[Marketing Handbook] Campaign Monitoring and B2B Advertising

Published by Nilangan Ray on October 3, 2020

B2B Marketers run several types of campaigns across different customer engagement and advertising platforms. Each campaign brings several different dynamics to the table. The biggest challenge marketers have is scrutinizing data to optimize customer acquisition costs and connecting campaigns with revenue.

The difference with B2C

B2C sales cycles are short and are often easy to track. This is especially the case for eCommerce and similar businesses. When it comes to advertising, marketers would set up a pixel for tracking conversions and when a customer makes the purchase, the data is logged. A marketer can get conversion rates and cost per conversion directly within the advertising platform and they can easily find out which campaigns are converting better. For other organic campaigns, marketers can track customers using UTM parameters and join the dots.

Things are not the same for B2B businesses. B2B funnels are complex and the buying process can last for months. Marketers need to attribute success even before a customer ends up purchasing. This is doable using a data-driven marketing strategy and proper campaign tracking and analytics. The biggest advantage of b2b digital marketing is the availability of information, unlike any other medium. While leads and customers engage with your website, their data can be acquired by marketers for proper analytics. B2B marketers can leverage this available information to improve their funnels and improve marketing efficiency.

Summarizing the problems

– Marketers need to track every direct and indirect channel and understand what is working and what is not.
– Marketers need to link campaigns to revenue even before customers buy
– Marketers need to identify campaigns that perform better than other campaigns and allocate more budget to them.
– Marketers need to eliminate poor performers to increase ROI.

Defining qualifying characteristics and KPIs

Before we begin tracking and monitoring campaigns and connecting them to revenue, it is important to define the metrics and data attributes you need. Instead of working with numbers and traffic as a whole, we will work on individual leads and group them based on quality. For B2B selling, even if a lead has not converted yet, you can still determine the value of the leads and connect it back to your campaigns. This is for preliminary marketing to revenue connection. You, of course, also need to connect marketing to purchase down the line.

1. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

A properly functioning marketing qualification system is the biggest indicator of lead quality for marketing teams, especially for B2B businesses. As B2B buying cycles tend to be long and there is really no other concrete way to determine marketing and advertising efficiency without looking at sales figures (which would take months to arrive for the current efforts).

Data-driven marketing helps B2B marketers leverage customer data to qualify leads and measure marketing performance.

2. Predicted Revenue

There are multiple ways to predict revenue especially after leads move to sales for evaluation. Sales usually put the expected lead value on the CRM deal which can be fetched back by marketing. For SAAS companies, it is even easier to predict revenue. A lead has signed up for a trial of $500/month plan and their profile matches the plan they have chosen? It is easy to know what the value of the lead is from this information.

3. Lead Engagement

Lead engagement when combining with other qualification attributes can be a useful indicator of the quality of a lead. Does a lead spend a lot of time with your product and check other boxes? Is a lead getting proper value from your product? Setting up a process where these leads can be easily identified can help you qualify your leads and connect them to your marketing efforts.

Making the connection with revenue

Now that we have determined the key indicators and data attributes, it is time to connect marketing campaigns with revenue determiners and predicted revenue.

Step 1: Setting up tracking for marketing campaigns and advertising campaigns

Using URL suffixes and UTM parameters are the most efficient ways to track your marketing campaigns especially if they are on organic channels. Once you use these parameters, it is easier for your visitor tracking tool (Salespanel, in this case), to identify where exactly your lead came from and tag it correctly. While Salespanel natively identifies the referrer without any parameters, using parameters helps the software precisely tag each visitor to each source or campaign. Posting different quora answers for each topic and having a link on each answer? Suffix a dedicated utm_parameter for each category of question and you will know which topics are bringing quality leads for you.

Now that we have covered organic channels, let’s talk about paid channels. Things are far easier to track on paid advertising platforms as these platforms give you tools to set up your tracking efficiently. For example, with tracking templates on Google Ads, you can exactly track which campaign, ad group, keyword, and ad copy a visitor came through, and all of the data is fetched by Salespanel. You can even monitor the performance of each particular target keyword and find out high-performing ones. To know how you can set this up, please check out this support article.

Step 2: Set up a qualification/segmentation mechanism based on either revenue or lead quality.

Once you have tracking properly set up, it is time to set up your qualification process that is either tied to predicted revenue or tied to qualifying characteristics. For revenue, you can either fetch sales revenue prediction from CRM or connect to the chosen trial plan (for SAAS) or simply tie predicted revenue with the customer profile. You can read more about qualifying b2b leads here.

Step 3: Monitor reports based on each campaign

After you have gone through the first two steps, fire up the reporting module and monitor how each individual advertising/marketing campaign is contributing to your qualified leads and revenue. Reports on Salespanel can be broken down and filtered further to give you the data you need.

Reallocating budget and optimizing for better ROI

Now that you have set up your marketing analytic system, it is time for you to put your budget where the revenue actually is. You would be surprised to see that the Pareto Principle (commonly known as the 80-20 rule) may very well apply to your marketing efforts. The rule states that almost 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. Your job would be to identify these winning strategies and relocate budget to them from underperforming strategies. Also, if you find that some campaigns are bringing really high-quality leads, you would be comfortable in increasing the cost per acquisition for these campaigns. This, however, will only end up decreasing your customer acquisition costs at the end of the day.

Bonus: Advertising fine-tuning for further lowering your CAC and retention

While this does not directly come under campaign monitoring, it is worth mentioning in this article because of its close alignment to the system. You have now identified visitors that are of high quality and are valuable for your business. And, you have also identified campaigns that bring them. You can now capture these visitors and replicate them to find potential leads who share similar characteristics with these visitors. Simply sync qualified visitors from Salespanel to your advertising account and create a lookalike audience for these visitors. You can also run targeted retargeting campaigns to engage with high-value prospects and better serve them.