While revenue attribution — both single-touch and multi-touch modeling — isn’t exclusive to any one industry, there are several reasons why it’s especially valuable to B2B marketers. The following post discusses why attribution and B2B marketing go so well together:
Longer Sales Cycle…More Touch Points
On average, B2B sales cycles are much longer than B2C sales cycles. Businesses are composed of several decision-making bodies including, CXOs, IT, Accounting, Finance, etc. Contrary to an individual buyer in a B2C market, the decision to convert will have to go through different layers of authority and stipulations. As a result of this, the B2B companies require intensive lead nurturing, and frequent interactions with a brand and value proposition for all parties involved in the decision-making process. Hence, a substantially higher number of customer touchpoints and channels to work with. This facilitates an important need for multi-touch attribution for B2B customer interaction.
B2B Precedence In Content Marketing
Among the many customer touchpoints prevalent in B2B marketing, content marketing has exclusive precedence for B2B clientele. This is because B2B customers favor resourceful content that will help in educating them on the product/service at hand. A lot of B2B organizations maintain a tight-knit audience relationship with their customers through their content. This is why most B2B organizations have a dedicated content marketing team with a content marketing strategy — “91% of B2B marketers say they use content marketing in their overall strategy”. Revenue attribution reinforces the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy, as it provides insights into which of your content is more accomplishable, allowing you to fine-tune your strategy accordingly.
Role-Based Analysis
As mentioned in an earlier point, B2B clientele is composed of several personnel, not to mention individual roles within a business itself. In other words, businesses sell to specific roles in other businesses depending on what the product/service is. And when attributing your marketing efforts to these roles, it becomes important to distinguish the data and analysis under a single customer profile. Revenue attribution comes equipped with granular customer journey analysis which methodically ties customer touchpoints to different roles under use — for instance, if your business sells a comprehensive accounting automation system, you could get a granular view of your attribution performance tied to the accounts receivable role and accounts payable role per customer.
ROI For The Customers
Evidently, B2B clientele is far more interested in the efficacy of your product/service’s utility in the form of ROI (Return on Investment), and while B2C clientele is also concerned with the utility of their product/service, it is nowhere near as empirically required for a business customer. Fortunately, revenue attribution happens to facilitate observing your ROI, better yet optimizing it. Once again, proving to be a useful tool for showcasing your product/service’s ROI to customers that require it.
B2B Transaction Value
According to DecoNetwork, B2B transactions have an AOV (Average Order Value) that is more than seven times larger than that of B2C transactions. This also justifies their higher acquisition cost per customer channel. The important thing to note here is that the more income and investments get involved, the more money there is to tie to channels and channel leads. More specifically, the higher amounts of money and channels involved will contribute well to generating data-driven attribution insights, and with the right metrics, you’ll be able to attribute the quality of your leads based on your data-driven attribution insights.
Attributing Your Brand For Long-Term Relationships
Whether it’s having to generate leads among every stakeholder involved in a conversion decision, sustaining a tight-knit audience relationship through your content marketing because most of your purchase volume comes from the same buyers. B2B marketers prioritize building a relationship with their customers, due to their longer buying cycles, or long-term contractual nature. The same isn’t expected in a B2C environment as the seller-customer relationship is merely transactional and building recognition is prioritized over building a relationship with your clientele. This being established, it is virtually more important for a B2B marketer to be concerned with attributing brand awareness and value, along with generating other useful insights like CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value). All of which can be gauged to some degree through revenue attribution.
And there we have it. Revenue attribution is becoming an increasingly important tool for B2B marketers today. That being said, attribution can be a tricky technique to master from scratch. Factors.ai is an end-to-end revenue attribution platform that helps B2B marketers get started on their attribution journey through super simple, super intuitive, AI-powered marketing analytics.
