As we gear up for the challenges and opportunities of 2024, it's time to sharpen our tactics and embrace data and intelligence more widely.
Here at RevSure, we work closely with marketing teams to optimize lead and demand generation. We’ve seen what works—and what doesn’t— when it comes to evaluating, predicting, and building pipeline and maximizing marketing ROI.
We’ve gathered these learnings here to help you kick off 2024. Let's dive into five "in-the-trenches" tips for setting your B2B marketing team on the path to success
1. Deep Funnel Optimization: Steer Paid Ads Beyond Clicks & Impressions
As the focus on cutting/rationalizing paid digital ads continues, ensure the targeting and campaign tactics for those ads align with deep funnel performance. Do you have a way to provide feedback from leads and accounts showing deep funnel conversion and performance? Can you integrate that feedback into your paid ad systems to help you optimize the audience of the campaigns?
2. Marketing Attribution: Rethink Your Approach Beyond Past Reporting
Are you moving away from traditional attribution? Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. A lot of attribution challenges stem from mindset and implementation.
Attribution is often seen as a retrospective tool for past reporting, but it can be so much more. Here are the best practices we at RevSure have learned to focus attribution on actionability and drive its true potential:
- Have a future-facing mindset. Use attribution to take the next-best action and connect it with day-to-day campaign and funnel management. Don't just use attribution to analyze campaign/activity/performance from a past quarter/year reporting perspective.
- Look at conversion paths and attribution by stage. Don’t use attribution only for pipeline and revenue contribution analysis. Analyze the touch points that are driving conversions at different stages of the funnel based on your GTM motion to maximize nurturing and outreach activities. Identify the best touches that accelerate conversions from Suspect -> Lead, Lead->MQL, MQL->SAL, SQL-> SQL, SQL-> Pipeline, Pipeline to Closed Won, etc.
- Connect the dark funnel to the deep funnel. Capture as many first-party and anonymous visitor signals as possible from the website to social media and other campaigns. Track the journeys and touches from the top to the deep-funnel events and stages.
- Implement an attribution solution. Many limitations of traditional attribution can be overcome by adopting the proper software solution to capture data. Create a framework to analyze channels, campaign types, interactions, assets, events, and campaigns.
- Integrate activities and campaigns across the GTM motion. Include SDR/BDR & Sales activities and campaigns as well as marketing touchpoints for a more complete understanding.
- Employ AI-powered multi-touch attribution. Use a multi-touch attribution approach, preferably one based on AI and statistical analysis, rather than rules-based approaches such as U, W, Linear, etc. Even if you can't adapt to an AI-based system initially, using a multi-touch rules-based approach that makes sense for your GTM motion can gain the trust of the sales and SDR/BDR teams and improve accuracy and insight.
- Look at account-level attribution and lead-level attribution. The fact is that most companies and buyers are engaging at both levels. So, you have to have a hybrid approach that harmonizes both types of engagements.
3. Caution with Third-Party Intent: Validate and Analyze
Third-party intent can be a powerful tool, but you must test it for your specific GTM motion, category, and space. Don’t rely on anecdotal evidence. Look at your past efforts (6 - 12 month period at least) and see if you find a strong correlation between the intent you used for targeting/reach-outs and those leads and accounts converting to pipeline and closed-won behavior.
Analyze the data statistically to test whether the intent you used correlates with conversion. And best of all, engage your intent provider to prove this to you. Do they have any studies showing this?
4. ABM Campaign Scrutiny: Rely on Objective Measurement
If you are running ABM campaigns, ensure you are holding these to the same standards of your other paid and digital campaigns. Use an objective framework to measure the effectiveness of those activities.
ABM tools have sub-optimal campaign effectiveness analytics within their tools. Further, it is not easy to extract campaign data from these systems so that it can be run through an objective measurement framework. But data, not gut feeling, is key to analyzing these campaigns.
5. Harmonizing ABM and Lead-Based Motions: Find the Sweet Spot
The ABM movement has helped marketing orient towards account engagement campaigns in their target ICP. The rationale has been that B2B buying has become complex, involving multiple stakeholders and buyers doing their research before wanting to talk to sales reps. Accounts have budgets, and buying committees make decisions.
While this is a critical perspective, we have seen that most companies that have taken to ABM realistically have a hybrid of account and lead/contact-based motions for these reasons:
- Once you identify, engage, and attract accounts into the funnel, you have to speak with individuals.
- B2B Buyers are acting more like consumers in their expectations of experience and personalization of engagement.
- Hybrid GTM motions, including PLG, have brought back the focus on individual users
The need of the hour is synergizing the best of account and lead-based motions.
B2B Marketing Success in 2024
In the dynamic landscape of B2B marketing, these tips for better use of data in marketing intelligence can be your secret weapons. Let's not just adapt to 2024 – let's redefine success in B2B marketing.
RevSure delivers the data-driven insights you need to own a seat at the table. Forecast with ease, maximize pipeline generation at every stage with full-funnel visibility, and know which campaigns to say "yes" to. Unlock the next level of marketing performance with data and insights you can trust. Revolutionize your approach, and we’ll conquer the trenches together.
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Step away from conventional attribution methods and embrace the transformative potential of machine learning. Download your copy of Unlocking the Power of Marketing ROI Using AI/ML today.
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