VIEWPOINT: Accurate ROI measurement

Solving for B2B performance marketing’s greatest challenge

 Necessity is famously the mother of invention. With uncertainty surrounding marketing budgets big and small, the current need for business-to-business (B2B) marketers is almost universal: the ability to accurately measure return on investment (ROI), justifying every line-item to the penny. Here’s a wide-angle look at the trends shaping the quest for more accurate ROI measurement.

How to establish ROI

Looking at a campaign broadly from start to finish, which elements are driving people to your website? Can you identify which element played a role in which sale by getting a customer to our website? Answering those questions is key to accurately determining ROI. A marketing-automation platform (MAP) or customer-relationship management (CRM) platform is uniquely positioned to collect the following data on an individual level:

• Paid-media impressions/clicks
• ​Landing-page sessions/engagement/engagement time
• Form starts and completions
• Email-open rates and click-through rates
• Final-sale conversions, values, and contributors

The broader idea behind collecting and analyzing each of these data points is to relate a specific conversion or sale by an individual to the steps that led to that sale. While there are opportunities to include traditional marketing methods such as television, billboards, and even word-of-mouth marketing to assess their value, this article will focus on less nuanced data from your digital platforms.

Pulling insights from your sales funnel

Drilling down even further: If the purpose of cross-channel marketing is to get users to your website and volunteer their contact information, how effective is each element of your website toward achieving that goal? In the quest to identify where ROI is lagging, you will identify bottlenecks in your sales process. A poor marketing strategy can act like a dam in a river. If one tactic becomes a barrier for leads, it could dry up every other tactic that follows. When that happens, it’s hard to assess any one tactic’s value. If potential leads are stalling at the same step along the path to conversion, you might have identified a clog in the sales funnel. Start with your website. Which pages on your website are generating the most page views and engagement time? Which videos are visitors spending the most time watching? Which assets are they downloading most often? Tracking the customer journey through your website can generate other useful data points. Knowing what product page a customer viewed gives you an idea about the specific solution/service they’re looking for, a relative idea of their budget for a solution, and what timeframe they might be working with to find a solution. To the latter point: because B2B conversions require more time than business to consumer (B2C), patience is key. You might have run a campaign a long time ago and forgotten about it, yet that campaign resulted in a recent big sale. This can significantly alter that campaign’s ROI. Longer sales cycles also mean you need to hold attention longer. Politely nurturing leads allows your brand to stay top of mind — don’t let them forget about you and your value.

Making sense of your data

MAPs, CRMs, SEO, Meta, LinkedIn, and whatever solution you’re using for display ads all yield actionable data. Tying it together is a challenge. A data analyst can help analyze the data and bring it all together in a way that adds practical value. A good analyst will be able to communicate, in terms of an understandable story, what the data is telling you. That story should fit a recognizable template — for example, “here’s how customers, clients, and leads are interacting with your brand,” or “this is what your potential customers want from you.” The analyst can also tell you what tactics you pay for but perform poorly, effectively hamstringing your marketing budget and costing time as well. This can also potentially remove an impediment to getting the maximum ROI. The strength of the story the data paints isn’t merely dependent on the quality of your analyst — it’s dependent on the blind spots of the data itself. Unless you have all the pieces in one place, and they can talk to each other, maximizing your ROI will be impossible. Worse yet, if key data points are missing or left unconsidered, it might heavily skew your conclusions in a false direction. Wrangling all the disparate data points generated by any marketing campaign to determine ROI can be a challenge — one of the largest challenges that cuts across industries today. However, it’s worth the effort. With the correct tools and personnel, measuring ROI can help yield insights that will make your next campaign more successful than your last.      

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Erik Michal provides email and marketing automation leadership for ddm marketing + communications, a B2B digital-marketing agency for highly complex and highly regulated industries.