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Here is a Guest Blog post by my good friend over at Powered by Search, Vlad Rascanu.
Author: Vlad Rascanu is the Search Marketing Manager of Powered by Search, a Toronto, Canada based full service SEO & Inbound Marketing agency. Follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
Do you know exactly how much revenue each marketing channel is currently driving or do you THINK you know? Most companies we talk to firmly believe that they do simply because they know they should. Find out why you need to press your Online Marketing team for the correct numbers.
We find many cases where the different marketing departments within an organization try to take credit for other departments’ leads simply because their marketing channel was the one to drive the final lead and no attention is being paid to any other metrics. We were also shocked to find many companies believe that their brand is driving the vast majority of the sales and so they should continue to pump more money into advertising their brand and completely ignore the user that’s at the beginning of the purchase cycle.
For the purpose of this article we are going to focus on the value that an experienced SEO agency can bring to the table while using a powerful tool such as Salesforce. The right SEO agency along with Salesforce will help you allocate your budget in the marketing channels that will yield the highest Return on Investment.
Find out how Powered by Search is able to generate an ROI of 300%-500% for one of their clients on a consistent basis despite a six figure fee per year for their services.
Given the long nurturing cycle and the many touch points during a purchase between the potential customer and the company, we knew that after the deal is closed it would be very difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of the lead unless we had a proper tracking system implemented.
The purchase cycle doesn’t even have to be as long as 4 to 6 months to warrant the implementation of a multi-channel marketing tracking system. If the following example is the typical behavior of one of your potential customers then you know you need to track leads better.
Suzy is looking for a blue winter jacket and lands on your client’s website. She finds one that she really likes, but she’s still going to shop around. She continues to shop around and after she makes up her mind she decides to come back to your website to buy the jacket. This time she searches for your website and clicks on a PPC ad and converts.
Normally, I don’t make assumptions, but this time I can say with certainty that 9 out of 10 agencies and marketing specialists will be much more concerned with the rankings for “blue winter jackets” and will completely ignore looking at first click attribution and won’t take credit for this sale. As this scenario will repeats itself on numerous other occasions you will go to your in-house online marketing team or to your agency and ask them what you’re paying them for because your branded terms along with your e-mail marketing campaigns and PPC campaigns are the ones driving the leads. Before you ask your team some hard questions I suggest that you check out your tracking to ensure that all the leads are attributed to the correct channel.
Using salesforce.com’s custom reports and dashboards we can set up “first click attribution” reports for organic and paid search leads. This will ensure that even if a lead that was originally acquired through non-branded organic 2 years ago and only recently converted to an e-mail that was sent out yesterday for a special promotion, salesforce.com will clearly distinguish between the marketing channel that originally drove the lead and the one that lead to the final sale.
Figure 1: A separate report needs to be created for each marketing channel
Figure 2: An example of the metrics tracked in the reports above
Does your SEO agency or in-house marketing team report directly to the decision maker in the company or to the “gate keeper”? An SEO agency’s point of contact in a large enterprise company is usually the “gate keeper”, or the person that’s filtering what information gets to the decision maker in their company and what information they think they should omit. Because of the lack of communication between an SEO agency or even an in-house SEO team and the key decision makers, these individuals don’t always see the true value of SEO.
Solution. Separate reports must be created for the different decision makers in the company. For example, the VP of sales doesn’t care to know what the average page views per visit were, they only care about the number of leads, where they came from and what their quality was like, or how many converted. On the other hand, the VP of marketing will probably be interested in the most popular blog posts on their website, the average time on site, or the bounce rates per marketing channel, so their report needs to have a clear focus on these metrics.
Salesforce allows you to create separate reports and dashboards for each decision maker in a company. Dashboards can also be set up to track leads, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), and sales.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) – leads that are interested in the product, but are not ready to purchase yet because they want to gather more information or they don’t have the budget yet. All these leads should be included in different nurturing campaigns.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) – leads that have a clear need for the product, have the budget, they agreed to purchase the product verbally and it’s only a matter of time before they convert into customers.
Using this funnel a client's cost per lead, MQL, SQL, and sales can be easily calculated along with an accurate ROI for the SEO spend. Compare these metrics with the revenue generated by these leads and ensure that these metrics are compared across all marketing channels.
SPOILer ALERT. The SEO channel will have the highest ROI 90% of the time. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong.
In order to ensure our customer’s success we also went the extra mile and ensured that every lead’s behavior is getting tracked. Everything from which pages they visited on the website to which whitepapers they downloaded, which videos they watched, which emails they received and which ones were opened, etc. can be tracked in Salesforce.
Would your sales person have a higher chance of closing a lead without knowing anything about the lead or knowing everything about what their interests are and exactly which product they’re interested in? This is a no brainer.
FINAL THOUGHTS. Stop making decisions using incorrect data! Do a thorough analysis of your tracking system, your CRM, and test your marketing team’s knowledge in this area, and if you believe your organization is experiencing any of the issues mentioned in this article then it’s time to consult an experienced SEO Agency.
Author: Vlad Rascanu is the Search Marketing Manager of Powered by Search, a Toronto, Canada based full service SEO & Inbound Marketing agency. Follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
If you have already built some SEO/SEM Reports and Dashboard in salesforce.com, please share them below.
