There's an Alert for That: The B2B Marketer's Edition

I am back on the blog with the next installment of There’s an Alert for That. This time, it’s all about B2B. I’ll illustrate how real-time alerts can give B2B marketers an edge over their competitors through a handful of examples that address some of the most common challenges we hear about from B2B brands. At Rise, we use our Connex Alerts technology to help our B2B clients make smarter decisions using real-time data across channels. Let’s jump right in.

Challenge #1: I’ve spent a larger-than-ideal portion of my budget on leads that aren’t qualified.

Solving this challenge requires a two-part solution. First, if your conversion process is multi-step—which for many B2B brands is the case—it is critical to have a measurement framework and data infrastructure that connects offline data from your CRM or back-end tracking system with online activity. Technology solutions like Invoca help achieve this for conversion funnels with calls and leads, and most of the major ad platforms also have identifiers that can be used to stitch this data together. At Rise, we then use Connex for a unified view across all channels with offline data such as qualified leads, pipeline value, opportunity conversion rate, and won revenue.

Second, it’s time to configure alerts that will inform us when any campaign, tactic, ad, audience target, geography, or keyword across our program is (or isn’t) driving the right types of leads for our business. Any KPI or metric that we track in Connex can be used to develop custom alerts. Here’s a few examples for this use case:

Challenge #2: My business goals and budgets are organized by territory, and I don’t have the insights I need to show me what’s working (or not) by specific regions or geographies.

Whether you are trying to drill into territory-level performance as a marketing leader or provide territory-specific insights to individual sales reps, Connex Alerts have you covered. With the right account structure, naming conventions, and alert configuration, Connex can notify both you and the Rise teams who are optimizing your account about important growth opportunities in real time. Some of my favorite examples include:

• Trigger an alert when I am exceeding my Cost Per Lead or Revenue goal by more than 10% for any specific territory. → This information arms you to make the case for increased budget to take advantage of strong performance or higher-than-expected regional demand.

• Trigger an alert when my Lead or Revenue volume has fallen below a certain threshold in the past 7 days for any specific territory. → This information allows you to be nimble and adjust strategy as needed based on potential performance issues in real time, not days or weeks after the fact.

• Trigger an alert when I’ve spent more than $X in a specific territory, but the volume of qualified leads is less than Y. → This alert combines the first and second challenge to pinpoint any territory campaigns or strategies that aren’t delivering the business impact that you need.

Each of the above alerts can be configured based on aggregate performance across all of your digital channels, or any one digital channel or platform.

Challenge #3: My current digital strategy doesn’t support my business’s complexity: I have many different departments and service lines and each contributes differently to the bottom line.

One of the strategic shifts we work with our clients on is evolving from a single goal KPI to having multiple goals and KPIs that align to the needs of the business. Examples include having different metrics to evaluate top-of-funnel awareness tactics vs. bottom-of-funnel conversion efforts, or setting higher ROAS targets for low-margin service lines and more flexible ROAS goals for service lines that are more profitable. Campaign structure, naming conventions, measurement frameworks, data flows, and alerts are again the keys to success in activating these types of strategies. We build service line specific campaigns that have unique goals and budgets across channels and then configure alerts to react to performance data at the service line level:

• Trigger an alert when I am exceeding my Cost Per Lead or Revenue goal by more than 10% for any specific service line. → Another way to make the case for increased budget to take advantage of strong performance or higher-than-expected service line demand.

• Trigger an alert when my Lead or Revenue volume has fallen below a certain threshold in the past 7 days for a specific service line. → Again, you can be nimble and adjust strategy as needed based on potential performance issues in real time.

• Trigger an alert when I’ve spent more than $X in a specific territory, but the volume of qualified leads is less than Y. → This alert combines the first and third challenge to pinpoint any service line campaigns or strategies that aren’t delivering the business impact that you need.

As you can see, using just a core set of straight forward performance alerts applied in different ways across all of your channels—segmented by services, geographies, business units, and so on—you can achieve a significant edge by having a team that can act immediately based on the real-time data of the incredibly dynamic world we live in.

This is just a sample of the problems we’re helping our B2B clients solve by having the right data infrastructure and data mining capabilities. Our clients can create and subscribe to their own Alerts if they choose to, but the primary purpose of Connex Alerts is to focus our teams on the highest impact actions in real time while cutting through the noise of disparate data sets across platforms.

Want to know the Alert for your B2B challenge? Reach out to Rise today.