Tying lead gen to revenue completely transformed the way Mapp allocates their marketing budget
Allocating budget to the right channels at the right time is one of the most important challenges the modern marketer faces. It requires marketers to know customer journeys inside-out.
Knowing where prospects are buying, how are they moving down the funnel, what content are they consuming, and when, are all critical pieces of the puzzle.
Yet the B2B journey isn’t exactly easy to track and piece together.
The marketing team at Mapp were faced with the challenge of allocating budget as efficiently as possible.
They needed to bring all the data across their go-to-market tech stacks under one roof and identify exactly what efforts were behind their marketing-generated pipeline.
To meet this challenge they chose Dreamdata.
Here’s their story.
Key results Mapp achieved with Dreamdata:
Used revenue data to make marketing budget allocation more efficient across all levels
Improved lead and demand gen motions based on pipeline and sales data
Developed a content marketing strategy targeting individual audiences at specific funnel stages
About Mapp:
Mapp is the number one insight-led customer engagement platform with global offices in six different countries. They have won several prestigious awards internationally for product innovation, providing best-in-class martech solutions, and being an industry leader in cross-channel digital marketing.
With a powerful combination of data and AI-driven intelligence, they help consumer-facing brands run highly personalised, cross-channel marketing campaigns powered by real-time customer data and generated insights, all from a single platform.
The challenge: close the gap between lead generation and pipeline generation
Mapp’s marketing team is responsible for lead and demand generation and ultimately, generating new business for the company.
Like many B2Bs, they are faced with very long customer journeys and complex funnels, which make it a challenge to link their marketing activities to revenue.
Sami Sharaf, the senior digital marketing manager at Mapp, outlined the challenge:
“there was kind of a big gap in tracking digital touch points. That is, connecting people visiting the website and how they got there, with pipeline generation.”
In an attempt to close this gap, the Mapp team put together a solution which converted this single-touch tracking information from anonymous web traffic into forms in Hubspot. The output was a list with a limited number of engagements that prospects had had with their brand.
While this offered some clarity, they found themselves lacking depth and actionable insights.
For starters, the main source of marketing-generated pipeline was being shown as direct traffic. The touches happening before this were clearly missing.
You can read more about solving the Direct Traffic problem here.
Likewise, although they would generate many top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) leads and get content downloads from other channels, they couldn’t see whether this was generating sales pipeline.
Additionally, non-converting demand-gen type initiatives couldn’t be incorporated into their story of pipeline generation, as they couldn’t be included in this list.
Worst of all, in missing all this data, they were unable to pin down how long their journeys actually took from the very first touch to closed, i.e. time-to-revenue.
The result: all their tracking information ended up just sitting idly. Which offered no help in deciding where to direct the marketing budget!
What they needed was in-depth data on the full customer journey and a tool that could give them the insights to focus their efforts on the touchpoints that really mattered.
The solution: track all touchpoints on the customer journey to link marketing activities to revenue
With Dreamdata, they found a tool that gathers, cleans and models data from start to finish across the whole customer journey. Dreamdata can track every page view, of every session, by every user of every company. And link all this data to pipeline and revenue generated.
Thanks to this, Dreamdata would be able to track and measure the KPIs that would help the team at Mapp better allocate their budget and optimise their marketing motions.
This means that the team at Mapp can now:
Connect and un-silo their go-to-market tech stack and establish a single source of truth that enables them to analyse of every touchpoint on their customer journey.
Measure top-of-the-funnel, account-based conversions - no matter how long after the first session these happened.
Incorporate pipeline and revenue metrics into their marketing analytics and reporting, instead of looking solely at traffic and superficial lead generation metrics.
“We hadn’t before been able to get a holistic view of the full B2B customer journey and incorporate all of the different ways our accounts engage with us before progressing to paying customers. We now can.”
The results: a completely transformed budget process and a more efficient go-to-market setup
Without Dreamdata, Sami and the Marketing team at Mapp were unable to confidently allocate their budget as efficiently as possible.
Thanks to Dreamdata and the wealth of data the tool makes available, the team at Mapp has finally been able to start optimising and targeting their activities to nurture leads and shorten customer journey times.
Here are some of Mapp’s results so far:
Gained data-backed confidence to improve their marketing budget allocation across all levels
Dreamdata’s dashboards have enabled Sami and the team at Mapp to incorporate hard data into their budget allocation. Money now gets channelled into those efforts that are delivering the best results and not wasted on poor performers.
The team is able to see the amount of pipeline generated and ROI across channels, ad campaigns, and content, at different stages in the funnel. This data enables them to easily identify where exactly to double down on and invest.
Beyond the tactical application of budget, their performance reporting is also shared with management to evidence marketing attributed pipeline. This allows Sami and his team to not only prove which marketing efforts are leading to revenue but also forecast the impact greater investment in these areas could have.
You can read more about how to cut cost with Dreamdata here and how to nail your marketing budget here.
Improved lead and demand gen motions based on revenue data
Dreamdata’s performance reports have allowed Sami and his team to identify opportunities for optimising and improving their efforts. That is, identifying those campaigns and efforts which have the potential to perform better.
The Mapp team combines revenue data and the time to revenue metric to accurately and efficiently measure every detail of their marketing motions; from keyword right up to the channel as a whole.
So they now know how exactly how their TOFU and BOFU funnels look, how long they take and what efforts speak to which audience.
See how you can use Dreamdata to measure your Google Search Ads here.
A content marketing strategy targeting individual audiences at specific funnel stages
The team at Mapp has now made the data insights of Content Analytics a core component of their content marketing strategy.
Maybe we only need an infographic to get top-of-the-funnel leads through LinkedIn lead generation. And then maybe we only need to promote this webinar through using our existing audience to nurture them. Or maybe generate new leads through content syndication.”
While previously they would have produced an e-guide as an asset for lead generation and run that every time, which might have involved sending out an infographic or a blog post as part of the campaign and seeing which resulted in more pipeline.
Now, with the increased content data available to them, they can see when they only need to send an infographic or a webinar to existing audiences. Landing pages have likewise been customised to be most effective for each individual group.
