Measuring MROI in a B2B World (3 of 4): Attribution is Required

This is part three of a four-part post that will explore the challenges of measuring marketing return on investment (MROI) in a high-ASP B2B business. 

As I stated on the first post of this series, MROI is a straightforward concept: measuring what the return is on your marketing investment. I have also identified six problems that make that concept much less than straightforward in real-life implementation. "Devilishly complex" was the phrase I used. However, it is not impossible to get reasonable MROI measurement to guide decision-making, if you have certain baseline capabilities in place. 

There are two key capabilities that enable MROI measurement: multitouch attribution (MTA) and pipeline attribution. Why? Because that attribution is the bridge that associates all of the touchpoints in a complex customer journey to resulting pipeline.

Photo by Adrien CÉSARD on Unsplash

[To get one thing out of the way, I'm only going to talk about pipeline attribution, rather than revenue attribution, because of the Delayed Return Problem. Focusing on pipeline, which is the estimated value of the sale when the opportunity is created, reduces the time gap between investment and return by the length of the opportunity-to-close cycle, commonly a couple of months in this type of business. This makes the resulting learnings more actionable.]

Multitouch Attribution

MTA has been a well-known concept in marketing for many years. However, it's frequently associated with attribution marketing touchpoints to the generation of a marketing qualified lead. (For example, here's a HubSpot article talking about it.) While that may be adequate for some businesses with simple sales engagement models, in the case of high ASP B2B, it doesn't solve for the Buying Team and Lead Irrelevance problems. (I guess I called the latter a sub-problem, didn't I?) What this more complex sales engagement model requires is a way to associate multiple marketing touchpoints to multiple leads.

One way to do so is to associate all marketing touchpoints with an opportunity, rather than a lead. In doing so, you retain all of the benefits of traditional multitouch attribution, like being able to compare performance of very different marketing channels, like email and in-person events, but in a way that acknowledges that you're engaging multiple individuals at an account.

Pipeline Attribution

Maybe this goes without saying, but if you have implemented the ability to associate touchpoints with opportunities, then you are now associating touchpoints with pipeline. It is then a straightforward exercise to attach costs to the marketing investments that generated those touchpoints. After that, you know what you have? MROI! 

Well, sort of. In my next post, I'll break down different views of MROI into a framework that can be applied for various forms of marketing decision-making.

Also, I don't want to gloss over the complexity and hard work that I just described in a few short paragraphs. At our company, it took us two years to build out this capability completely, and we're still fine-tuning it. The point is, if you do that hard work and solve the hundreds of small problems you'll encounter, you'll have an analytics foundation that can serve many purposes, not just MROI evaluation. Our attribution model is at the center of almost all marketing performance analysis that we do.