Struggling to show B2B marketing ROI? Learn how multi-touch attribution, conversion APIs, and marketing mix modeling can measure performance and prove value.
A combination of tighter marketing budgets and the expanding role of CMOs has pressured B2B marketing teams to find new ways to demonstrate the value of their marketing initiatives in a way the C-suite will appreciate.
Marketers must continually explore new ways to measure marketing performance if they want to hold onto (or even grow) their budgets. Don’t worry – we wouldn’t highlight a challenge without offering a solution. Let’s look at four performance measurement techniques that can help your team prove the worth of your marketing beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Multi-Touch Attribution
Multi-touch attribution (MTA) is a technique for measuring marketing performance along each touchpoint on your buying journey. MTA can assign fractional credit to each touchpoint your customers interact with, allowing your marketing team to understand which touchpoints most influenced the customer’s decision-making.
Using multi-touch attribution can be challenging because it requires locating and defining every touchpoint, and then ensuring you can access accurate marketing metric data from each of those touchpoints. For best results, experts recommend exhaustively mapping out your customer journey and touchpoints before you get started.
From there, your team should choose an MTA model, determining how you’ll assign fractional credit to each touchpoint you’re tracking. There are several models to choose from, including linear attribution, time-decay attribution and position-based (or “u”) attribution. Choose the model that most accurately reflects how your unique customer journey works.
Also Read: Mastering LTV: Data Analytics and Attribution
Conversion APIs
LinkedIn introduced Conversion APIs (CAPIs) in November 2023 as a way to provide greater clarity and precision to advertisers in the face of evolving privacy restrictions. This new feature allows you to connect the rest of your online and offline data to LinkedIn to see how LinkedIn ad campaigns have influenced actions on your buyer’s journey.
CAPI allows you to improve your full-funnel measurement without relying on cookie-based tracking. As you continue to use CAPI to track and measure conversion performance, you’ll gain insights into where your marketing is and isn’t driving the next action from multiple types of conversion data, allowing you to optimize messaging and targeting across each stage. CAPIs become even more useful when combined with the Insight tag, which unlocks further demographic information about site visitors.
Marketing Mix Modeling
Marketing mix modeling (MMM) uses different forms of regression analysis to analyze your historical business data and estimate the impact of different marketing tactics on business performance.
MMM can help you understand how various aspects of your marketing campaigns – including channels and audience targeted, messaging, budget and more – affected your previous performance relative to business goals. This historical context can give you a clear view of when and where your marketing is most effective and how to optimize future campaigns.
There are three core steps to using MMM. First, define the business objectives you want to measure your performance against and settle on KPIs. Next, collect and prepare your historical marketing and outcome data. Finally, choose a regression model to compare different aspects of your previous marketing strategies to your KPIs. This will help you identify different patterns you can use to optimize future marketing.
Quality Reach Metrics
Quality reach metrics are part of performance branding, which aims to prove the ROI of brand marketing in bottom-line terms the C-suite can understand.
Because up to 95% of B2B buyers are out-of-market at any given time, brand marketing contributes more to long-term growth than demand generation. This is achieved via memory generation. Successful brand marketing makes your brand memorable to out-of-market customers, so that when they are in-market, they remember your brand and come looking for it.
Performance branding quantifies this effect by measuring share of mind, which is a measurement of how many people positively associate your brand with the types of products and/or services you sell. Quality reach metrics use share of mind to start measuring the quality of specific brand marketing elements in impactful terms.
There are five quality reach metrics:
- Quality creative measures how well your audience is responding to your branded content.
- Quality reach measures how effectively your branded content is reaching current and future buyers.
- Quality attention measures how effectively your branded content is capturing and retaining the attention of your audience.
- Quality awareness measures how well your content fits the context of its environment and how effectively it is building positive associations.
- Quality lift measures how effectively your brand marketing helped increase sales during a specific period.
Also Read: How Are Marketing Attribution Models Helping Brands Drive ROI?
By measuring each of these quality reach metrics, you’ll be able to point to exactly how and why your brand marketing is making a difference. It’s a great example of how B2B marketers can think more deeply and holistically about measuring performance, looking beyond final conversions to more clearly understand the buying process and how marketing influences it.
