The term “analytics” has a broad range of meaning for marketers. Yes, there are analytics that require multiple PhDs and a “big data” infrastructure. You can do some really cool stuff with that. But not all analytics are rocket science. Believe it or not, analytics can be useful and approachable.

B2B marketers are beginning to analyze the performance of their marketing tactics over time, across segments, personas, geographies and product categories in order to determine tactic effectiveness. The most straightforward approach to this is marketing touch analysis, which tracks the interactions of individuals with marketing tactics on a plotted graph.

The result is a pattern of interactions that can help marketers visualize who is interacting with marketing tactics, and when they have done it. If you know their roles, you can see how different buying roles interact with marketing tactics (e.g. webinar, downloaded white paper) during the buyer’s journey. This is an excellent use of persona information and can give you insight into which tactics are stimulating interaction with the buyer personas you manage.

If the group of people is limited to those who participated in a specific purchase, then you get a picture of all the interactions by those who participated across the sales cycle, including concentrations of activity at particular stages of the deal.

This information is useful in several ways:

  • It gives visual insight into the activities of your prospects along a deal timeline and validates which tactics are working.
  • It helps determine whether marketing is having an influence on deals. Often marketers are recognized only for marketing sourced leads; if you can demonstrate the interaction of buyers with marketing tactics over time, it may be easier to discuss marketing’s impact on a deal.
  • By mapping interactions to closed deals, you can begin to eliminate marketing tactics that you can’t link to closed deals. For example, if you attend a trade show and no closed deals can be tracked to participation in that event, ask yourself if it was worthwhile. After analyzing tactic cost and interaction levels, you may find it easier to reach some conclusions about where your precious program dollars may be better spent.

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    In my next post, I will dig a little deeper into some other ways to extract insight from your data.