If you have landed on this article about closed-loop marketing, I am guessing you are struggling to measure your marketing team’s impact and need a solution.
It’s a struggle that marketers have faced for as long as they can remember. Many of them put a lot of hard work into creating successful marketing campaigns, paid ads and generating keyword driven content, but at the end of the day, marketers have little to no visibility on the revenue their marketing efforts brought in.
I’ve actually seen this happen first-hand. And here’s my story:
Before joining Ruler Analytics, I worked at an events company. I had a marketing budget which, in part, I used to run paid campaigns through Facebook and Instagram. We also had a strong organic social presence and a successful blog.
We were generating ticket sales, although I couldn’t tell my manager how much of that revenue was due to my work designing, monitoring and developing ads, curating keyword driven content and populating our organic social media with posts.
As a budding Digital Marketer, I was taught to use the industry standard of Google Analytics.
With Google Analytics, I could see goal conversions, but this didn’t help me prioritize ad spend to optimize successful channels. I could not truly measure how much revenue was being generated due to my marketing efforts, which, in the end, was very frustrating.
I had not been in the industry long when I had already faced a struggle that was all too common in the digital marketing world.
Since starting here I have heard my peers stories which are very similar to mine, but seeing this tool as the solution, the problem suddenly seems much less daunting.
Finally, there is a solution to accurately attribute revenue produced by marketing.
Closed-Loop marketing assists modern marketers with an accurate method of measurement for their online marketing campaigns.
From the outset, you are able to capture all of the important information needed from website visitors, leads and clients, to measure the success of your campaigns and optimize for success.
So, what is closed-loop marketing?
Closed-loop marketing is an approach to marketing measurement, which allows you to focus on what actually matters to your business: revenue.
Different traffic sources, keywords and ads will produce different revenue per lead, however, Google Analytics will simply class it as a ‘goal.’ External analytics tools will take this into account and value them respectively.
The Industry standard, Google Analytics, relies solely on tracking goals and conversions, which, in reality, does not offer a reliable method of measurement. Different traffic sources, keywords and ads all
Google Analytics does a great job at tracking for E-Commerce businesses, where a goal can clearly equal a purchase, however, for more complex B2B lead generation businesses, the industry standard is outdated and does not offer accurate data.
The Closed Loop Framework provides a more detailed and in depth picture of your marketing spend and return on investment as a whole. External tools such as Ruler Analytics, help with the measurement of this.
For those of you that don’t know Ruler Analytics, it’s a visitor level multi-touch marketing attribution tool that helps bridge the gap between marketing generated leads and closed-revenue. It works on a closed-loop framework based on closed-loop marketing.
Anyway, let’s dive into how closed-loop marketing can help you accurately measure revenue and attribute it to the marketing source that generated it.
1. Revenue data reduces marketing costs
Closed-loop marketing shows you which campaigns and channels drive the most revenue, according to the revenue attribution model you use.
It also shows you which drive the least revenue.
In other words, revenue data shows you which of your efforts are generating a return on your investment and which are simply wasting your budget, providing the information you need to cut spending on underperforming campaigns.
This blog helps you understand how multi-channel methods of attribution enable you to see the value over all your channels, which can ensure budgets are allocated more fairly.
2. Revenue data accelerate sales opportunities
One customer of Ruler recently mentioned how they noticed something interesting through their closed loop analysis: one specific customer sector had an average lifetime value that was higher than any other.
If they hadn’t been measuring revenue metrics, the trend would have likely gone unnoticed. But since they did, they were able to act on it.
The client shifted all of their efforts to focus on that sector, and their monthly recurring revenue started growing immediately.
Revenue data not only told them which campaigns and channels were best; it also showed which customers benefited the most from their product.
The result of that one insight: the customer doubled their previous years revenue in the first half of 2019 alone.
3. Revenue is marketing’s most important metric
Since we’ve discovered the benefits of closed-loop marketing — and the means of tracking it with our analytics tool — we’ve focused much less on the awareness metrics we used to rely on (e.g., clicks, conversions and leads). Revenue data has given us everything we need to grow our business and make strategic marketing decisions.
But this is just our experience, so it’s limited. We’re curious to know what benefits and disadvantages other marketers have experienced when tracking—or trying to track—marketing-generated revenue.
Conclusion
So, closed-loop marketing: is it the right approach or just another time-consuming report to build? Is it the metric that will boost CEOs’ opinions of the discipline?
If you’re a lover of CLM, like me, and have achieved positive results from this process then I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. CLM is a valuable method of reporting, and it’s time we make more marketers aware of it.
About the Author:
Eve Smith a very creative individual, with a passion for content creation. After completing a Digital Marketing apprenticeship, she found her interest in all things digital and analytical.