Success story: How 24Slides solved the enigma of content ROI with multi-touch attribution
Proving the value of content is a pain-and-a-half for any modern-day marketer. Tracking conversions on lead-generating landing pages and product pages is fairly easy, after all, they’re built for that exact purpose. But when it comes to attributing the impact of content pieces that live further upstream in your funnel on revenue, it becomes an educated guess at best.
Blog posts, videos, infographics, whitepapers… are all created under the guise of moving leads down the pipeline. But how do you know for sure which content pieces and channels contributed to an actual won deal, and revenue?
This is exactly the mystery 24slides is now able to solve with Dreamdata’s multi-touch attribution platform.
Key results 24slides has achieved with Dreamdata so far:
Tracking content performance at the account level (instead of just the individual user level)
Weekly revenue reports with accurate insights into the performance of their content marketing initiatives
Enriching their existing Google Data Studio custom reports with revenue-specific data
Want to see results for yourself?
“Dreamdata gives us accurate insight into the performance of our content marketing initiatives and the team is dedicated to continuously improving their product and supporting their clients.”
About 24Slides
24slides is the world’s leading presentation design agency. They create professional and eye-catching custom presentations in just 24 hours, using PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, and many more presentation platforms.
24slides designs over 15k slides a month covering every industry imaginable. Their mission is to help individuals, teams, and corporations around the globe save time and present better.
The challenge: Going beyond Vanity versus value
Ben Otomo is the Head of Marketing at 24Slides. A critical part of his role is to set KPIs for his team and ensure that their marketing activities deliver stellar ROI. But, with a content-focused strategy, measuring ROI was proving to be an impossible task. What’s more, without linking his content efforts with revenue, Ben just couldn’t tell if his content was under-optimized, over-optimized, or being led down the wrong path by vanity metrics.
It was this struggle that set Ben off on a search for an attribution platform. One that would give him reliable data for proving the value of his team’s content creation.
“We wanted to find the value of our content marketing activity, however, we did not have an easy or reliable way to attribute revenue across all our content being served through multiple channels,” Ben says.
Reliable is the keyword here, and that’s due to the nature of the beast. B2B users tend to interact multiple times with multiple touchpoints over a long period of time. From a content perspective, that means they can be exposed to multiple content pieces spread across multiple channels before they decide to convert.
So how do you reliably find out which content is “king” in your marketing activities? 👑
… And which content is just playing court jester? 🤡
The solution: Validation and value of content
“The data we see validates the assumptions we’ve had, which is a big relief.”
Dreamdata attributes revenue to different customer types across content which, according to Ben, has been immensely valuable:
“We can quickly see what channels, content groupings and campaigns are delivering the most value to the business. What will have the biggest impact for us, however, is being able to see how our different content marketing activities affect revenue.”
How does it work, you wonder?
Dreamdata maps every touch on the customer journey by cataloguing and visualising who is looking at content and when on a given timeline. And, it doesn’t just do this for individual users, but for an entire account (making it the perfect solution for B2B scenarios!).
Dreamdata then isolates the URLs where the content is hosted. Using multi-touch attribution, you can generate a list of all content URLs that shows:
How many visits each URL had
How many contacts (emails) each URL generated
How many new companies each URL generated
How many deals came from each URL
How much revenue each URL generated
Gone are the days where you have to “guestimate” whether content pieces contributed to your bottom line, or which to double down on (or cut loose).
With Dreamdata you know which content pieces are due for optimization, which ones may have low traffic but great ROI, which ones have high traffic but horrific conversion, and so on. In short, you get to keep your powerhouses while opening up budget for more of the same content, a creative experiment, a new headcount… The choice is yours.
Just think of Dreamdata as your content team’s very own data analyst!
Or, as Ben puts it, “Dreamdata effectively replaces what would otherwise take a dedicated, full-time data collection and analysis role within our business”.
Ben’s team now reports weekly on revenue numbers available in Dreamdata. “We’re also working with them closely to bring their data into some of our custom reporting in Google Data Studio,” he says, which is another huge benefit of owning all your data. The party doesn’t stop in Dreamdata’s own platform; you can infuse and enrich any relevant systems with the data uncovered with Dreamdata for even smarter business decisions.
Crack the content ROI code at your company in 3 steps
Any company with an ambition to shine a light on their content ROI can repeat the success 24slides has with Dreamdata. If you want to show how your B2B content contributes to your revenue, follow these 3 steps.
Check out this post with the full recipe for measuring ROI on B2B Content.
1. Get ownership of your own data
If you want to identify where your content movers and shakers are, you need to own all data connected to the complete customer journey. This may sound daunting, but it isn’t.
Dreamdata helps you gather, clean, and store all your data, by connecting all the data from across your commercial tech stack.
2. Connect the customer journey to historic data
In B2B, you work with accounts, not individual users. Dreamdata helps you connect the dots with intelligent tracking. In essence, you assign an ID to every user once they’ve identified themselves, whether it be through a demo call, by filling out a form, by downloading an ebook, etc.
You then get consent from the user to identify what actions they took while they were an anonymous user. This will enable you to see which content and campaigns actually led them to your website.
“Dreamdata was an ideal choice for us as it does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to sorting the data. They've simplified the tracking and implementation immensely meaning we don't need a dedicated internal resource to manage all of it,” Ben says.
3. Attribute revenue value to content
Now you’ve got two pieces of the puzzle: your data (which you fully own), and identified track users (and accounts). With these, you can start putting actual value on your created content by connecting all these points with the revenue generated - which typically sits in your CRM.
Once you’ve got the final connection to revenue, you can start running multi-touch attribution on every deal and pipeline stage.
Then it’s just a question of finding out what model is the right fit for your company. (And Dreamdata can of course help you with that.)
You might also be interested in reading about Content as a B2B Revenue Driver.
