There is no shortage of things to measure in marketing. Yet all that data doesn’t help when it comes to communicating marketing’s value within the organization. What if the answer was less data, not more? What if all you needed to capture the attention of your leadership was a single, simple marketing metric?
A crisis of trust
All marketers are supposed to be storytellers. We exist to connect products, services, and markets using ideas and stories that engage, motivate, and persuade. But somehow, we’re lousy at telling our own story internally.
For years, marketing attribution has formed the core of our narrative. In B2B marketing, we borrowed B2C/E-commerce attribution models and attempted to apply them to our processes and systems. We started with straightforward first-touch and last-touch models, then forayed into more complex multi-touch, time-decay, U-shaped, and W-shaped versions. More recently, algorithmic models that leverage machine learning became part of the mix.
But while the models are getting more sophisticated, they’re not necessarily more effective. Only 29% of marketers are extremely confident in their accuracy, and only 36% believe our company trusts the data enough to use it to drive decision-making. And we’re not wrong: nearly half (46%) of CFOs and CEOs say they are not confident in the CMO’s ability to prove the value of marketing to the enterprise.
It’s complicated
No wonder there’s a lack of trust in attribution reporting: it was never designed to capture complex B2B customer journeys.
Attribution has its roots in the marketing mix models (MMMs) of the 1950s, which were used to determine the consumer product sales that could be attributed to marketing activities. In the era of TV, radio, direct mail, print ads, and out-of-home displays, tracking marketing’s impact was a virtually impossible task. Still, MMMs helped the early Mad Men justify their extravagant budgets.
Post-internet, drawing a straight line from marketing to revenue suddenly became possible. Consumers saw an ad, visited a product page, and clicked the “buy” button. To capture this simple journey, attribution was more than sufficient.
But that’s for B2C journeys with a single buyer, as little as one touch, and a timeframe that can be measured in minutes. The B2B journey, by comparison, involves an average of 12 people, 10 channels, and nearly 30 touchpoints (or more than 60, according to some sources) spread out over a year or more.
And most of that journey occurs beyond our ability to track or measure. Multiple humans are in the loop: product champions, executive sponsors, end users, and technical gatekeepers. The competitors they’re engaging with, the internal discussions they’re having, the content they’re consuming, and the organizational changes they’re going through are all happening largely beyond our field of vision. When we think about how little we know about the buyer journey, boiling it down to first-touch, last touch, or a complicated formula that assigns minute fractions across the board will come up short.
Misjudging the audience
No wonder marketers struggle to tell their revenue story. But the validity of the attribution model is not the only problem: we’re also forgetting who we’re telling that story to.
Every marketer knows they must tailor the message to the audience to speak to their unique context, priorities, and goals. But when it’s time to report to our leaders, those skills often go out the window.
In support of attribution data, our reports might include details about the number of downloads the latest whitepaper garnered, the number of leads collected during the last tradeshow, levels of engagement across social media, click-through rates, and so on.
We think the data justifies and quantifies our impact, but it’s really burying the lede.
Because there’s only one metric the C-suite wants to see from us: marketing’s contribution to revenue.
Unlike marketing attribution, marketing contribution is a very simple metric: what percentage of revenue did marketing bring into the mix? Or, phrased differently: how much revenue would the company have lost without the marketing function in place? For example, if last quarter’s revenue was $10 million and 60% of those closed deals originated due to marketing outreach (an ad, a webinar, an event, etc.), then marketing’s contribution was $6 million. It’s a simple pie chart that distributes revenue between sales-originated deals (outbound BDR activity, for example) and those brought in-house by marketing.
Note that this purposely omits any deeper consideration of which channel or campaign is responsible for generating the lead, which activities were most successful, or how many subsequent touches were required to qualify or advance the lead. It’s a single, simple, intuitive number that puts a clear dollar amount on marketing’s value to the organization.
This approach also neatly sidesteps the “marketing math” that can get marketers into trouble when they apply complicated fractional approaches to the attribution question and end up with revenue multiples.
Ultimately, marketing contribution answers every leader’s question for marketing: “Did you contribute to this revenue or not? And if so, by how much?” That’s why this metric is front and center on Insentric’s CMO Dashboard.
Using attribution wisely
A CEO or CFO doesn’t care about the details. They don’t care which newsletter got a high-value lead back on the path or which email got the most click-throughs.
But marketing does care, and that’s why attribution still has a big role to play in marketing’s success. Attribution models may be complicated and fiendishly difficult to deploy, but they’re still the only means of quantifying and comparing our impact across channels, campaigns, and timeframes.
Marketers who can consolidate, normalize, and analyze full-funnel marketing and sales data can gain valuable insight into what’s working, what’s not, and what they can do to amplify impact and improve ROI. This kind of attribution data is core to the Insentric Performance Dashboard, and it’s invaluable. But it’s intended to guide internal team decision-making, not external reporting.
Try it the next time you need to report to your executive. Set aside the attribution data that drives internal monitoring and analysis and present the single, incontrovertible metric that proves marketing’s impact on revenue. You may find that this less-is-more approach is exactly what you need to cut through the noise and re-center your story on what really matters.
