As a marketing team, you spend tons of time and resources building marketing campaigns that drive people to your website. Your website is the perfect place for prospects to learn about what you do and, most importantly, let you know who they are. As one of your most valuable assets, capitalizing on website visitors is just as important as getting them there.
That’s where conversational marketing platforms, like Qualified, come into play.
Why use conversational marketing strategies?
Conversational marketing is becoming a common tool in many marketers’ belts because, well, it works a lot better than standard marketing forms at increasing website conversions and capturing leads from target accounts. (See more in our blog post: When ABM Meets Conversational Marketing).
As Qualified has said in their recent financing announcement, “Every year, B2B marketers spend more than $6 billion driving buyers to their website, but sales teams have no way of knowing when a qualified buyer has arrived, and no way of speaking with that buyer in that pivotal moment.”
When you’re spending that much money to get people to your website, two things come to mind:
- You need to have a top notch strategy to convert them and alert the right people on your team when a target account is on your site
- You need to be able to report on how your conversion tools are providing a return on investment
This post is focused on #2. Once you’re bringing in Leads and qualified accounts through a Conversational Marketing tool, how do you make sure you’re getting credit for those conversions and tying the work you did back to revenue?
If you really want to make your execs and sales leaders heart-eyed, connect the dots between what’s happening on the marketing side of the house and what’s influencing and closing deals. Here’s how.
Step 1: Campaign attribution
To understand who’s engaging with your Conversational Marketing platform, you need to be able to attribute engagement to marketing campaigns. With Qualified, you build your Conversational Marketing reports in Salesforce where your entire team can access and understand them.
The first step is to set up experiences in Qualified so that, when someone engages with your Conversational Marketing tool, they are attributed to the right Salsforce campaign with a designated member status.
Campaign Attribution shows how multiple Campaigns can have influence over a particular Lead/Contact. If you’re already tracking marketing activities like Email, Webinars, and Events, you can add Conversational Marketing as a Campaign “type” to track alongside your other Campaign Dashboards to measure Conversational Marketing impact.
Step 2: Configure Campaign Influence
If the Contacts you’re attributing to Campaigns in Step 1 are also tied to Opportunities through Contact Roles, then we’re in business. You can start reporting on how Conversational Marketing experiences are driving ROI for your business by enabling Campaign Influence in Salesforce.
Side note: If you’re missing Contact Roles on Opportunities, check our our app to help you automate who is linked to Opportunities upon their creation: Automated Opportunity Contact Roles
With Campaign Influence, the Contact links the Campaign to the Opportunity, allowing you to see which Campaigns are influencing Opportunities. Then based on the Opportunity value, you can see how much money marketing campaigns are contributing to your pipeline.
Now that your Leads and Contacts who have engaged with Qualified are being tied to the right Salesforce Campaign through Campaign Attribution, you can start reporting on that engagement in really cool ways. The next step is to understand how your Conversation Marketing tool is helping seal deals and bring in valuable Contacts that you didn’t have insight into before.
Example reports
Here are some of the reports you can build once you have Campaign Influence ready to go to show how Conversational Marketing Campaigns are influencing the bottom line. Just set up your Campaign Influence dashboard with a filter for Campaign Type. If you’re capturing Leads through your Conversational Marketing tool and attributing them to the right Campaigns in step 1, then, when those Leads convert to Contacts and are tied to Opportunities, they will pull into these reports as Campaign Influence records.
Report Type: Campaigns with Influenced Opportunities
Filter: Campaign Type = Conversational Marketing
- Total Influence Opportunities – Shows how many Opportunities have been influenced by Conversational Marketing
- Total Influenced Pipeline (First Touch, Last Touch, and Even Distribution Models) – Shows how much money in the pipeline has been influenced by Conversational Marketing. The different distribution models allow you to see whether Conversational Marketing was the campaign that brought them in (first touch), the campaign that sealed the deal (last touch), or influenced the Contact anywhere along their journey (even touch).
- Total Influenced Pipeline, filtered for Target Accounts – Shows how much money in the pipeline Conversational Marketing has influenced for Target Accounts only (this could be eye opening when you compare with other Campaign Types because tools like Qualified are especially adept at personalizing experiences for target accounts and getting them to convert when they’re hot.)
- Won Influence Revenue YTD – Shows how much revenue in the bank Conversational Marketing has contributed to
- Won Influenced Revenue, filtered for Target Accounts – Shows how much revenue in the bank Conversational Marketing has contributed to from Target Accounts only
Here’s an example of what your Campaign Influence Dashboard could look like for all Campaign Types. You could then set up a filter for Campaign Type = Conversational Marketing to see a honed-in view of how your Conversational Marketing campaigns are bringing in the dough.
Take the next step with conversational marketing
Conversational Marketing is a great way to make your website work for you and to keep the sales team busy with high-intent visitors. Once you have a consistent Conversational strategy in place, getting credit for your efforts is the next step, and Campaign Influence is the most direct way to show results around Opportunities and revenue.
Want to see how you can grow your sales pipeline with Qualified? Let us know how we can help, or feel free to give them a shout directly at https://www.qualified.com/ (mention you came from The Spot for Pardot and they’ll hook you up!)
Need help getting started with Campaign Influence? We’d love to learn more. Get in touch!
