Marketing attribution enables marketers to connect their actions to revenues. At the tactical level, it allows them to identify exactly what tactics/activities are delivering the most ROI and then do more of those (and stop doing what isn’t working). At the organizational level, marketing attribution gives marketers credibility across the company, empowering them to “speak the language of business,” which is about revenues and not MQLs or vanity metrics. For example, the CFO doesn’t care “time on page,” but wants to know if the prospect actually purchased something.
Adobe recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to write an in-depth report on the total economic impact of its marketing attribution tool Marketo Measure. Forrester studied several organizations who are using the tool to determine its impact on marketing and the overall business. You can download the free 24-page report, “The Total Economic Impact of Bizible.” Let’s explore some of the report’s findings…
Marketo Measure changed everything
The Forrester report found that Marketo Measure dramatically changed the way marketing got done within the organizations that implemented it, not only improving marketing execution (and marketing KPIs) but also enhancing marketing’s credibility within the organization. The report explains that Marketo Measure helped marketing teams “increase MQL volume, improve MQL conversion rates, grow sales pipeline, and clearly demonstrate marketing’s contribution to closed won deals and renewals.”
Pre-Marketo Measure, the report says, marketing teams were basing key campaign decisions on hunches and best guesses rather than actual, accurate performance data. In terms of marketing attribution efforts, these same pre-Marketo Measure teams were either not doing attribution at all or else relying on patently inaccurate approaches. “Prior to using Marketo Measure,” the report notes, “marketing teams often relied on first- or last-touch attribution, which did not accurately reflect the full customer journey. These marketing teams struggled to demonstrate their impact and contribution to sales pipeline growth and closed won deals.” Hunches and “guesstimates” weren’t cutting it on the execution or reporting side.
6 benefits of Marketo Measure
Once Marketo Measure was implemented, the marketing teams Forrester surveyed began seeing much better results, ones they could quantify and report to leadership. Here are 6 benefits it provided:
1 – Significantly more qualified leads, pipeline, and revenue. Marketo Measure helped the surveyed organizations accelerate and efficiently drive more leads through the funnel, resulting in more closed deals, as well as more marketing qualified leads (MQL) and higher quality of those leads. These Marketo Measure-driven gains delivered larger sales pipelines and revenue growth.
The report found that MQL volume increased by 15%, while cost per lead dropped by 11%, so more quantity and better quality at the same time. In addition, the MQL-to-SQL conversion rate increased by 10%, leading (again) to more efficiency and more ROI.
2 – A deeper, more actionable understanding of customer touchpoints across the customer lifecycle. Marketo Measure gave the surveyed marketers more insight into how different content impacted conversion at each stage of the customer lifecycle. Teams could actually see how marketing investments and specific assets (blog posts, webinars, etc.) moved customers through every stage of the marketing and sales funnel.
As one surveyed marketing operations manager explained: “we could see that certain marketing activities were much better early in the cycle for creating leads and had a much higher quality and conversion rates. So, we put more money into certain activities, like content syndication and webinars, because those were [driving] a much better ROI.”
3 – A deeper, more actionable understanding of ROI by marketing campaign, channel, and individual content asset. With Marketo Measure, marketing teams gained visibility into which strategies yielded the highest return, enabling them to shift focus accordingly. When a content asset type (like webinars) was working, the surveyed marketers could quickly identify success and then create more of that specific content type. The same was true for channels: marketers could reallocate time and budget to channels driving ROI and away from channels not delivering sufficient ROI.
4 – More efficient, targeted marketing spend. By reallocating marketing spend to the campaigns, channels, and assets with the best performance, the overall ROI of marketing spend improved. Similar to a poker game, marketers could use Marketo Measure to quickly identify “losing hands” and discard them, while allocating more money into “winning hands.”
As one marketing operations manager explained, “any company with a really long sales cycle struggles to understand what is moving the needle in the funnel. With Marketo Measure, you can see the touchpoints and react to the data. It’s helpful because you don’t have to wait nine months to make a change,” you can make informed decisions about investments right away to drive ROI.
5 – Protection for marketing budgets through the capacity to prove value. With Marketo Measure data, marketing leaders could demonstrate to their organization’s senior leadership the value of marketing spend and thus protect or expand their marketing budgets. Every company’s leadership wants to see the numbers, to have every department leader tell them, “if we invest X dollars, we will get X + dollars in return.” When marketers have precise marketing attribution data, they have credibility and become stronger advocates for more budget.
As a Senior director of global marketing operations told Forrester: “Marketo Measure has given marketing a louder voice. It helps solidify marketing influence on the pipeline - we can show leadership we are touching 75% of the pipeline,” which gets attention and attracts more investment.
6 – Enabling marketing teams to shift time to higher value-added work. Post-Marketo Measure, marketing teams spent less time on manually-intensive (and largely inaccurate) revenue attribution models and/or writing attribution reports of limited value. Marketo Measure empowered these same marketers to shift their focus away from (manual and inaccurate) attribution reporting to higher-value tasks like data analysis of campaign performance, evaluation and tweaking of content assets and tactics, and taking actions aligned with growing ROI.
The bottom line
Forrester’s report found that Marketo Measure changed how marketing teams worked, enabling them to be more data-driven, efficient and measurable. The report concludes by looking at surveyed organizations for the first 3 years after Marketo Measure was implemented. The result? A stunning ROI of 298% when you compare investments in Marketo Measure implementation over returns on that same implementation. It simply added value in multiple ways.
Interested in learning more about how Marketo Measure adds value and possibly implementing it within your organization? We are experts in Marketo Measure – feel free to reach out to us to start the conversation.
