A new LinkedIn report highlights ways marketers can improve their tracking and optimization of results.
Digital marketers are under pressure to prove the impact of campaigns and show how strategies tie into bigger business goals. LinkedIn’s report, “The Future of B2B Marketing Measurement,” offers ways B2B marketers can improve their tracking and optimization of results.
Here are some insights from B2B marketers and stats from the report to help guide your approach.
Connect marketing measurement to revenue
Traditional cost-based metrics like impressions and clicks aren’t cutting it. The focus is shifting toward measuring marketing’s actual impact on revenue and tracking the KPIs that matter to the business.
- Moving beyond media metrics: Vivek Khandelwal from ServiceNow, said, “You can talk about click-through rate, cost per click and cost per impression all day long, but what eventually matters to the business are the revenue metrics.”
- Demand generation metrics: Prioritize demand generation metrics that translate into revenue at a predictable rate. LinkedIn’s revenue attribution reports can connect LinkedIn engagement data with CRM revenue data to track leads, opportunities and closed-won deals influenced by LinkedIn marketing — plus insights into deal size and time to close.
- Qualified pipeline: Alex Venus, performance marketing senior leader at Personio, suggests shifting the focus from MQLs to pipeline. “Our North Star metric is qualified pipeline, which means an opportunity that your salespeople care about, which should be converting at a rate of 25% or more.”
- Impact metrics: “As marketers, we’re paid less and less on activity metrics and more and more on impact metrics—the actual business that we’re generating,” said Julien Harazi, head of lead generation at Cegid.
Develop ROI frameworks for brand marketing
More and more marketers are being asked to quantify the value of brand marketing in financial terms. Business leaders understand brand equity matters but want more precise insights into how marketing helps build it.
- Brand value: Lucas Riedberger, digital and media director for the 3DEXPERIENCE innovation platform at Dassault Systèmes, said, “As a marketer, I can explain to them that the money we put into these campaigns has direct value in terms of the capitalization of the brand.”
- Separate brand and performance metrics: Valerie Kile, performance marketing manager at Alma, recommends, “Separating the two means that we’re able to focus on optimizing our lead budget for ROAS… With brand spend, we then rely on correlating it with the efficiencies we see throughout the entire customer journey within a given timeframe.”
- Standardized assessment: Guillermo Novillo, LATAM director of integrated marketing at Microsoft, wants to see “more of a framework emerging for how you connect branding to business outcomes, and I think that’s something that will start to happen.”
- Brand lift studies: Incorporate brand lift studies into your measurement strategy to gauge the impact of brand campaigns. These can include native surveys on LinkedIn or off-platform studies via Nielsen to track brand awareness and perception shifts.
- Account-based approach: Use account-based awareness campaigns to track how brand investment influences the buyer journey.
Employ a sophisticated approach to attribution
With so many digital channels and tactics, relying on last-touch attribution is no longer sufficient.
- Machine learning models: Khandelwal from ServiceNow shares, “We’re using machine learning models to ensure that we’re giving the right credit to the right touches and capturing the fact that the performance of one channel can have a positive impact on the performance of another.”
- Lifetime value: Sveta Freidman, global general manager of data & analytics at Xero, recommends building “an understanding of lifetime value by channel, segment level, and platform so that we can optimize our approach around the best outcomes for our business.”
- Company engagement reports: LinkedIn’s company engagement reports track awareness levels across different personas within an account, providing a clearer picture of how marketing influences opportunities.
By tying marketing efforts to revenue, building brand marketing ROI frameworks, and using smarter attribution models, B2B marketers can better prove their value and refine their strategies for success.
The full report can be found here. (Registration required)
The post Smarter attribution strategies to help B2B marketers prove campaign value appeared first on MarTech.
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