B2B marketing awareness activities can sometimes get left in the dust. For so long, it has been difficult to prove the ROI of brand awareness efforts. That’s where marketing attribution modeling can pay off big time.

From social media to events, blogs, or even ads, marketers have had to create new KPIs to track these kinds of activities solely because they couldn’t track the effect they might have on revenue.

But, we’re entering an era where marketers need to be more budget-conscious than ever. This means that awareness activities can no longer just be valuable because they meet impression goals; they need to be attributed to revenue.

Put on your revenue-marketing hat because today we’re diving into marketing attribution modeling for brand awareness.

The Value of Brand Awareness 

Since it has been difficult to attribute awareness to revenue, it begs the question: Do we even need awareness activities?

You may be killing it with lower-funnel activity and thinking about ditching awareness efforts altogether. But let’s take a moment to think about how your user got there. Research shows that brand awareness has been proven to increase revenue by 33%. Also 95% of customers are willing to pay more for a brand they trust.

The thing is, we live in a world where consumers have access to so much information about your brand. In fact, Gartner reported that the average B2B customer is part of a buying group with 6-10 decision-makers, each carrying 4-5 pieces of independent content about the brand.

Let’s do some simple math here. That’s 10 people who have all done their research about your business and have gathered around 50 pieces of content about your brand without ever contacting you.

We are at a point where B2B customers are making purchases without ever engaging with your sales team. So now, more than ever, your top-of-funnel activity needs to be perfect.

Differences in Brand Awareness Channels for B2B and B2C

So, we’re all on the same page: brand awareness is valuable. Now, the question is, what actually qualifies as brand awareness for a B2B brand? This is where things can get a little tricky.

Brand awareness is the degree to which your target audience is familiar with and recognizes your brand. When you have a B2C brand, it’s easy to see how the popularity of your brand can affect sales. For example, maybe your company is doing great on TikTok, and customers use the link in your bio to make a purchase. From the start of their journey to the moment they purchase, you can see how social media (your awareness activity) is affecting sales.

But it’s a different experience for a B2B customer because of the long sales cycle and the number of people involved in making purchasing decisions. It’s not as linear as what you would see with a B2C company.

In addition to that, the awareness channels can be significantly different when it comes to B2C and B2B. For consumer brands, you’ll find a lot of awareness can start with commercials and social media. Where brands focused on businesses will utilize targeted ads, industry events, or strategically placed billboards to ensure that the right decision-makers are seeing their company name. 

Overall, because of a variety of factors the B2B customer journey from acquisition to close – is more of a maze rather than a linear experience.  

Revenue Over Impressions

On average, it takes B2B companies 83 days to close a deal, making it difficult to track the impact of awareness activities on a campaign. That’s a little over six months from the moment the target audience recognizes your brand to the day the deal is closed. By that time, it can feel almost impossible to know where your new customer discovered your brand.

Because of this, marketers historically used a different set of KPIs to measure the success of their awareness efforts. Metrics like impressions, engagement, website traffic, search volume, earned media, and external links were used to measure the effectiveness of these activities. However, the problem with this approach is that it doesn’t show the overall contribution of these activities to revenue.

For example, let’s say you created social media posts as part of your campaign, and they are going viral, generating over a million impressions. Great, you’re killing it in your awareness goals, however, you have no numbers to reflect if those impressions are converting into actual sales.

Maximizing ROI with Marketing Attribution Modeling

At the end of the day, marketing is part of a revenue-generating organization, and it’s imperative that all our efforts can reflect ROI. This is where multi-touch attribution and customer journey tracking become your best friends. These two things will help you understand your customer’s buying behavior better and enable you to determine the value of each of your marketing activities.

Multi-touch attribution helps you eliminate channel-specific KPIs and allows you to see the impact of each marketing activity on revenue, giving awareness campaigns the opportunity to demonstrate revenue earned instead of impressions and engagement. For a deep dive, read The Multi Touch Attribution Guide for Marketers.

Ready to Get Started with Marketing Attribution Modeling?

Schedule a demo with our team at Dealtale to see how our marketing platform can help you identify revenue from your awareness campaigns.