Marketing attribution is the concept and process of giving “credit” for marketing touches. Not just the proverbial high-five with the team. I mean actual revenue credit. It’s an essential step to calculating ROI and proving the effectiveness of marketing.
This sounds easy enough, but there’s a twist. B2B companies often deal with multiple stakeholders during the buying process. This means B2B companies are actively marketing to all the people involved in a deal, tracking multiple touch points from all stakeholders such as the researcher, finance person, the user and the ultimate decision maker.
To attribute revenue to marketing channels accurately, marketers need to gather all of the individuals involved in a deal into one group — in other words, one account.
How does this work? Take for example a deal involving a researcher, user and decision maker. The researcher might be the very first touch. This is the user who engages with your top-of-funnel marketing campaigns, possibly requesting a demo. But wait, the user doesn’t sign the check. The decision maker does.
Marketers who aren’t using account-based attribution wouldn’t attribute credit to the researcher and they might assume this company didn’t advance in the funnel. Or they might apply all the revenue credit to the last touch — the decision maker — and undervalue the marketing touches for the researcher and users. In this case, a marketing team would only optimize for those touches and not even consider those of the researcher and user.
This is why marketers need to group users into accounts at the company or departmental level. Account-based attribution is how marketers apply revenue credit to groups of prospects — meaning accounts.
It used to be all about having data. Today we have too much data and it’s using techniques like account-based attribution that makes data actionable.
Using account-based attribution is a critical part of pipeline marketing. Marketing teams are ditching lead generation for the metric that really matters: revenue. And you can’t measure marketing to revenue without marketing attribution and you need to be tracking each company, not person, to have useful data.
Dave Rigotti is the Head of Pipeline Marketing at Bizible, a SaaS B2B marketing attribution provider. He’s also the editor of PipelineMarketer.com and formerly of Microsoft. More importantly, he loves BBQ.
