You may have seen some news about this, and I wanted to tell you what it means for B2B marketers. First let me start with the (obvious) why. Digital marketing is an important part of B2B marketing. There’s the often quoted / misquoted “67% of a buyer journey is done digitally” (here is SiriusDecisions’ blog post with their take on what they really said). The point is clear though: digital is important, and should be tracked. We believe the impact of digital marketing should be tracked and measured for effectiveness throughout the funnel and in impacting revenue. That is why we are announcing our upcoming Digital Source Tracker capability as an additional functionality on top of our funnel metrics product Response Management.
What It Does
Digital Source Tracker captures digital engagements, including anonymous touches, from a marketer’s wide array of digital channels to measure the effectiveness of their online campaigns as part of the customer journey and help marketers better allocate marketing spend. While you probably already record leads who fill out forms on your website, Digital Source Tracker also captures website visits that abandon a form fill initially. A person may come from Google Adwords, or a LinkedIn ad, etc. By capturing the data of the initial visit (specifically UTM parameters including source, medium, channel, term, and campaign), you can evaluate the effectiveness of your digital marketing and segment them by the categories of digital marketing you’ve identified. Digital Source Tracker also captures this UTM data for visits to your website after the initial visit, so you can record the visit data for the visit that converts your lead (i.e., what gets the lead to fill out a form).
Why It’s Helpful
Let’s keep going with some more (maybe obvious) why. With UTM parameters in a URL, you can create a unique URL to track multiple sources that point to a single landing page. You won’t need to create multiple duplicate landing pages and multiple duplicate Salesforce campaigns. This saves time. Now with this data, you’ll be able to measure the number of form fills that came from each of your digital channels and evaluate the effectiveness of your digital campaigns and digital spend. Marketers can then allocate more resources and budget to the digital channels and campaigns that work (and impact revenue).
“To fully optimize performance, [a B2B marketer’s] understanding must extend across all parts of the buyer’s journey, including the traditionally opaque parts of the process, where demand may be active, but difficult to associate with named individuals. Companies that can gain this level of visibility are well positioned to make meaningful adjustments and drive superior results.”
-Ross Graber, Senior Research Director, SiriusDecisions
Why Apply Funnel Metrics When Evaluating Digital
I ended the “Why It’s Helpful” with digital impact on revenue and a quote on full buyer’s journey. Why measure funnel metrics for funnel stages as well as revenue impact? What does tying digital campaign engagement to funnel stages do for me as a marketer? The (maybe not so obvious) why: when you track digital engagements, beyond just how many visits, clicks, downloads, and even MQLs (marketing qualified leads) you generate, you get to see marketing’s impact on every part of the sales funnel. For example, you get to evaluate the quality of leads you pass to sales, segmented by the various digital campaigns and digital channels. With campaign attribution, a functionality of our product, you get to measure the revenue impact of each digital campaign by dollar. Marketing’s performance is no longer graded in a silo (with engagement and vanity metrics), but it’s about gaining trust from sales that your campaigns bring in great leads and generate revenue growth.
The Beta Program
We’re excited about adding this functionality to our product. We are announcing a Beta program for a select group of current customers starting in Q2 2018 to help make our product awesome. We hope our technology continues making our customers wildly successful, performance-driven marketers who create revenue impact for their sales teams and organizations.
