Revealed: How to Track Marketing’s Contribution to the Bottom Line

Marketers are notorious for being sales’ more creative, bouncy, counterpart – blowing bubbles and dancing in the rain – while sales watches on disapprovingly with a no-nonsense, numbers-driven demeanor. Truth is, despite common misconceptions, marketing is more than a happy-go-lucky team creating vision boards and nonsensical whimsy in the conference room.

We are an essential business department that impacts your revenue and bottom line – and now it’s easier than ever for us to prove it!

They say the only way you can improve something is if you can measure it, and marketing measurement is finally having its time in the sun. Marketing success of yore has been measured by single-touch attribution (giving one touchpoint 100% of the credit for sourcing a deal) or wasn’t measured (quantatively) at all – probably what attributed to its reputation as a fluffy rather than formidable business unit.

91% of CMOs have decided to take action toward better marketing measurement. This isn’t surprising, as there is a trend in organizations moving toward technologies that allow for higher levels of marketing accountability.

But how do we get there? Whether you’re in sales looking for ways to hold your marketing team more accountable, or you’re in marketing looking for a better way to justify your existence, you can follow suit with the techniques below to get answers.

Take a look at the metrics we use at Televerde to measure the success of our marketing efforts.

Pipeline

This metric is fairly common and something I’m sure you’re already using to measure the success of your marketing team. So, rather than spew off a bunch of basic pipeline facts you already know (but if you’re looking to build a better pipeline check out our recent blog post here), I’ll give you one tip on how to measure your pipeline better: Honesty is the best policy.

If you want a real depiction on the pipeline that is coming from marketing, you have to narrow down your definition of a sales qualified lead (SQL). While filling your pipeline with a little fluff (Sales Qualified Leads that aren’t truly qualified) may give you the appearance of ‘better numbers’ in the short term, this approach doesn’t translate to real revenue. It will also have the residual effect of building trust with your sales team, knowing that you’re sending them leads with the highest propensity to close.

Churn and Customer Lifetime Value

Too often, marketers focus on acquiring new customers instead of monetizing on the opportunities that exist in their current customer base. You need to know if you’re following this bad habit and the only way to do that is to measure your churn rate and track your customer lifetime value.

Don’t ignore this step! Consider the following:

  • Analyze your successes and failures
    • Data speaks volumes. Once you analyze why your customers went elsewhere, your customer life cycle, and what it is that makes your long standing customers stick with you, you’ll begin to notice trends and be able to improve your strategy accordingly.
  • Talk to your customers
    • Conduct surveys to learn firsthand your customer’s likes, dislikes, needs, and wants

The bottom line is this: don’t neglect the valuable data that lies in customer retention. 70% of companies say it’s easier to retain a customer than to acquire a new one.

Overall Engagement

How engaged are your prospects? Look at things such as

  • Ad clickthrough rate
  • Website visitors
  • Video & blog views
  • Email engagement

All of these add up and when measured over time show if the strategy you use is contributing to a more engaged audience.

Attribution

There are three methods you can take when it comes to attribution: single-touch, unweighted Multi-touch, and weighted Multi-touch; and each comes with its own set of pros and cons. Here’s a quick crash-course in choosing the method that will work best for you:

Single-touch: Assigns value to a deal by the first or last activity that touched it

As I mentioned earlier, single-touch attribution is an antiquated form of marketing measurement, but it still has its upsides. It’s easy and low cost to implement, clarifies what type of activities are driving the top of the funnel, and helps you determine cost-per-lead metrics. If your marketing strategy is fairly simple, this is a good place to start. If you’re already following an account-based marketing (ABM) approach, have large deal sizes and long sales cycles, and operate a robust, omni-channel approach, a multi-touch tactic is more your speed.

Multi-touch unweighted: Tracks multiple touches from multiple sources and allocates attribution across all the touchpoints

A multi-touch unweighted approach gives you a more granular view of who contributed what where. Example: A deal worth $60K just closed, and 3 people were involved: Jack signed up for your company’s podcast. Jill signed up for the podcast and clicked through your newsletter. Jenna saw a Linked-in post and subsequently filled out a contact-me form on your website.

Because there were four touchpoints, each activity received one-fourth of the total credit: $15K each ($30K to your podcast since it accounted for two touches).

This is a great tactic if you’re operating a sophisticated marketing strategy with multiple touches and members of a buyer team associated with a deal.

Multi-touch weighted: Tailors to your business’s buyer journey and customizes attribution to your specific strategy

Ready for the pièce de résistance of attribution methods? If your marketing strategy is super-robust, a multi-touch weighted attribution method will give you a detailed account of every activity, every person involved and exactly how much each of those touches contributed to closing the deal – with different models depending on the needs of your business.

For more info on which one is best for your strategy check out how Salesforce breaks it down.

A New Day in Sales and Marketing is Upon Us

If you want to be a modern marketer and a savvy sales person well into the new decade upon us (and, really, who doesn’t?) it’s time to move into the new school of thinking and make marketing attribution a regular part of your strategy.

Start by implementing a few of the above metrics to develop your marketing team into a hard-hitting, revenue generating juggernaut.

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