I remember the days when B2B marketing attribution was simpler. Buyers had to visit your website and identify themselves to gain access to the information they needed to learn about your solution and evaluate it with the help of your sales team.
A couple of decades later, that’s no longer true – for the most part. There’s an overwhelming amount of information available with a click. Add to that the ability to ask your favorite GenAI tool, join community discussions with peers, read customer review sites, ask your network, gather information from a growing number of channels, and you can’t help but realize buyers are in control.
Yet most B2B marketing teams work under mandates to prove their programs contribute to revenue.
We thought we had this in the bag when marketing automation systems came along. And it felt that way — at first. However, what these platforms did was pull our focus away from our customers and apply it to the tools.
We began:
- Optimizing metrics based on activity instead of value.
- Scoring interactions arbitrarily to generate “qualified leads” for sales.
- Focusing on individual leads even though a group buys complex B2B.
- Gating content to make buyers “pay” for information with their contact info.
- Spamming those email addresses as if frequency would cause buying decisions.
The B2B Marketing Decline to a Cost Center
And along came SaaS and a period of hyper-growth. It was a time when capital was cheap and growth at all costs was the mantra.
That worked for a decade. Unfortunately, the cost was ignoring marketing fundamentals to focus on short-term wins. We cast aside brand investment in favor of performance/demand gen — the stuff we could attribute — to promotional marketing programs.
Over the same period, content volume exploded, eliminating the scarcity of information and making it a commodity. Even though buyers declared most of it irrelevant and not useful.
Even worse, this quest for growth at all costs pitted marketing against sales in the arms race for credit for revenue. Along the way, marketing became more of a sales function, ironically giving away its strategic value to prove its impact on quick wins.
Then, the cost of capital became expensive. Investments slowed. Budgets tightened. Sales cycles extended and no-decision became more popular than purchase decisions. Companies that lacked a solid brand foundation failed — many of them SaaS.
Buyers revolted. We weren’t listening. Somewhere along the line we gave up on doing the work to truly understand our customers. There wasn’t any attribution for that work. We were on the hamster wheel of getting more programs out the door to drive more buyers to our sellers and sell more, faster. Regardless of what buyers wanted.
Not paying attention to our buyers cost us.
Not educating our companies about the strategic value of marketing or setting the right expectations cost us — and our brands.
Shallow attribution leaves us unable to prove value beyond vanity metrics that widen the chasm between marketing and sales at a time when the former should be multiplying the effectiveness of the latter by working together. Not to mention the possible compounding effect across the whole organization.
B2B Marketing Attribution Must Gain Depth
There’s a place—and a value—for short-term performance marketing. But it’s imperative to recognize the strategic impact forfeited without a focus on the longer term.
Here’s why:
- Only 5% of buyers are in-market at any time.
- Focusing only on 5% means ignoring the 95% that will solve the problem in the future.
- You don’t control when that trigger to solve the problem happens.
- If your brand doesn’t come to mind, you’re not in the game.
Buyers are firmly in control of their buying process. Most of these buying groups do all the research and evaluation to build the shortlist of vendors to consider before involving vendors. Members of the buying committee will visit your website during this time, but only 1 – 3 of them will fill out forms. That won’t happen if they aren’t aware of your brand, and you haven’t built memory structures that prompt recall when the problem you solve becomes acute.
And let’s get to the elephant in the room: 90% of B2B buyers are using GenAI during some part of the buying process. AI usage will only grow over time. Getting included in answers from GenAI tools requires meaningful, authoritative content that shares expertise and evidence to answer the question asked in context.
Gaining depth in attribution is a tall order. One that AI can also help marketers achieve.
Depth Isn’t About One Campaign but the Whole Customer Journey
We need to look beyond individual campaigns to the entire buying journey for your ICP. You may see a potential buyer engaged with your campaign content. But where else are they engaging with you?
What other channels are they using? Do you know the questions they’re asking about the problem-to-solution process? Do you have the content that answers those questions readily available?
What about the other members of the buying committee? Who are they? How do their perspectives and questions differ? Do you provide content that helps reconcile the differences across the buying group to help facilitate consensus? Without that, your brand may not make the shortlist.
Back to attribution. Brand investments are difficult to measure. But it is possible. As the buying environment continues to shift and GenAI plays a bigger role, we too must shift.
For example, consider that it’s not brand or demand but brand-to-demand programs that drive momentum. We need to stop measuring marketing by individual campaign and start measuring interactions across the entirety of the buying process – at least those we can see.
What are all the interactions buyers within an account have had with your brand? To gain depth means recognizing that activity from one buyer (when your ICP’s buying committee ranges from 6 to 8 people) isn’t significant enough to indicate they’re in-market.
But if you deanonymize web traffic and see in addition to that one buyer who is active in your nurture program, another visited product pages and commented on LinkedIn posts, and yet another registered for a webinar and watched the on-demand version – now you’ve got signals that the buyer may be in-market.
Gaining depth in attribution means the ability to show impact across the buying team of an account in your ICP. Without that, it’s arguably true the account is not in-market.
Gaining depth in attribution enables you to analyze what topics the account engaged with and look at how they fit together as a collective. What story are they piecing together? Are other accounts also engaging with these topics? Forget format and channel for a minute and focus on meaning. What are they learning? You should be able to understand what questions they’re trying to answer.
And this insight should also allow you to enable your sellers to provide meaningful outreach to further the storyline. Not a sales pitch. If they wanted that they’d fill out your demo request form.
Gain Buy-in for Brand-to-Demand Attribution to Prove Strategic Impact
Brand-to-demand programs tell a story across the long term. Six-month buy cycles won’t be closed with a white paper and a three-touch campaign, for example. This takes time and a breadth of content that engages across the buying group. But once you’ve gotten through a cycle you should see a flywheel effect where buyers are finding and engaging, becoming aware, building trust in your expertise, and gaining the confidence to add you to shortlists.
In the meantime, measures that help prove the impact of longer-term programs include:
- Traffic growth from ICP accounts – both direct and from paid ads.
- Engagement growth – longer website session times and more pageviews, more channel engagement, more followers, higher webinar registrations and attendance, etc.
- Account activity – participation by more people from ICP accounts.
- Increased activity from GenAI models as traffic sources.
- Growth in demo requests and/or sales inquiries.
- Increased referrals from customers.
- Lower customer acquisition costs (CAC)
- Higher customer retention and lifetime value (LTV)
Set benchmarks for each of these and then measure against those to show impact. Enlist AI to help analyze the data. Tie these to the buying journey as you build out tracking across all the interactions you can see to show momentum and orchestrate pathways that build more engagement. Orchestrate the data you share to tell a story about how these improvements impact business objectives.
A single campaign isn’t likely to close a complex sale. But putting the attribution in place that shows how all the programs you’re running work together to increase sales effectiveness will help B2B marketing regain the value we abandoned in favor of a short-sighted focus on the short term.