Success Story: 7shifts fires up demand gen with custom content analytics showing impact on revenue
As most B2B marketers are painfully aware, measuring content performance by pipeline and revenue generated is a serious challenge.
7shifts is no exception. The marketing team at 7shifts has been unable to accurately see the impact of their content beyond simple conversions; leaving the rest to guesswork.
This is because traditional analytics tools are unable to adequately track the long and sometimes complex B2B customer journey.
Which means that marketing teams are unable to tell whether their blog posts, videos, ebooks, infographics, etc. have actually contributed to revenue.
With Dreamdata, 7shifts has now overcome the challenge.
Key results 7shifts has achieved with Dreamdata so far:
Incorporating content impact on revenue into their reporting
Scaling demand generation content efforts based on data insights
Building custom content dashboards with Dreamdata’s open-access data warehouse
Want to see results for yourself?
“Dreamdata is flexible, user-friendly and most importantly backed by a team that’s a pleasure to work with.”
About 7shifts
7shifts is an all-in-one team management platform built for restaurants. The platform helps restaurant managers work more efficiently and improve performance; freeing up more time and energy to focus on growing their business.
With 7shifts, restaurant managers are able to reduce labour costs and end up spending 80% less time on management logistics when switching from paper or Excel.
7shifts, schedules pull employee availability and eliminate scheduling conflicts. Employees also automatically get a text and email with their upcoming shifts. It's simple to use, and everyone stays in the loop without any effort.
7shifts also offers a free mobile app so that managers and employees have all the tools at their fingertips.
The challenge: measuring the impact of content on leads and conversions.
The Marketing team at 7shifts is responsible for programs that drive high-quality leads into the funnel, efficiently and at scale.
To measure these programs across channels the team tracks a range of KPIs. But they lacked the crucial link between their efforts on the one hand and pipeline and revenue on the other. In essence, they could not attribute Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) to their content marketing.
Without this link, the 7shifts Marketing team was not able to assess what content channels were underperforming, in need of optimisation, or absolutely smashing it.
And with a growing content marketing footprint, headed by Vahag, the problem became even more accentuated.
Content is notoriously difficult to measure. Do visitors consuming your content go on to become opportunities and revenue months later? What content is most effective at which point in the funnel?
7shifts, like most B2Bs, only had traditional analytics tools available to understand whether or not a conversion (say a sign-up) has taken place after viewing content.
But these tools are limited to measuring this conversion when it happens in the same session as the content piece was engaged with.
This ignores what happens further down the pipeline, making it difficult to see how well content is performing.
“We wanted to build an attribution report that allows us to attach conversion and revenue information to content marketing efforts by tracking different types of interactions with content at different attribution time windows,” said Vahag.
What 7shifts needed was a tool that could track multi-touch, multi-session journeys and link this data to pipeline events and revenue further down the line.
The solution: tracking all interactions with content at different stages of the pipeline and building custom reporting.
“We also needed high customisation, and Dreamdata was the only tool we approached that had open access to the data.
It’s really incredible that we’ve been able to extract the data we wanted and are now building our own content reporting powered by Dreamdata’s data models.”
Dreamdata’s B2B revenue attribution platform offered 7shifts the solution they were looking for.
Dreamdata gathers, cleans, and models data from across the B2B go-to-market ecosystem. This enables Dreamdata to track every page view, of every session, by every user of every company, and link all this data to revenue.
Thanks to this, Dreamdata is able to overcome the content-to-revenue challenge 7shifts faced.
The platform also meets the flexibility and customisation needs of the 7shifts Marketing team.
Where, apart from incorporating high customisation of dashboards and reports in-app, Dreamdata makes data models freely accessible on BigQuery for customers to extract and query. Which means boundless customisation on customer and revenue data.
For 7shifts this has meant:
Accessing account-based multi-touch attribution by pipeline stage to identify all the digital touches that contributed to a conversion.
Being able to build a custom content attribution dashboard for their unique needs.
Levelling the playing field between paid and content marketing, to optimise demand gen.
The results: fired up demand gen activity and enhanced reporting based on newly built custom content dashboards.
The 7shifts Marketing team were not getting the insights they needed to measure content with the traditional analytics tools available.
Instead, they were left tracking proxy KPIs and estimating whether content actually contributed to pipeline and revenue.
“The chasm between content, pipeline, and revenue has finally been closed. Which means that thanks to Dreamdata we’ve now entered a new era of content development—and success!” highlighted Vahag.
So far this has enabled 7shifts to:
Incorporate content performance data into their reporting
For the first time, their paid and content activities are measured against the same benchmark: pipeline and revenue generation. As a result 7shifts is now incorporating content performance into their marketing reporting: giving management oversight of all activities.Build custom content dashboards with Dreamdata’s open-access data warehouse
7shifts works with both Dreamdata’s in-app dashboards and custom dashboards built on Dreamdata’s data models. This gives the Marketing team the flexibility they need to report and analyze their efforts according to their unique needs.
“Being able to build custom reporting empowers us to really tailor the analytics to our needs in the content team” said Vahag.
Scale demand generation content efforts based on data insights
Dreamdata operates at both the macro and granular levels. This allows 7shifts to not only identify which content pieces are in need of optimisation - by for example exposing the SEO potential of content pieces with low ranking and traffic but great ROI - but also how content activities compare to say Google paid campaigns.
“On the one hand we can see what ad campaigns are delivering the most value to the business. On the other, we are able to see how our different content marketing activities affect revenue.”
“This puts the Marketing team in a great position for scaling at both campaign level and at channel level” reported Vahag.
In concluding, Vahag outlined, “we’re still very much in the early stages of our Dreamdata journey, so I’m sure there’ll be a lot still to come. But just the fact that we’ve been able to connect content to pipeline and revenue is a huge step in the right direction.”
Why not start your multi-touch attribution journey today?
Try Dreamdata free today (or drop us a line!).
