• by Jess Nelson , February 13, 2017

Measuring campaign attribution can be a challenge for many marketers, particularly in B2B industries where marketing and sales teams need to work congruently to close a deal.

Potentially separated by office location and time zone, this process could easily be disrupted by miscommunication. Bonnie Crater, CEO of Full Circle Insights, says marketers can leverage data to pinpoint any gaps in the communication process.

You don’t need to fear the algorithms if they’re helping you keep your job.

Full Circle Insights, a marketing analytics platform built natively on the Salesforce App Cloud with applications including Campaigns, Leads, Contacts and Opportunities, offers customers the ability to measure the performance of their digital marketing efforts by streamlining marketing and sales data.

Here are four steps to optimizing marketing performance that Crater provided in a conversation with Email Marketing Daily.

The starting point, says Crater, is to begin shifting marketing strategy based on key performance indicators to maximize ROI.

She recommends that marketers compare how many leads they have recruited in the past year to lead conversions and average deal size. Once you have that information, Crater says you can apply funnel metrics to measure past performance based on its actual business impact.

Crater also recommends that marketers give particular attention to sale cycle length, which can vary depending on the type and nature of the business.

2. Measure Actual Performance Against Goals

Crater recommends that marketers develop a method to measure whether they are achieving their goals.

Salesforce offers marketers the opportunity to organize campaigns and assign attributes, so customers can report on overall performance of channel or type. Crater says this is an important part of evaluating performance, but it is valuable to dig deeper into the data. Full Circle Insights provides customers with dashboard reports displaying key performance metrics, which Crater says can be useful for spot-checking performance.

3. Optimize Processes and Communication

Crater says that data offers an opportunity to find any gaps in communication during the handoff process of a lead between marketing and sales. “We’re just trying to help marketers get better at what they do and use data in ways they haven’t done before,” says Crater.   

4. Evaluate Program Performance And ROI

It’s critical that marketers use the right type of data when evaluating ROI, says Crater.

“The prioritization of sales impact is so much more important than response rates,” she says. “Measuring by number of clicks or leads generated doesn’t give you a good measure of campaign performance, it just gives you a response rate.”

To gain a more thorough analysis, Crater recommends measuring program performance against sales data. From there, a marketer could add budget elements to calculate a more realistic ROI.