers use
- Account-Based: Keep account-specific data with those accounts
Measure marketing and sales activity against conversions.
Original article from Engagio on 20 March 2019.
