For B2B marketers, a common challenge is understanding which marketing programs contributed most to overall revenue.
Although marketers may have insights into overall campaign performance, the combination of a variety of channel programs and high volume of historical data makes taking predictive actions, as opposed to reactive ones, a little more complex.
NetProspex, a provider of marketing data-management solutions, uses marketing automation platform Silverpop for its tight integration to CRM platform Salesforce.com and to build “a buyer-persona marketing strategy mixed with a content-marketing strategy, [which] Silverpop helps us achieve,” said Lauren Brubaker, demand generation manager for NetProspex.
Although NetProspex has used Silverpop for marketing-automation purposes for well over a year, it has recently started using Revenue Analytics, an out-of-the-box application that measures marketing campaign activity against CRM sales data to determine closed revenues within the Silverpop Engage email and marketing-automation platform.
“The biggest value for us right now is the cohort report, which lets you track [revenue performance] based on campaigns and track based on lead source, so you can see how long it takes over time for revenue to start coming in and [associate it] with campaigns,” Brubaker said.
For instance, Silverpop Revenue Analytics helped Brubaker dig into all of her trade conference campaigns during the busy October and November show season. Because Silverpop Engage is hooked up to a CRM database, it allows the marketer to match marketing performance to sales outcomes.
“I used [Revenue Analytics] to see how long it took for money to start coming in and for deals to close,” Brubaker said. “I realized that sales cycle is about six weeks longer than what we were originally anticipating and my trade show nurture programs were not long enough. Immediately, I went and redid all of those programs to make them longer and hopefully match the sales cycle that was showing up in the cohort report.” This will combat missed revenue opportunities during trade show season, she said.
Brubaker also foresees using Silverpop Revenue Analytics for planning purposes. By determining which campaigns worked from a return standpoint, NetProspex will apply those findings to their content-marketing strategy and planning calendar for 2014.
Revenue Analytics is one of three applications developed by Silverpop. Visitor Insights and Email Insights allow marketers to see how content is rendering on mobile devices or across Web properties; using Silverpop Engage, a marketer could take email and pay-per-click campaigns and run revenue analysis against the lead or referral source, such as Google display or social media advertising.
Although the focus now for Revenue Analytics is on the B2B marketer, Silverpop in Q4 will launch a similar offering for B2C marketers to link data uncovered by its platform with third-party ecommerce or loyalty and coupon systems.
Marketers “can typically see the first time someone interacts with their brand or submits a form or perhaps through lead source attribution, but if they want to understand the whole customer journey, it becomes, ‘How can I understand all the different marketing touch points?’ and ‘Are those touch points positively or negatively contributing toward driving sales revenue?’” said Adam Steinberg, director of emerging apps at Silverpop, a member of the PlacePunch founding team, a location-based mobile marketing platform Silverpop acquired in 2011.
As far as the major difference between a B2B and B2C Silverpop Revenue Analytics use case, B2B might focus on funnel and sales pipeline, whereas the B2C marketer might zero in on customer loyalty or overall customer lifetime value, Steinberg said.
