By As a B2B technology marketer, if you can't show your ROI, it doesn't exist as far as C-suite is concerned. This impacts your marketing budget, professional reputation, strategy, and ability to align your efforts with sales to improve ROI.
Understanding how your B2B marketing campaigns are actually performing lets you see which campaigns are driving ROI and which ones are dead weight — so it's critical to audit those campaigns. Make sure they're really delivering the quality leads you think they are.
What Is Marketing ROI?
You already know that marketing ROI (MROI) is your return on investment for marketing activities. All profits and revenue growth hinge on how well you're marketing.
Unlike B2C marketing, where the relationship between marketing and revenues is mostly straightforward, in B2B marketing, the relationship is much more complex.
What Makes B2B Marketing ROI Auditing More Difficult?
B2B technology is a major buying decision, not an impulse buy. It often requires multiple decision-makers. And, in some situations, getting someone to transition from one B2B technology to your technology is like pulling teeth.
Business leaders get comfortable with dealing with the outdated tech they know, even if it doesn't meet their needs. You've got to give them a solid reason to switch or invest.
You must provide information and support through multiple marketing channels: inbound marketing, social media, email, remarketing, and other digital strategies.
Attribution gets tricky as the direct lines to ROI become blurred with so many marketing channels in place. Multiple touches influence the final sale. And many of these channels have delayed revenues because buying B2B technology requires time, research, and deliberation.
To audit your B2B marketing campaigns, you must have a way to track where revenues are coming from. Once you do that, you can hone your overall strategy to increase marketing ROI.
How to Audit Your B2B Marketing Campaigns
To audit your campaigns, you need to decide how you want to attribute revenues to quantify your marketing ROI. You have several options.
1. Single Attribution (First Touch / Last Touch)
This is the most common way to attribute. You assign the attribution to the first or last campaign that resulted in that sale. Whether you use the first or last depends on which you determine is more influential in achieving that sale.
In sales terms, which one more readily defines your success — the person who broke the ice with a prospect or the person who closed the deal?
It's hard to say, isn't it? You have no sale if you remove either one. Single attribution is easy to implement. But it gives too much credit to one and none to the other.
That's not getting the whole picture. In B2B marketing, it's like attributing revenues to your remarketing ads without considering how you got that cookie into their browser in the first place.
That's why other options exist.
2. Single Attribution with Revenue Cycle Projections
Decisions based on single attribution alone can lead to cutting the very campaigns that attracted or broke the ice in the first place. This method attempts to address that.
It recognizes the time it takes B2B buyers to move through the pipeline. So it uses first touch to project the revenue outcome.
For example, based on past performance, if you generate X number of leads at Y conversion rate and Z average order value, then X number of leads = X revenues down the pipeline.
You can now clearly link marketing ROI to marketing efforts earlier in the B2B Technology Buyer's Journey.
3. Multi-Touch Attribution
This option has only recently become a practical way to determine ROI thanks to innovative B2B marketing technology. With this method of tracking and auditing, you give adjusted weight to multiple touches that happened.
You can base the weight assigned to each on factors like the time that's passed since the touch, the role it plays, or how much someone interacted during that touch.
And if this sounds complicated, know that current technology allows you to automatically assign these attribution weights and view them in a single pane that helps you clearly understand the impact of each marketing campaign and channel.
Multi-touch attribution does require some assumptions when you're setting it up that may cause over-attribution to a touch that had little to no effect.
But as you audit your campaigns, it becomes clearer where those weights may need adjustment. That's where the next tracking and auditing method is critical.
4. Implement Controls in Your Testing
Any good scientist knows that to prove something, you have to have a control group. To truly understand the impact of your marketing efforts, you need to run controlled experiments and measure the difference between the control group and the test group.
To cost-effectively and efficiently run these tests, make a change that directly impacts only one target audience. Leave the others as the control.
If the change produces a statistically significant (can't be attributed to chance) change in leads generated in that test group, then apply that knowledge to improve your overall marketing strategy and ROI.
Increase Your Marketing ROI with a B2B Audit
To increase your ROI, you must know where leads are coming from and which channels produce the highest quality leads. A B2B audit consistently applies the above attribution techniques to objectively evaluate channels and campaigns to help you achieve that ROI.
Download this case study to see how one of our B2B technology clients increased its marketing ROI by 20X by auditing and improving its strategy.
