B2B brands usually have a good understanding of how many views, likes, comments, and shares their influencer campaigns are generating. The tricky part is: how much revenue or pipeline did these influencer campaigns actually contribute to?
That is one of the biggest B2B marketing challenges right now. Influencer partnerships are no longer just brand awareness campaigns. When you are working with influencers to market your SaaS, enterprise, agency, or tech brand, there is much more to it.
Here is what we mean. An average B2B purchase decision is made with the involvement of several decision makers over a course of few months and with lots of digital touches. In this situation, standard reach-based metrics used in consumer marketing won’t be enough.
As per the original ContentGrip article, B2B influencer marketing attribution usually fails because campaigns are launched without the proper tracking infrastructure to link creators’ efforts to CRM and revenue-related metrics.
Why B2B Influencer Marketing Attribution Is So Hard?
Average B2B buyer journey is anything but simple. For example, a potential customer can learn about your brand thanks to a LinkedIn creator post, read a blog post on your website, participate in a webinar you run, visit your pricing page, contact sales, and become a closed-won opportunity only after.
If you only rely on last-click attribution here, the final touchpoint (such as a demo request form fill-up) will get all the credit. Influencer marketing will be left outside the scope of B2B attribution.
That is why B2B influencer marketing attribution requires a different framework. Instead of asking whether this influencer post converted someone today, try asking yourself a different question: how did this particular creator post impact my buyers along their purchasing journey?
Build a Proper UTM Tracking Setup Before Campaign Launch
Before we move on, let’s talk about basic B2B marketing attribution practices such as UTMs. All influencer posts need to be tracked with UTMs before the campaign launch.
A typical influencer marketing UTM structure may look like this:
- utm_source: the name of the influencer/creator
- utm_medium: the social media platform, YouTube, or newsletter that creator uses for marketing
- utm_campaign: campaign title
- utm_content: content type (video, carousel, article, or interview)
That way, you will be able to understand which creators, platforms, and content types were the most efficient in generating traffic and leads.
Without creator-specific UTMs, all influencer-generated traffic will be considered a single source and thus will be challenging to attribute correctly.
The ContentGrip article also emphasizes the importance of passing UTM data into your CRM. Otherwise, you will get a view of campaign traffic but not of its connection to opportunities and pipeline revenue.
Import Creator Data into Your CRM
It does not really matter how well you are implementing UTMs if you don’t pass them to the CRM. That is the place where the real impact will come from – your CRM stores leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, and ultimately revenue data.
For example, you can use hidden fields on your forms to pass the UTM parameters to the CRM for every lead generated via influencer channels.
In the case of HubSpot CRM, you will need to map these new contact properties with UTMs.
For Salesforce users, custom lead/contact/opportunity fields or workflows can be utilized.
By doing that, you’ll be able to answer some of these important B2B influencer marketing attribution questions:
- Which creator brought this contact to me?
- Was this creator-driven lead qualified?
- Which influencer campaigns contributed to closed-won opportunities?
- Which amount of pipeline value came thanks to creator partnership?
Without integrating UTM data into your CRM, you won’t be able to attribute influencer marketing to your pipeline and revenue performance.
Use Multi-Touch Attribution, Not Just Last-Click Attribution
Last-click attribution will make you underestimate the impact of your influencer marketing because of how creators operate.
Creators usually drive brand awareness and nurture the target audience for months, which is why you need to implement a more advanced attribution model for B2B influencer marketing.
Here are some models for influencer marketing:
W-Shaped Attribution
The main principle of W-shaped attribution is awarding the first impression of the buyer journey with 30% attribution credit. This model works well for B2B brands, especially those that operate in enterprise and longer sales cycle industries.
U-Shaped Attribution
In this case, 50% of credit will be given to the first and last touches with the buyer. Middle touches will receive less credit. This model is a good alternative to W-Shaped attribution as it is more flexible.
Full-Path Attribution
As the name suggests, this attribution method evaluates the whole customer journey, giving different attribution credit for each touch – from the first impression to closed-won revenue.
In the case of influencer marketing, you can benefit from multi-touch attribution because creator-driven content often impacts the buyer journey at the very beginning of it.
Don’t Forget About the Dark Funnel
No matter how accurately you implement UTM tracking, some of the influence will be missed. As per the Content Grip article, in B2B marketing, the vast majority of conversations take place outside of any analytics software:
- Slack groups
- LinkedIn Direct Messages
- Communities
- Peer Recommendations
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Word-of-mouth
All these sources are called dark funnel sources. The buyer may hear about your brand from an influencer but visit the website through direct visits and therefore won’t be considered influencer traffic at all.
So what you can do is adding some qualitative signals to your CRM database:
- “Who told you about us?” field in demo requests
- Questions to the sales team during calls
- Interviews with closed-won clients
- CRM fields dedicated to self-reported attribution
- Analysis of intent data collected in creator campaign periods
Those qualitative indicators will complement the information obtained with UTMs.
Build Executive-Level Reporting with B2B Influencer Marketing Attribution Data
Your execs don’t really care whether influencer posts were viewed 10K times or not. What they want to see is how marketing efforts contribute to revenue generation.
Therefore, your influencer marketing attribution report should answer questions related to your pipeline and revenue performance:
- Value of pipeline generated by creators
- Lead volume brought by influencer marketing campaigns
- Opportunities influenced by influencer campaigns
- Attribution breakdown for creator campaigns
- Total revenue generated via influencer marketing efforts
- Self-reported attribution
- Ratio between campaign costs and pipeline created
With that information in hand, you will be able to show that influencer marketing drives your pipeline.
Influencer Attribution Tools to Consider
There are several tools you can use to build B2B influencer marketing attribution.
CRM systems like HubSpot or Salesforce allow storing leads and opportunities data, attribution platforms can be used to evaluate marketing contribution to the pipeline.
As per the Content Grip article, examples of such tools include Dreamdata, Hockeystack, Heeet, Factors.ai, and IMAI.
Which tool should you choose? It highly depends on the sales cycle, CRM infrastructure, and budget.
The most important thing here is implementing attribution strategy before influencer campaign launch.
Closing Thoughts
B2B influencer marketing is evolving fast and now brands are not just trying to increase visibility by launching campaigns with social media influencers.
Brands actively work with creators to earn their customers’ trust, engage decision-makers, educate buyers, and drive sales through long and complex sales cycle.
And to demonstrate the real ROI of this practice, you need to apply attribution to your influencer campaigns.
B2B influencer marketing attribution combines several methods – UTMs, dark funnel evaluation, multi-touch attribution, CRM data analysis.
If done properly, influencer marketing will be a solid driver of revenue.
If you are running campaigns with LinkedIn creators, newsletters, podcasts, and webinars, consider building attribution infrastructure for influencer marketing ahead of time.
