With this click-bait title and an answer as short as “more leads, better leads and cheaper leads”, I could wrap this article up in one sentence. Yet, even though that answer would not be very far from the truth for many startups, there is a lot more to it.
Marketing is all about measurable results. The days when you could buy a billboard next to a football field without asking a few critical ROI questions are long gone. In order to make things happen — and to make them happen fast — you need laser-sharp focus and a reiterative process that allows you to “fail fast” and improve. For this, (empirical) data is crucial.
So what is more important? Does quality trump volume? Or is it cost-per-lead, or cost per MQL? No one really likes the hassle of A/B testing banners or landing pages, but there’s no way around it. You have to find the best “bang for your buck” and do it fast. You need to create an arena where you measure, monitor, analyze and go through demand generation experiments that you can improve at the speed of light.
Let’s look at the three very real challenges that easily jumpstart or hamper growth:
1. REAL-TIME OVERVIEW
Knowing where you are (with regard to your goals and cost) at any given time is essential. “Build insights, not dashboards” is one of our mottos, and there’s a lot of truth to that. You need insights at your fingertips without having to plow through all the various platforms to understand budget spent versus results garnered.
Use data collation in push-mode to get campaign data from all the different channels and ABM platforms (Adwords, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), to show you the entire paid campaign overview. No need to log into 15 different dashboards to get the data, as you will have one source that shows the cost per click, cost per lead and conversion stats, with the option to drill-down into each channel.
2. END-TO-END ATTRIBUTION
What brings you volume, quality and bang-for-buck? In order to truly understand the marketing campaigns that work and the ones that don’t, you need attribution throughout your entire funnel. Tying the loose ends together and understanding the ROI at every stage is something many companies struggle with.
The attribution functionality in most marketing automation platforms does not cover it, as the journey continues in your CRM. The attribution using the budget/cost mechanism in Salesforce campaigns also doesn’t quite cut it. Leads are often part of multiple campaigns, so how do you determine what the crucial campaign was?
Is the original lead source of major importance? Or is the optimal journey defined by the steps? Do 10 website visits, 2 whitepaper downloads and 1 webinar attendance create the ideal formula?
Take this example: It is invaluable to finally see that 10K LinkedIn leads at $10 each produce 150 SQLs and result in 10 closed deals at $10K each. With attribution knowledge like this, you can improve the metrics, month to month and quarter to quarter.
3. DEEP 360° BUSINESS MONITORING
In the past, when you had hundreds of online campaigns running in Adwords (on top of your LinkedIn, Facebook and other channels), how did you keep track of crucial cost peaks or activity drops, and how would you find the source of those changes? Be honest, you would probably “wing it”. You would put more people in charge of more campaigns and hope that each person would be responsible and fast enough to catch outliers before they led to financial catastrophes.
Let’s leave that method in the past and move to a more accurate and reliable way of working. Using Anodot Business Monitoring, you can easily monitor every data detail and combination ever imagined.
What makes this so incredible? Well, first of all, you don’t have to define the rules. You don’t have to think about triggers or combined data clusters to capture everything that could possibly go wrong. Just connect the online data sources you have — Google Analytics, Salesforce, your Adwords account — and give the system time to chew on the historical data, “et voila”! The system formulates its baselines and will now go forth, learn and train itself on what is normal behavior. You will literally spend 5 minutes setting it up and waste zero time premeditating any move after that. Any deviation from the norm will result in an instant notification and the opportunity to investigate and remediate.
You'll believe it when you see it
