It might seem obvious, but we don’t think that there’s much of a point in marketing unless you can tie what you’re doing back to revenue. While some marketing is immeasurable (for example, it’s difficult to identify the monetary value of a brand), the more you can relate your efforts to revenue, the better.
Of course, to ensure your marketing efforts are resulting in revenue, you need a way to measure your performance. That’s where attribution comes in.
Marketing attribution is used to help businesses understand how marketing is contributing to their bottom-line and for marketers to get the credit that they deserve for the work they’ve been doing.
To get a full picture of how your marketing efforts are contributing to revenue, you need to attribute every touchpoint contacts’ make with your company. HubSpot’s Multi-Touch Revenue Attribution Reports can help you do just that. Before we talk about the reports themselves, though, let’s discuss why attribution reporting is important to begin with.
If you boil it down, marketing’s two most influential responsibilities are creating and promoting content. Therefore, when you want to prove that marketing is resulting in revenue, you should track the content you create and the way you are promoting it, specifically examining who is interacting with it and how they found it.
For example, if you’re analyzing a blog that one of your contacts interacted with, you should ask yourself questions like:
Marketing attribution can help you find and understand the answers to these questions so you can uncover the in-between marketing touchpoints that are important to capture.
Imagine if you could close a deal with numerous associated contacts and see which channels they came through and all of their touchpoints. You could develop a solid picture of which marketing efforts were working for you and contributing to your bottom-line. This information could be integral to your success.
Being able to identify and exhibit your success can also help you gain more decision-making authority in your organization. By proving that your previous efforts generated results, you can build trust and become more involved in your company’s strategy planning efforts moving forward.
With marketing attribution, when you understand which content is getting the most engagement and actually resulting in revenue, you’ll discover where you need to create more content to take advantage of popular topics or close gaps.
For instance, if you develop content that never drives people to close, it might be worth finding different topics that are more relevant to your consumers' pain points, relate more to what your business does or are just more interesting.
Ultimately, marketing attribution can help you determine how to plan your marketing strategy in the most efficient way, producing and promoting the content that best benefits your end customers and your business.
It’s not uncommon for marketing and sales to have a contentious relationship. Sales doesn’t think that marketing is creating leads that are worth following up with. Meanwhile, marketing doesn’t think sales is spending enough time following up with the leads that they create.
Luckily, by properly leveraging marketing attribution, marketing, and sales can get on the same page.
With a multitouch revenue attribution model, marketing teams can go in and say, “Look at all the content we created that helped close these deals.” It also allows them to see that sales is following up with contacts and guiding them down the funnel.
By lifting the curtain and revealing how both teams are contributing to revenue, marketing, and sales can begin to appreciate each other and further align their efforts.
At this point, it’s clear that marketing attribution can provide great benefits for your company, but traditionally, it has not been easy to execute.
Here at New Breed, we used to struggle with implementing a marketing attribution model. None of the ways we tried to do it were scalable, automated, or fully accurate.
However, we are not the only company to struggle with such issues. This is a challenge that many other marketers are dealing with today.
Many attempt to enact solutions involving manual processes that are time-consuming and inaccurate. Others don’t have full access to the data they need. Still others don’t even attempt marketing attribution because they think it is too complex to figure out or feel it could expose potential flaws in their strategy.
Thankfully, we found a solution to these issues.
HubSpot introduced multi-touch revenue attribution reports and resolved many marketers’ issues with attribution reporting.
First, the reports are automated and easy while providing access to all of the data you need. Instead of utilizing a complex, difficult-to-comprehend format, HubSpot allows you to answer some of the most common marketing performance questions. For example, you can determine which of your channels or content types influenced the most revenue for your business in the click of a button.
With this feature, marketers need not fear revealing how they are contributing to revenue. If they select, “Which content drove the most revenue for my business?” they’ll be able to see the content that has produced the most revenue, verifying their contributions right off the bat.
Using these reports, there is also no reason for marketers to worry about implementing marketing attribution models. Everything is already prepared in HubSpot.
Additionally, you can select which type of marketing attribution model (like the first interaction model or the full-path model) you want to use. You can even overlay the models to see how they compare.
The only preparation that’s required to use the reports is that you are tracking deals in HubSpot. If you’re using HubSpot for marketing and sales, and HubSpot is your CRM, you’re probably already using the deals feature. If you’re managing deals or opportunities in another CRM, all you have to do is integrate those properties into HubSpot so that the deals can be tracked.
From there, you need to associate contacts with those deals. Basically, if you have a contact within your database that works for a specific company involved in a deal, that connection needs to be made. Then, the reports can track what a given company’s employees are engaging with. At that point, you’ll be able to click into specific deals and see every interaction each contact from a given company had with your business, showcasing each touchpoint that led to a deal.
You’ll also be able to see when interactions happened, what type of touchpoint they represented (a first touchpoint, a lead creation touchpoint, a middle touchpoint, an opportunity touchpoint or a closed-won touchpoint), what type of interaction they were (a page view, an email click, a meeting, a form submission, etc.), where interactions came from and how much credit was associated with each touchpoint.
Overall, HubSpot’s multi-touch revenue attribution reports can prove invaluable.
HubSpot’s attribution reports provide a simple solution to a complex problem.
The data you need to understand how marketing is contributing to your bottom-line and for marketers to get credit for the work they’ve been doing is all at your fingertips.
If you want to learn more about HubSpot’s multi-touch revenue attribution reports and how they’ve helped us here at New Breed, check out our upcoming webinar.