Bring Full Funnel Visualization into Clearer View and Reap the Rewards
If you ask your marketing team any of these questions, you should read on:
- Do we have full visibility on how effective our online marketing dollars are being utilized?
- Can we follow an online lead from ad click to form capture, and all through to sale?
- Do we know what audience types are our most qualified and top high converting leads?
- Which creative campaigns are driving low cost leads?
- Are we tracking leads from every marketing channel?
As John Wanamaker, the grandfather of the first department store concept famously quoted:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.”
With all the digital tracking available today, marketers are looking for answers:
- Findings from the 2018 Marketing Measurement & Attribution Benchmark Survey show that more than half (55%) of B2B companies say their current ability to measure and analyze marketing performance “needs improvement” or worse
- The inability to track activity between specific buyer stages (48%) and measure impact across channels/campaigns (47%) are the biggest challenges for marketers looking to demonstrate marketing impact
- Additional research from Demand Gen Report and Madison Logic shows that more than half (52%) of B2B marketers also claim “extending marketing influence across the entire buyer journey” is a top ABM initiative for them
Realizing the Full Funnel
True visibility into your full funnel allows you to see the relationship between your online presence and marketing actions, as well their effect on your sales process. From improving the overall consumer journey and boosting sales, to making smarter budget allocation decisions and empowering post-opportunity stage marketing, getting a closer and clearer look at “the big picture” can benefit your business and brand on many levels. When you can see that big picture clearly – fully understanding how your actions at the top of the funnel also impact the bottom – you can optimize for revenue on an ongoing basis.
It’s important to remember that all too often today, your consumer’s journey is long and sometimes a tedious one. The more “touchpoints” in that journey, the longer the journey. And the longer that journey, the more you need visibility in your attribution data.
Even way back in Wanamaker’s day, when advertising options were limited to a handful of mediums and channels, marketers were far from clear where they were burning through budgets and misallocating funds. Today, it’s even cloudier. What online ad did your consumer click to reach you? Did they first hear about you online or offline? Did they fill out an online brochure form? How long did it take them to reach you? The list of questions may be as long as the customer’s journey to you.
If you can access and track the data on each of those touchpoints – from their first anonymous visit all the way through to becoming a customer – then you have full funnel visibility. Once you access, mine, analyze, and understand this hard-earned data, you can use it to optimize each interaction with your consumers.
OK…But How Do I Do That?
When it comes to achieving full funnel visibility, there are three primary components:
- Multi-touch attribution
- Omni-channel attribution
- Account-based attribution
Multi-touch attribution refers to the ability to track and measure multiple touchpoints along the consumer’s journey – from the anonymous first touch all the way through to closed-won.
Omni-channel attribution is the ability to track and measure offline and digital channels in the same way. This is extremely important to keep in mind. Even if you track every online/digital touchpoint, you’d still be missing key parts of the consumer journey if you omit “offline”/physical interactions such as direct mail, conferences, and traditional marketing.
Account-based attribution, meanwhile, refers to the ability to merge the touchpoints of several individual contacts at the same company into a single journey. This is especially relevant when it comes to B2B marketing – where your average “buyer” is almost certainly more than one key stakeholder or decision-maker, and often a handful of individuals, each with their own unique attributes and perspectives. Being able to effectively measure them as one single entity on a shared journey is incredibly powerful.
Understanding the Process
Now that we’ve covered what full funnel visualization is, it’s important to note what full funnel visualization is not. It’s not something you can just “buy and plug into” your organization’s infrastructure or marketing machine. It’s a process that requires patience. This process involves an array of people, software, and strategies. And it starts with one key decision:
Selecting the right partner or agency to help you implement, realize, maintain, and monitor it.
To truly achieve full funnel visualization, you need an partner who can digest your internal systems, marketing efforts, marketing software, customer relationship management software, analytics software, business intelligence tools, and anything else that is gathering data.
For more than 25 years, ParkerWhite has helped launch, rejuvenate and reposition brands for financial success. In addition to building brands and growing businesses, we’ve honed our skills and expertise in areas like attracting leads and nurturing customers.
Let’s talk today. We’d love to learn how we can help visualize your data and understand both where you’re spending your marketing dollars and if that is effectively driving conversions.