Any successful B2B marketing strategy has to begin with understanding where your buyers are coming from, or you will simply waste money.

Ask yourself this question — do you understand your B2B buyers? Sure, most B2B marketing professionals worth their salt can basically list the top buyer personas for the product or service they are selling pretty easily, and they can also list the most important characteristics of those buyers — who they are, what they do, and what motivates them to buy.

But that is not completely the right answer to the question. What is even more important is understanding the overall journey your B2B customers take on their way to discovering and agreeing to purchase your product or service — this is fundamental and far more valuable to marketers than just defining your typical buyer’s traits.

In the B2B marketing space, you can’t expect to drive any worthwhile leads without thoroughly understanding your buyer’s journey. Would you build a highway without knowing how people will merge onto it, where people want to drive to, and which exit routes they may eventually take?

Like this example, understanding the B2B buyer is all about knowing where your customers are coming from, how they found you, and where they want to go.

Quite simply, if you know how your customer found your company’s products or services in the first place, and the specific marketing or media channel that brought them to you — then you know exactly where to place your marketing bets moving forward. In summary, marketing attribution is the art and science of uncovering which touch points the customer interacted with before they became a lead, and most importantly, before they made a purchase.

MULTI-TOUCH ATTRIBUTION

Touch points made with a customer can be any kind of interaction, marketing tactic, channel, or a combination of them — including promotional offers by email, radio, or television commercials to gated content downloads and even visits to website landing pages, or everything in between. A typical B2B marketing campaign will consist of many, many touch points along the buyer’s journey, and so measuring attribution can be quite tricky. But if you can get it right, it will tell you which interactions with your company most successfully moved the customer forward along their journey to actually making a purchase.

Marketing attribution is a set of rules for determining which of your media channels are driving the most success in terms of leads, purchase transactions, or other key points along the journey. It assigns these rules to also making decisions like knowing the right time to send an offer for a discount — when it is going to have a much higher probability of getting a prospect to react, based on insights about where the customer is along the journey.

For example, if your company provides IT training to business users, and you want to offer a 40% discount to a prospective lead — a marketing attribution model will signal exactly when you need to send out this generous discount to customers to garner the best results. Using a multi-touch attribution model can tie specific marketing efforts back to ROAS but it can be tricky to set up and master.

Luckily, there are online multi-touch attribution solutions, like LeadsRx, which are already preconfigured and ready for use by marketing teams of all sizes to help them start optimizing their marketing campaigns right away. A good solution will do the heavy lifting, revealing how leads are converted. It will also connect the dots on the buyer’s journey — but even more importantly, it will close the loop between lead generation and sales transacted by pinpointing where you need to focus more marketing efforts to replicate those successes. This translates directly into ROAS and helps ensure your long-term results.

One Universal Conversion Tracking Pixel for Everything

With the LeadsRx platform, you can track these efforts using one simple pixel. Their Universal Conversion Tracking Pixel™ is all you need to track 100% of inbound marketing programs and all conversion points. Install the pixel on every page of your website directly, or through any tag manager. Once installed, the pixel immediately starts capturing business conversions, including form completions, sales, inbound phone calls, and any outcome a marketer may want to measure and attribute.

This enables marketers to categorize their B2B marketing attribution touch points into groupings like channels, programs, or other logical collections. An easy-to-understand marketing attribution dashboard shows which touchpoints directly contribute to conversions, and you can easily generate a touchpoint performance report to provide feedback on each individual touchpoint

The algorithmic attribution models automatically ingest all of your marketing touchpoints and conversion events to learn about your B2B marketing campaigns, and after only a few weeks, you should have more than enough data collected to make reasonable decisions about your advertising mix. It will enable you to see which ad spend is not contributing to ROAS, and which marketing tactics need more budget, as well as suggestions on when is the most opportune time to use those tactics.

Enhanced Business to Business (B2B) Attribution

LeadsRx has some unique features that make this solution ideal for B2B marketers and their attribution tracking efforts. One of these is Incremental Profile Data, which enables marketers to see prospect data at each step in the sales funnel. For example, a first conversion point may only capture a new lead’s business email address, but the next conversion would add the name and company of the new lead. In addition, there are powerful data visualization capabilities that allow you to see the B2B customer’s journey through the various stages in the sales funnel, providing a better understanding of how prospects are identifying with a brand, developing trust, and becoming loyal, repeat purchasers. This helps marketers focus on movement throughout the sales funnel and develop programs to avoid bottlenecks and delays. Precision marketing attribution with a solution like LeadsRx is invaluable for closing the loop between B2B lead generation and sales —the holy grail from a successful marketer’s perspective.

Ryan Gould – Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services ElevationB2B

From legacy Fortune 100 institutions to inventive start-ups, Ryan brings extensive experience with a wide range of B2B clients. He skillfully architects and manages the delivery of integrated marketing programs, and believes strongly in strategy, not just tactics, that effectively aligns sales and marketing teams within organizations.