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How to Attribute Content to Revenue
63 Plays2 years ago
Do you struggle to demonstrate your content's effectiveness? Are you trying to attribute revenue to your content efforts? Our guest, Steffen Hedebrandt, CMO of Dreamdata, is the expert you need to connect with.
In this episode, Steffen joins us to discuss:
Steffen is a subject matter expert in connecting marketing activities with revenue. He has an exceptional growth mindset, is data-driven by heart and loves all parts of scaling the commercial side of a business.
A notorious growth hacker with a successful track record of scaling businesses and building teams at Upwork and Airtame, Steffen knows the pain points of rapidly scaling marketing and growth firsthand.
Want to connect with Steffen?
Find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/steffenhedebrandt/.
Connect with us on social media:The B2B Mix Show — Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, FacebookStacy Jackson — Twitter, LinkedInAlanna Jackson — Twitter, LinkedIn
In this episode, Steffen joins us to discuss:
- the importance of building a revenue-focused content marketing plan
- why you should view the impact of content touches throughout buyer journey stages (rather than "last" or "first" touch only
- how this approach can help guide and justify time, resources, and spend on content marketing
About Steffen Hedebrandt
Steffen Hedebrandt, Chief Marketing Officer at Dreamdata a Revenue Attribution Platform that collects, joins and cleans all data to give an insightful value to your business.Steffen is a subject matter expert in connecting marketing activities with revenue. He has an exceptional growth mindset, is data-driven by heart and loves all parts of scaling the commercial side of a business.
A notorious growth hacker with a successful track record of scaling businesses and building teams at Upwork and Airtame, Steffen knows the pain points of rapidly scaling marketing and growth firsthand.
Want to connect with Steffen?
Find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/steffenhedebrandt/.
About The B2B Mix
The B2B Mix Show with Alanna Jackson and Stacy Jackson is brought to you by The B2B Mix agency. Need help with your B2B online presence? Let's talk!Connect with us on social media:The B2B Mix Show — Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, FacebookStacy Jackson — Twitter, LinkedInAlanna Jackson — Twitter, LinkedIn
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Transcript
Introduction to B2B Mix Show
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the B2B Mix Show with Elena and Stacey. In each episode, we'll bring you ideas that you can implement in your sales and marketing strategy. We'll share what we know, along with advice from industry experts who will join us on the show. Are you ready to mix it up? Let's get started.
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello, Elena. Hello, Stacy. How are you today, my friend? I'm just dandy and you? Great. I'm hot. We're in Florida, so it's hot. Yeah, it's hot. My face seems like it's red, even though we're in air conditioning. So it is hot.
00:00:39
Speaker
But you know what else is hot? This topic. And I don't mean the store. Why don't you tell our listeners what this topic is, lady?
Attributing Content to Revenue
00:00:49
Speaker
So today we're going to be talking about how to attribute your content to revenue, which is something that everybody's always trying to do, right? Especially marketers. You want to prove that the hard work that you're doing is
00:01:03
Speaker
you know, resulting in some good leads and some sales. Today's guest has tips to help marketers who want to learn more about how their content is contributing to revenue and sales. Lina, would you like to introduce our panelists today? Stefan Hederbrandt is the chief
00:01:25
Speaker
marketing officer at Dream Data and that is a revenue attribution platform and it collects, joins, and cleans all data to give you an insightful value to your business. And Stefan is a subject matter expert in connecting marketing activities with revenue, which is
00:01:42
Speaker
what we're going to be talking about today. And he has an exceptional growth mindset. He's data driven by heart and loves all the parts of scaling the commercial side of business. And he is a notorious growth hacker with a successful track record of scaling businesses and building teams at Upwork and Airtame. Stefan knows the pain points of rapidly scaling marketing and growth firsthand. So we are excited to have him on today to talk about how to attribute your content to revenue.
00:02:10
Speaker
Thank you so much for joining us today on our podcast.
Understanding Dream Data
00:02:14
Speaker
Before we get started, could you tell us a little bit more about Dreamdata and what your company does?
00:02:19
Speaker
Yes, happy to Stacey and thanks for letting me join your show. So, Dreamder is basically a B2B go-to-market data platform. And what that means is that we're kind of a data warehouse where you can connect all the tools you use in going to market, speaking to your customers, etc., and put that into our pocket. And then our algorithms clean up all this data.
00:02:49
Speaker
and leave you with a holistic account-based data model, which is a fine word for saying it's a timeline of every single touch that you have with an account, all the way from the first touch until you see that you win the deal. And then what takes place is that we extract all the data from the serum system, from the marketing automation system, etc.
00:03:19
Speaker
let's say Stacey exists in four or five different systems, then we deduplicate that and then make sure that the system can see it's just one Stacey, but she's just appearing during different stuff in different tools. Does it act alone? I'm sorry, does it act alone or does it work with HubSpot and Salesforce and things like that?
00:03:41
Speaker
Yes. I don't know how technical your listeners are, but I think the technical term would be that we are a first party data processor. So that means that we work with the data that the company can give us. So that's typically their CRM hotspot.
00:04:01
Speaker
some kind of marketing automation tool, their ad platforms, the traffic on their website, and so forth. So they give us all the data that they have collected themselves, and then we just process for them and build this account-based timeline of every account. So it kind of cleans the data, like you said. Yeah, exactly. So what you're getting is good data. It's not crap. No worries. It's like a better word. Yeah, we can just touch why it's kind of in it, why this is nice. So
B2B Buying Journey Complexity
00:04:31
Speaker
B2B companies you guys notice they typically they buy more as a team than as an individual and that means that you know three or five people are involved in in the buyers journey the journey might take you six months and have 30 sessions or something like that and in this scenario where let's just say there's three people involved in a deal that quite typically you'll see that
00:04:57
Speaker
the marketing activity starts the journey, but then that journey might end with that person and then another person kind of takes the torch and carries it on and then those two people have a boss that signs the contract. It's fine that you sell something, but it's a problem that you can actually not join that timeline because then the money you spent starting the journey is not connected to the revenue that you produce from winning the deal.
00:05:26
Speaker
So that makes it very hard to decide which activities you should do more often, which activities you should do less of. Right. Which really leads us into what we're talking about today, how content impacts revenue and how you can attribute those two things together. So everyone wants to know if the content that they're making is worth it, if it's doing anything, if it
00:05:52
Speaker
if it's impacting sales in your bottom line. But before we get into all that, maybe we need to take a step back and talk about how your content strategy. So what do marketers need to know about developing that revenue-focused content strategy for B2B?
00:06:12
Speaker
Good question. I'll tell you how we think about it. Our company is just about three to four years old now. The first few years we have initially let the content production be guided by the sales team very much because the questions that those guys hear repeatedly
00:06:38
Speaker
are stuff that we should definitely address with content. Because salespeople, they do the one-on-one communication. And that's the good thing about marketing is that you can then take a one-to-many approach. So if the one-to-one consistently asks similar things, then you can go out and produce a really well-written answer to a tough question. So the salesperson doesn't have to
00:07:07
Speaker
in-depth be able to answer really, for example, really technical stuff or, you know, a marketing topic that they're not a master of, that we can deal with in marketing. So the first long period, we just let the sales people tell us what are people asking. Don't try to kind of invent the wheel, but let's just listen to what we're being asked.
00:07:29
Speaker
This is really how I see companies should think about their website. It should be like a library to any given question that you might ask about your company. Because I think nowadays people don't want to speak to salespeople before. They've almost made the decision about buying. So you need to think about making sure that your website exhausts all questions you might have related to your product.
00:07:59
Speaker
So that was a warm up to the answer. Which is true though, because a lot of times when the sales and marketing teams aren't speaking, you're missing out on those wonderful opportunities that the sales team is getting. They're getting all these questions and maybe your content isn't even answering that question. So maybe you're too focused on hitting a keyword for SEO or something like that.
Content Strategy for Engagement
00:08:25
Speaker
So that's a really good point.
00:08:27
Speaker
Then mistakes I've made myself in the past has really been to, you know, I don't know how familiar we are with like search engines, but you can, there's the search engine tool tools where you can look up how much traffic is there on a particular keyword. And early in my career, I was very focused on finding a somewhat relevant keyword, but that had a large volume. And then I tried to get that traffic into the website.
00:08:52
Speaker
But, you know, it turns out that it's much better to focus your attention on the high-intent searches. Right. Like, for an example, could be the B2B attribution software. Somebody wrote that, then we would love to have them on our website. If somebody just searched for attribution, the intention behind that search would be very weak. So, definitely not. Nowadays, I wouldn't spend time on doing so. But I think this, we can kind of
00:09:22
Speaker
There's one million opinions about content, but I think we can split if you split the discipline up into two buckets. So there's one you do for the search engines where you try to rank on certain searches in the search engines and pull people to your website. The other type of content is like another way of analyzing it is to look at what are the pages on your website that people look at as they're going through a buying process.
00:09:51
Speaker
And this is some of what we can do with Dreamdead as well. So we have a tracking script and this tracking script records every single session by every user and every URL that this user watches.
00:10:06
Speaker
And that we have aggregated across the whole account. And if you aggregate that up to when all the deals you've won, you'll start to see certain URLs are present when people become closed one in your Serum system. So what, for example, we have found out, which is, there's three or four URLs that I can anecdote here, but one, the integrations page, people always look at before they, if they buy.
00:10:34
Speaker
We also have a community page which is basically just a link to our Slack channel that's also present. Our about page, which we never ever spend any significant time on, is also viewed quite often before people buy. So there's these pages you check when you want to be sure you can trust the company that will never ever pull you any traffic from the search engine.
00:11:04
Speaker
to be trustworthy and nice when a customer is considering whether they should buy your product. And then the last funny one was that we could see that our 404 page, the error page, if people manage to find this on our website that actually also typically correlates with them being close to actually buying
00:11:29
Speaker
Yeah. I think it's an expression that they're really going deep around the website every single bit. And then if they can find something, then if that is present, then they might be actually interested in buying. That's funny. I guess that does make a sort of sense though. Yeah. We were quite surprised. So do you have a trigger warning when someone hits that four or four page? You're like, okay, let's get ready. It's coming.
00:11:57
Speaker
Exactly. If we were to build a lead scoring model, that would probably have to be present. Does this kind of thinking make sense, guys? Yes, absolutely. I know a lot of people think in terms of ABM these days, but it sounds like even if you don't have an ABM formal model that you should consider some of the things that people who have a formal ABM plan are like,
00:12:22
Speaker
defining your ICPs, your ideal customer profiles, and thinking about intent. Are there any other things that people should maybe adopt that be a mindset as far as their strategy for content goes? Good question. Obviously, you will have to define what we mean by ABM as well. But if we think about it as we're selling to an account, a company,
00:12:50
Speaker
Then I think I would start looking at for our product, who's typically part of the decision making process. For example, when we sell a dream that there's typically three to four people involved in the deal. And you need to kind of make sure that you have actually, you've just not made content for just one of these people. So if there's a CFO, a
00:13:17
Speaker
a security officer, a marketer and a salesperson involved, then you need answers to all four of these people and not just the marketer or the salesperson. Yeah, definitely. I think that's a good point because too often when you think about just that one
00:13:34
Speaker
decision-maker and not all the influencers that we need to be creating content. Yeah, exactly. Maybe the influencers are not the ones that are starting the journey, so you should only spend 20% of your time on these because you want to be pulling in traffic from the social media and the search engines towards which, let's say it's the marketers and the salespeople.
00:13:58
Speaker
But they still need some URLs that they can send internally to their team because
00:14:05
Speaker
when it's popular to talk about when you find your champion for buying your product, this champion still needs to go to market inside the company to make sure I get the budget, I get the approval of the security part, et cetera. And if you don't have that supporting content... Yeah, because there's a whole lot of people involved in that whole decision. It's not like... Exactly.
00:14:30
Speaker
Obviously, you might be dealing, some might be dealing with micro businesses where it's kind of the guy or girl that starts the journey is also the guy that has to do the security check and consign the contract and then it's a little bit different flavor.
00:14:45
Speaker
Well, once you've established your strategy for B2B marketing and the content revenue focus, what's the next step that marketers need to do in attributing content revenue?
Digital Traceability in Marketing
00:15:00
Speaker
What are the needs to think about in terms of their data and systems? What are some pointers for them? Yeah. So where to start? So I think one thing is that you
00:15:12
Speaker
If you want to do these kinds of analysis, first of all, you need to wire your organization to
00:15:23
Speaker
digital traces. Because if there's no sign of what was the activity that took place, then you can't. And what I'm trying to say here is that you have to go through all your go-to-market teams activities. So if you do your customer success work from a Gmail inbox,
00:15:45
Speaker
It probably doesn't leave a lot of traces about who did what. If your sales team is just picking up their own phone and calling the customers.
00:15:54
Speaker
then that doesn't leave a lot of traces of what actually took place. So they could, for example, be using our calling software instead. The same with the activity on your website. If you haven't installed any kind of tracking script on the website, you're not actually able to understand, like, I spent this money or we did these activities and now people came to our website and booked demos or something like that.
00:16:19
Speaker
So step one is definitely going through and kind of think about the customer journey, whether we meet our customers and speak to them and make sure that we have actually set it up in a way that generates data. Because if we don't have that, then we can start to extract knowledge out of it. Otherwise, you're just kind of making it up. You don't have anything to go on, no solid evidence of anything.
00:16:46
Speaker
And then you could then go on to talk about the best thing you can do is
00:16:54
Speaker
connect your content to revenue. But that's typically a harder discipline in B2B because we're talking about these longer journeys with more stakeholders, et cetera, involved. So you might want to think about what could be a good proxy metric, a good proxy conversion for revenue. That could be your we know that one out of 100 who signs up to the newsletter ends up buying
00:17:21
Speaker
So you could be tracking how many emails does our content generate. Maybe a step further towards the money could be a demo call, which you might want to be tracking. Here it's maybe one out of 50 who ends up buying. And then could you even take it longer to a demo call? And then a second meeting started by a certain piece of content.
00:17:45
Speaker
So that's kind of one way to go about it. The way we do it in Dreamdata is that we have a fairly advanced platform. So you get a tracking script from us. This tracking script stores
00:17:59
Speaker
every URL that every user looked at. And then we joined that together with the CRM system, where we can see what are the accounts. And if we sold to them, we can also get the money component and then say, okay, this account started the journey from this URL and ended up buying. And that's maybe one of the
00:18:24
Speaker
B2C, if it's a web shop, somebody comes to the website and they buy, then it's pretty easy to see. Shopify, they landed on this page, but in B2B, it's kind of a... It's a lot longer process. It's a mess. It's very common.
00:18:43
Speaker
And a lot of times, you know, the whole process of they'll see something on social, maybe they saw it and then they come back later. So it's, there's a lot of different pieces to it, which that can happen in B2C too, but probably not as often as because in B2C you're going to say, oh yeah, I want that and go ahead. But it's a longer process and thought process in B2B.
00:19:09
Speaker
Yeah, we actually put out some benchmarks earlier this year where we could see for a problem, we analyzed around 500 accounts and their average journey had 32 sessions recorded before a deal happened.
00:19:25
Speaker
So this is like recorded session. But on top of this, you also have all the views on LinkedIn and Facebook, etc., where they might not have clicked through to your website. So B2B is just, as you say, it's super much a multi-touch game where you get 32 is a lot. And that's the average. So some is higher, some is lower. But to me, it just means that you need to be super productive.
00:19:51
Speaker
You need to put out a lot of good content all the time in order to just keep moving them these small steps forward. I know that one of the things that was mentioned is putting your metrics into two different models, like an attribution model and revenue model. Can you kind of talk through that?
00:20:15
Speaker
If we go back to what I said initially about getting every touch of an account into a timeline.
00:20:23
Speaker
Then we have something we call, it's basically a stage model. So you can say from first touch to MQL, that could be one stage. From first touch to SQL, that could be another stage. And from first touch to one could be a third stage. So depending on which stage you say, I want to understand and analyze, after that you then apply an attribution model. So it could be from first touch to becoming a marketing qualified lead.
00:20:55
Speaker
I'm trying to explain and not make it too complex, but let's say the full journey is 10 touches. Then from first touch to MQL might only be three touches. So if you apply a last touch model to this, that means that the last touch will be the last touch before they became an MQL and not the last touch before they bought.
00:21:19
Speaker
Does that make sense? Yeah. So the stage model basically says, at which stage of the journey are we analyzing? And then you have a certain amount of sessions there. And then the attribution model applies only to the selected time period. You can say the reason why this is nice to do is because if the average B2B journey is six months, we can't just, as marketers, do an activity and then sit back and wait for six months to see whether it worked or not.
00:21:49
Speaker
Right. Because then you don't know what you need to be working on next. You want to have something that is like where you can easily connect this with the actions I did and now we've reached MQL stage. We might only take 14 days to get there. And then you can look back and say, okay, did it work? Did it not work? What can we do more of?
00:22:13
Speaker
So we've hinted at what several of the benefits are if we take this revenue focus content approach, but maybe we can just really dig into those, obviously help you justify where you spend your time and money, but maybe you can give us some more in-depth meat around that topic.
Optimizing Revenue-Driving Content
00:22:32
Speaker
So I can just anecdote and one of my own experiences at my last company,
00:22:39
Speaker
We had been very heavily driven by paid ads initially. And then from one year to the next, I decided now it's the time to, you know, ramp up our content production as well. So I went out and hired a videographer, a designer, a writer, and a manager for that team. So then suddenly I had a head count of four people just doing content.
00:23:05
Speaker
Fig started out nicely that you could see in Google Analytics that more people would be arriving from organic search in Google to our website. That's fine. That's at least a sign that something is happening. But inside of Google Analytics, as a B2B company, you don't get to see any kind of revenue component. There's no kind of money in there as a B2B company because the money sits in the CRM system.
00:23:35
Speaker
And then when the CEO comes asking to me whether like, Stefan, was this a good idea that we hired these four people to produce content, then I, you know, back then I would be stuck with answering, you know, we get more organic traffic. Well, okay. I can't pay an salary with more organic. Did it, did it produce any revenue?
00:23:58
Speaker
Exactly. So the problem is that the content typically would start journeys or be in the earlier part of the journey, which then would be taken on by the salespeople afterwards. And then I couldn't connect the dots from the activity of the content with the revenue. And then that makes it a massive problem to defend headcount. So that's why you need to establish
00:24:23
Speaker
And I think this is the market's responsibility to educate the people you work together with. Why are we doing these things? Why is it valuable? Okay, we cannot prove that we directly generate money, but maybe I can prove that we generate demo calls and we win one out of five demo calls, so it makes sense for us to continue with producing this content.
00:24:48
Speaker
Yes, I think that's definitely something that most marketers want to know. And it also helps you defend what you're doing to the sales team who says, you're not bringing in any leads. Well, yeah, we did influence these. Or it also teaches you a lesson if you're not helping. And then all journeys are not equal. So maybe you have certain pieces of content that consistently sets up nice leads for the salespeople, whereas like
00:25:15
Speaker
So you just produce funny cat videos. You might be able to generate a lot of emails from that because the cats are cute, but it's probably not going to be your next customer coming out of that type of content. Yeah, exactly. So can you share some use cases of how Dream Data's content analytics product and how you can make the most of your content data with it?
00:25:41
Speaker
Yes. If we go back to what I said earlier, we can help show which pieces of content generate sales pipeline and what pieces of content generate deals. Quite typically, it's not necessarily the pieces of content that has the highest search volumes that actually do this.
00:26:04
Speaker
which then if you end up spending your resources on just generating traffic to your website that never ever becomes sales pipeline and revenue, then like roughly speaking, then you're just wasting your company's time and money because we should be doing our marketing activities to produce revenue. Then now that you know which pieces of content generates the sales
00:26:29
Speaker
pipeline and revenue, then you can think about which content should I be producing more of in the future. But it could also be that you find out that this piece of content actually doesn't rank too well in Google, though it has produced revenue. So let's try and do some of that stuff that can move some content up in the search engines, like link building, making the website faster, etc. I have a quick question.
00:26:58
Speaker
Do you know, based on the research that you've done, I think you said you looked at 500 companies, do you know if any of that shows the type of content that maybe people
00:27:15
Speaker
makes turns someone into a customer. Does it like, or is it typically blogs? Is it an ebook or, um, a webinar podcast? Did you, did you come across any of that in the data that you researched or did you not go to that, that kind of angle?
00:27:34
Speaker
That's actually a really good topic for a new benchmark study. This one we did recently was about the customer journey. We just also put out some
00:27:52
Speaker
some benchmarks and for example, CPM prices for ads right now, which is just completely falling through the floor at the moment. So it would actually be fun to look at like across all the accounts, which types of content is better? Like is it the webinar, is it the ebook, et cetera. We haven't done that, but like one method that I consistently see working
00:28:18
Speaker
And this is just for your listeners that the alternative articles to established brands in your industry always seems to be working quite well.
00:28:32
Speaker
Let's say you're in the customer success software industry, then I know for Zendesk has done a lot to defend against this, but then you would take brand name Zendesk and then write an alternative to that because then people who are searching for an established brand, but an alternative to it, they understand what they're looking for, but they're probably looking for something cheaper, a little bit different.
00:29:01
Speaker
Yeah. So think about, as a listener, who are kind of the established brands in our industry. And then you can produce an article that can kind of be a ticket in the lottery for people searching for alternatives. And like comparisons. Yeah, exactly, comparisons. But one thing, at least in Danish law, and I think in a lot of commercial law, it needs to be
00:29:31
Speaker
something that is objectively true, what you put there. Otherwise you can maybe risk receiving. I have received letters from lawyers. Yeah, have integrity about how you're doing it and don't just bash them and talk horrible about them. But, you know, just put the facts out there and just talk about your style. Just writing stuff that is kind of objectively true comparisons. And you also at the end of the day,
00:30:00
Speaker
You don't want to talk somebody into buying your product who's not going to be a happy customer. You know what's funny on that topic, I think it was SurveyMonkey, but they use that for their own benefit. They bid on alternative to SurveyMonkey and their ad was there is no alternative to SurveyMonkey. So you could even use it to your own advantage.
00:30:26
Speaker
I don't know if it exists anymore, but Zendesk invented a rock band called Zendesk Alternative. Oh, really? And they put up a music video and stuff like that too. Oh, that's also funny. That was super funny. I'll have to see. Look, see if I can find that. So before we kind of wrap things up, are there any tips or details that you'd like to share with our listeners? So regarding this content, I would say that the most important thing is
00:30:54
Speaker
for me would be to produce high quality stuff and think about going for the intention rather than the volume because at the end of the day we're trying to, at least I am trying to get new customers from producing content. And I think also the reason why I'm saying high quality is that every interaction with your brand and company forms the opinion.
00:31:22
Speaker
If you put out like low quality stuff, people might read it and then think, this is probably not like a trustworthy brand, or they might tell their friends that I read this crappy article here. So be aware to produce a content of a certain quality, because it represents your company out there.
Stefan's Personal Insights and Connection
00:31:41
Speaker
All right. Well, we usually ask one just for fun question before we let our guests go. So if you weren't chief marketing officer at Dream Data, what would your dream job be? I can tell you what I wanted to be as a child. And I wanted to be like a football commentator. Oh yeah. Because then I knew I could go travel around the world to watch all the games in the American. Yeah.
00:32:08
Speaker
And I remember like I thought that would be a good job if I could go to the games and watch the games. So maybe you should create some content for dream data, a video or something where you're doing the commentating it like a football game.
00:32:25
Speaker
I don't know if I'm good at it that much, but I would love to see the games. Well, if people want to connect with you, how should they do that? It's linked in where I'm by far the most active, so people can just connect and ask any question if they have any after listening to this.
00:32:43
Speaker
Perfect. So you should go and connect with Stefan on LinkedIn. And if you want to connect with me or Stacey, you can find us on Twitter. Stacey is Stacey underscore J-A-X. That's S-A-S, I can't even spell her name, S-T-A-C-Y underscore J-A-X. And I am Elena underscore Jax, A-L-A-N-N-A underscore J-A-X. And you can also find us on LinkedIn, Elena Jackson or Stacey Jackson. See you next time.
00:33:09
Speaker
The B2B Mix show is hosted by Stacey Jackson and Elena Jackson of, you guessed it, the B2B Mix Agency. If you need help with your B2B inbound marketing efforts, visit us at theb2bmix.com.