Do you know what percentage of your sales pipeline is influenced by marketing?
Recent industry-wide benchmarks are hard to find, but the most reliable numbers from Forrester research reports that it can be anywhere from five to 20 percent for organizations with a focus on strategic accounts, a well-established client base, or a focus on upsell. Meanwhile, Forrester notes that some B2B marketing organizations source more than 50 percent of their company’s pipeline.
We’d like to propose a different number.
In an episode of 6sense’s Revenue Makers podcast, Saima Rashid, 6sense SVP of Marketing and Revenue Analytics, said: “One hundred percent of what your company closes is influenced by marketing. Nobody’s going to buy your product or solution without at least hitting your website, consuming some form of content.”
It’s an insightful episode, and you can listen to it here.
Finding the Attribution Metrics That Execs Will Believe
The bad news is that you can’t just take that quote into a meeting and have it accepted as a fact. But the good news is that if you capture the right data, you’ll be able to come up with metrics that more accurately reflect marketing’s attribution to the sales pipeline.
Navigating the attribution maze can be daunting, especially in B2B. The B2B buying process is lengthy and involves numerous touchpoints across various channels, as multiple stakeholders engage in extensive research and evaluation before making significant investment decisions.
This complexity makes marketing attribution challenging because it’s difficult to track and assign value to each interaction accurately. With a long sales cycle that can span months — or even years — maintaining a clear view of all touchpoints and their influence on the final decision becomes a significant hurdle for marketers.
But with the right strategies and tools, marketers can turn data into their most reliable ally. Read on to explore how marketers can effectively use technology and data to measure marketing’s impact and prove the value of their work.
Making Sense of Marketing Attribution
Marketing attribution is the process of identifying and assigning value to each touchpoint a prospect has with your brand throughout the buyer’s journey, such as clicking ads, opening targeted emails, and visiting your organization’s website.
According to research by Gartner, by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. The ability to accurately attribute sales to digital marketing efforts is critical when four in five interactions happen online.
Having a clear and well-defined attribution strategy is essential for understanding the true impact of marketing activities. That begins with understanding how your marketing efforts influence buyers over the course of potentially hundreds of interactions.
The Buyer’s Journey and Marketing’s Influence
There’s not a single stage of the buyer’s journey that marketing doesn’t touch, hence the assertion that marketing influences 100 percent of the sales pipeline. At each stage, marketing plays a pivotal role:
Early-stage: Creating awareness through targeted campaigns and content.
Mid-stage: Nurturing leads with personalized information and interactions.
Decision-stage: Supporting conversion with data-driven insights and tailored offers.
Mapping out each stage and the associated key marketing touchpoints is critical for helping marketers understand how their efforts directly contribute to sales.
Choosing the Right Attribution Model
Selecting the appropriate attribution model for your business can significantly impact your ability to measure marketing effectiveness. Common attribution models include first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch attribution.
Each model has its benefits and drawbacks. For example, first-touch attribution credits the initial touchpoint, providing insights into which campaigns are best at generating awareness. In contrast, multi-touch attribution offers a more comprehensive view by assigning value to multiple touchpoints throughout the buyer’s journey.
Choosing a consistent methodology that aligns with your business goals is crucial for accurate measurement.
Leveraging Technology and Tools for Attribution
Here’s how different technologies can enhance attribution efforts:
Predictive Analytics
Advanced analytics solutions, such as Google Analytics and 6sense’s own analytics tools, offer deep insights into customer behavior and campaign performance. These tools can analyze large datasets to identify patterns and trends, helping marketers understand which channels and content are most effective.
6sense advises customers to take advantage of Predictive Analytics to understand their prospects’ buying stages. In addition to delivering more relevant messages to prospects, knowing their buying stage enables you to track how marketing messages influence your audience along their buying journey.
Rather than tying your metrics to a single conversion event that may be months away, you can see how effectively you are capturing interest and driving opportunities forward.
Marketing Automation Platforms
Marketing automation platforms streamline repetitive tasks and enable personalized marketing at scale. These platforms can track email opens, clicks, website visits, and more, providing crucial data points for attribution.
By integrating marketing automation tools into your existing tech stack, you can automate the collection of data across various channels, ensuring that no touchpoint is missed. This leads to a more accurate representation of how each interaction contributes to the overall sales process.
CRM Systems
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are essential for managing interactions with current and potential customers. CRMs like Salesforce or HubSpot track customer data, sales activities, and communication history.
When integrated with marketing automation platforms, CRMs provide a unified view of customer interactions from initial contact to final sale. This integration is crucial for attribution as it links marketing efforts directly to sales outcomes, allowing marketers to see which campaigns and touchpoints are driving conversions.
Multi-Touch Attribution Tools
Multi-touch attribution tools assign value to each touchpoint in the buyer’s journey, rather than giving all credit to the first or last interaction. This approach provides a more holistic view of how different marketing activities contribute to conversions.
While multi-touch attribution can be complex, it offers a more accurate picture of marketing’s impact by considering the entire customer journey.
Turning Data into Actionable Insights
Translating attribution data into actionable marketing insights is where true value lies. The ability to identify patterns and trends in attribution data enables marketers to:
- Optimize campaigns,
- Allocate budgets more effectively, and
- Ultimately drive better business outcomes.
Here’s how you can turn attribution data into actionable insights:
Identify High-Value Activities
Attribution data reveals which activities are most influential in driving conversions. By analyzing this data, marketers can identify which interactions are pivotal in the buyer’s journey.
Optimize Campaigns
Attribution data can show which marketing efforts are driving engagement and which are falling short. By regularly reviewing this data, marketers can make adjustments to improve performance.
Allocate Budgets
Effective budget allocation is critical for maximizing marketing ROI. Attribution data provides insights into which channels and campaigns contribute to pipeline value, enabling marketers to allocate budgets more strategically. For example, if attribution data shows that certain content pieces or advertising channels consistently engage targeted accounts, marketers can prioritize spending in these areas.
Guide Content Creation
Attribution data can inform content creation by highlighting which pieces of content resonate most with your audience. By analyzing which pieces are frequently engaged with by closed-won accounts, marketers can identify themes and formats that are most effective. This insight can guide the creation of future content, ensuring it aligns with the interests and needs of your target audience.
Practical Tips for Measuring Marketing’s Impact through Attribution
To get the best metrics for marketing attribution, consider these actionable tips:
- Align Marketing and Sales Metrics: Ensure marketing and sales teams use the same metrics and definitions for key performance indicators. Aligning these metrics provides a unified view and reduces discrepancies in attribution analysis.
- Adopt a Holistic Attribution Approach: Combine multiple attribution models (e.g., first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch) to get a comprehensive view. Also, use a weighted approach to understand the contribution of each touchpoint accurately.
- Regularly Validate and Update Attribution Models: Continuously test and validate your attribution models against actual sales data and outcomes. Update models to reflect changes in customer behavior, market conditions, and marketing strategies.
- Use Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning: Rather than rely on the guesswork and manual modeling described in the two bullets above, use AI to analyze the behavior of your closed-won customers and compare it to the behavior of your current prospects. These technologies can identify complex patterns, provide more precise attribution insights, and automatically adjust as customer behaviors evolve.
Conclusion
Mastering marketing attribution is essential for understanding and maximizing the impact of your marketing efforts. Using data and technology to accurately capture attribution metrics helps marketers drive better strategies and achieve greater sales success, as well as prove the massive impact that marketing efforts have on the buyer’s journey and sales pipeline.
