According to KPMG LLP’s recent “Making Martech Pay Off” report, only 11% of CMOs find their current marketing reporting to be very effective. One of the key struggles faced by marketers is showing the impact of their cross-channel marketing efforts on furthering the business’s sales goals, and the majority of CMOs aren’t able to get to a real ROI number. Marketers are working across multiple channels in the digital space, and these systems don’t always talk to each other, much less the sales and CRM platforms used by the business.
By combining the best-of-breed campaign management of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and an enterprise-level web analytics tool, marketing can tie data sources together using a common key that can then be used to tie to sales activities. Once marketers have the technical foundation in place, they can optimize their reporting metrics to show the efficacy of their marketing efforts and impact on sales. The benefits are improvements in sales’ acceptance of marketing qualified leads, personalized campaigns based on expanded visitor information, and end-to-end reporting as visitors progress through the sales funnel.
1. It is a challenge for marketing to show the impact of its efforts on sales activities.
While overall marketing budgets are dropping (Source: Gartner, “The State of Marketing Budgets 2021”), the department has traditionally received north of 10% of total revenue. Without being able to quantify the impact that marketing activities make on sales, it can be challenging for a CMO or marketing leader to prove ROI and keep arguing for those allocated dollars. More importantly, it’s difficult to know if those dollars have been spent efficiently.
There are countless activities that span the marketing spectrum—direct vs. channel, inbound vs. outbound, online vs. physical, upper funnel vs. lower funnel, internal vs. external— but savvy marketers invest in the channels that have the greatest impact. Without the tracking mechanisms in place to clearly prove the efficacy of each channel, it can be difficult to put together a complete picture of how marketing activities are truly impacting sales and driving business objectives.
2. This challenge generally comes from data gaps between marketing and sales.
In a perfect world, marketing would know everything about their customers—their likes and dislikes, habits, needs and wants, etc.—so we could better position our product/service and market to them more effectively. Today, marketers have come a long way in terms of being able to collect this sort of data, but the vast majority of it is not being used in a meaningful way. Why? Because the different data sources are not connected.
When marketers collect data that is tied to different marketing activities, a lot of those quantitative metrics are bunched together—# of site visits, # of calls made, # of articles produced, # of events hosted, etc. These are great metrics to track collectively but not so great in connecting the activity to a known person, building out a personalized journey for that individual, and optimizing a path to get that person to a sale. The key lies in building a bridge between the data collected from marketing activities to known user information and then using that combined data for sales activation.
3. Salesforce Marketing Cloud and web analytics tools provide a way to build Salesforce IDs into tracking parameters to tie these data sources together.
Luckily for marketers, there is a solution to connecting unknown user activity to users: tying Salesforce Marketing Cloud to web analytics. As a leading marketing automation system, Salesforce Marketing Cloud not only stores customer information in a useful and manageable way, but it tracks marketing activities and campaigns through Salesforce IDs originating in the CRM system. On its own, however, Salesforce Marketing Cloud does not have the capability to connect unknown users who are responding to marketing campaigns to known customers in a CRM database.
This is where a web analytics tool comes in. By integrating Salesforce Marketing Cloud and an external web analytics tool, marketers are able to build and cross reference Salesforce IDs into the existing analytics tool’s tracking parameters and see it reflected inside the web analytics reports.
4. While the individual systems on their own are not sufficient, KPMG has implemented an implementation solution to tie them together successfully at multiple clients.
With the retirement of Marketing Cloud Web & Mobile Analytics, there is no longer an in-system way to track anonymous user activity, but web analytics tools do it by default. Without a strategy to tie the anonymous activity to known user accounts, it isn’t possible to track usage comprehensively as visitors move down the sales funnel.
Here are a few ways KPMG has helped businesses close the gap:
- Designed a website strategy to migrate hosting capabilities to Marketing Cloud’s CloudPages, integrated those CloudPages with an external web analytics tool, and took advantage of templated page designs to simplify enhancements
- Integrated Datorama and web analytics data with Marketing Cloud to equip marketers with advanced analytics and reporting to enable the decisive, data-driven strategy
- Connected Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud to empower a cross-system approach to campaign strategy and lead generation, resulting in more effective and personalized tactic execution using advanced segmentation, one-to-one journeys, and templated materials
5) Once the data is tied together, improved analytics capabilities enable a number of KPIs that would not have been possible otherwise.
Web analytics tools generally have the ability to set up custom dimensions or attributes, and this allows the Salesforce ID to be applied a filter to their reports. This means that the aggregate reports can be filtered by Salesforce ID to see specific activities by specific users. That opens up a variety of more granular KPIs – think beyond just “average time spent on site” to “average time spent on site by target clients” – that will be explored further in a later post.
As a marketer, your time is already spread thin managing marketing dollars and campaigns across channels, platforms, analytics tools, and teams. By integrating your multi-channel customer campaigns within Marketing Cloud with the power of web analytics, you can enrich your marketing messaging, better target and allocate your marketing budget, and save yourself some additional time and energy.
To find out more about how KPMG can help you with your data challenges, contact Ryan Doubet. We’d love to have a conversation with you about your data challenges and where we could help.
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