In this episode, we discuss: Dreamdata’s approach to data-driven marketing strategy. Why benchmarking is so impactful for marketers. What obstacles or mistakes do marketers encounter when developing a data-driven strategy? Why UTM codes and best practices are a bigger blindspot than you think. Which marketing channels should we prioritize first? When is attribution and data collection not effective?
Having trouble scaling your marketing strategies? Not sure why your marketing strategies aren't as effective as they could be? We may have the answer…
The easiest way to scale a marketing strategy is to see what worked in the past, make the necessary adjustments, and iterate. If you want effective, data-driven marketing strategies, you need to focus on data-driven attribution and benchmarking.
In this episode of Markigy Podcast, your host Leanne Dow-Weimer welcomes Steffen Hedebrandt, CMO & Co-Founder of Dreamdata, to share his best practices for data-driven attribution.
In this episode, we discuss:
Meet the Host:
Leanne Dow-Weimer, Founder & Host of Markigy Podcast https://www.linkedin.com/in/leannedow
Meet the Guest:
Steffen Hedebrandt, CMO & Co-Founder of Dreamdata
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steffenhedebrandt
Links to content here:
Visit Dreamdata’s website: https://dreamdata.io
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This episode was produced and brought to you by Reignite Media.
Edited audio
[00:00:00] Leanne: Welcome to Markigy the Science of Marketing Strategy, a biweekly podcast where all the cool marketers discuss their favorite marketing strategies. Study by study. On this show, we feature marketing risk takers who believe long-term wins for the customer. Equal long-term wins for the business. Two, how human led marketing, the combination of where science, creativity, and strategy meet, [00:00:30] or as we also like to call it Markigy.
Let's break down the marketing trends, myths, and methodologies together. I'm your host, lean, do Weimer. Let's go. Hello, this is Leanne with Markigy. Today I am joined with Steffen from Dreamdata and he is such an expert in attribution and so many things. He's currently the c e o, and I'm truly grateful that you've joined me here today.
Could you tell us a little bit about your. [00:01:00]
[00:01:00] Steffen: Yeah. Happy Leanne. Yeah, I'm the cmo, so, uh, sorry. I'm glad I don't have to deal with all the, the things that a CEO HA has to deal with, but I'm a co-founder of this company called The Dreamdata, and essentially what we do for our customers is that we try to help them understand the nature of how they produce pipeline and revenue with j all the Dakota market activities that they.
And our approach to, is it BA, is basically to say, let's take anything that leaves behind the digital touch [00:01:30] and that's sorted out into account based timelines. So we can see if there's three, four, or five people doing something on this account, what are they doing? How are they progressing towards?
Becoming deals that you win. And are there certain things that either repeats positively or repeats negatively in the sense that this is not working, we're wasting money, or this is working, we should be investing more money into this. So just briefly to touch what I, what, why I think. Attribution is an interesting topic [00:02:00] for me.
It's a matter of understanding when you get a customer, how did you win it? And if you won a hundred customers, how did you win these 100 customers? Because the, the easiest way to kind of, to scale something or to be successful is to understand what worked in the past and try to see if you can either just do more of the same or with a slight flip of what you did there and repeat.
So I'm interested in winning and that's why I'm interested in understanding kind of what worked in the past so we can do more of it in the future.
[00:02:28] Leanne: Yeah, absolutely. [00:02:30] Apologies for the fake promotion.
[00:02:32] Steffen: I wouldn't see as a promotion
[00:02:34] Leanne: much too tough. But you know, you mentioned that you like winning and I think that's something that so many people relate to is that no one likes doing something for the sake of doing something.
They want to do something for an outcome or a. And you know, I don't wanna say I'm like addicted to analytics. Cause I mean, I understand the limitations, but I find a lot of value and [00:03:00] comfort in knowing if I'm doing something that's worthwhile or not. The last time we talked it was about benchmarking and I think that that is such an impactful way for marketers to look at if what they're working is working enough or not.
And yeah, not enough is, it's never enough. You know, you, you mentioned, you know, a couple things about a data-driven strategy and kind of talk us through your insights there.
[00:03:28] Steffen: Yes, we, just [00:03:30] to give the context, we put out some benchmarks last year where we analyzed our customers customer journeys. What that means is that we have all these customers, I think it was around 400 customers at that point, where we looked at how long does it take for, for, and these are all B2B companies only.
How long does it take from the first activity or session? We know of an account all the way until the account is. And then we looked at the length of it and like certain, like if they come from certain channels, et cetera. Does that [00:04:00] matter? So I will, I, I just anecdote a few numbers. So the first one is that it took an average of 192 days from the first touch until a deal was won.
So that means from the very first time you did something and got somebody to respond, it took. More than six months, like half a year. And that's a really, really important number to know when you're in marketing because like as we, the two of us are like, if we do something today, the salespeople are gonna sign a contract six months now from now.
And [00:04:30] that is a, that you need to align with the rest of the organization because it's not like, In like in a B2C world where you can go out and buy a Google ad and the next mo moment somebody comes and buy a running shoe from your website, like you work in a bank and things take, takes a lot of time to to, to make happen.
So this says something about the alignment you need to have in your company. If. If there's a sales target in q4, let's say that, then you probably need to have already started to build some of that pipeline from marketing and [00:05:00] q3 and the activity might wanna start in in q2, even to, in order to do timely.
The some of the other ones of the benchmarks was that I think there was around 31 sessions involved in a deal on average. So that means you need to constantly bring people back to your website. You need to have constant touches on these B2B deals actually, to bring them forward. It's not enough to acquire one click.
You need to retarget them. You run need to run newsletters, you need to run webinars, you need to have [00:05:30] salespeople interacting with these accounts. And then the last component is, yeah, just with our own account, whenever. Sign a deal. There's an average of five people involved on, on the customer side. So that means like it might, it might be fine that you had a good one, good conversation with one person at that company, but you're actually facing a buyer committee and you need to bring that buyer committee into the, the sales conversation, or at least have content that kind of caters to the different kind of personas that will [00:06:00] be typically sitting in this buying c.
[00:06:02] Leanne: Yeah, absolutely. Kind of circling back to one of your earliest points was the, the six months and, and planning ahead. And I think that one obstacle that, maybe not obstacle, but one thing temptation that I think a lot of marketers have is to give up too soon because they have pressure from executives that are like, Hey, have you seen results yet?
Where's my leads? Like, have you done it? Like, you know, and for good reason, right? Businesses aren't Absolutely, yeah. You [00:06:30] know, they, they, they need customers in. Literally be a business. But you know, I, I could see how six months people may not have realized the, the length of the cycle. And one of my goals that I think about is how do I shorten the cycle?
[00:06:44] Steffen: There's another component to it is of course, of course we can't just sit down and, uh, wait for six months when we've done something. So did you need to kind of come up with, uh, good proxies for what leads to revenue later? So like [00:07:00] in a typical sales, uh, world, that would maybe be. Before you have deals, you have sales opportunities before you have sales opportunities.
You maybe have marketing qualified leads before you have that, maybe you have demo calls or something like that. So I would definitely advise you to come up with some midway points where kind of there's shorter between you carry out an activity and you see that metric going up or down. You typically call this a leading indicator for what becomes money later on.
So, so I would [00:07:30] definitely also, that's the next thing to align. One, the journey is long. What we are gonna measure early success upon would be, for example, we get more demo calls requested and I can then, I only have to close the gap between where, what activity I carried out and the Democrats starting to happen.
Definitely.
[00:07:48] Leanne: And that kind. Remind me of something else that you mentioned was, you know, about the difference between being within A C R M and that lifetime, but that's also part of the entire [00:08:00] length of the journey. Is that like there's that time before they're in the crm when they're maybe Oh, yeah,
[00:08:05] Steffen: yeah.
I, I can just reference that as well, so that it's actually, uh, it's quite. I think most companies have a dark spot in what they perceive as their customer journey. My guess is that 90% will answer you how long their customer journeys are by answering from when we have the first conversion from an account until they sign.
That's, and what it really is. That's the sales process. What we could see in those, those [00:08:30] benchmarks as well. The length of the real journey from first touch where people just research, I remain anonymous until they're ready to talk to you is the same length or longer than what you know of in the sales.
Journey typically. So that means if the con, if the, the narrative is in your company right now that it takes three months from when you see a lead until they buy, that actually means that the journey is more likely to be, uh, six months from the first [00:09:00] time they start looking at you until they raise their hands and say, okay, let's have a sales conversation.
[00:09:05] Leanne: Absolutely. So what are some other obstacles that you see when people are trying to navigate having a more data-driven strategy? Ooh,
[00:09:16] Steffen: that's a broad question. So one thing is maybe, so now my background is, is purely b2b. So I'd say the first one is to, to have an understanding of the data in a B2B context.
What I mean [00:09:30] by that is that marketers, which again would get, assume that most of your audience as well are using Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Google Ads, et cetera. And all of these platforms are, uh, To understand the behavior of one individual or even just one browser interacting with stuff. So the ad platforms that we rely on today is extremely bad at describing value.
For a B2B company, like the Journey is 192 days. There's more than five people [00:10:00] involved at the deals. There's 31 sessions, and what this really means is that you can't really use the numbers you're looking at in the ad platforms too. So you need to come up with a way to regard data that makes sense in a, in a B2B context.
But before, yeah, may. Maybe heading to that problem, then you should start looking through all your go-to-market activities and think through, are we actually leaving? Are we producing digital traces of our behavior? Like if the same people are just sitting with their phone, calling [00:10:30] customers, not writing it down anywhere, then it's very hard to understand whether phone is a good media.
Progressing deals. So ask them, could you please move into the CRM system and click the calling button from within there, or use a calling software or something like that. The same goes for like if your customer success is just handled through a Gmail inbox or something like that. Maybe use a software that is intended for it, and then kind of that continues if you're running a lot of ads, but there's not any UTMs on [00:11:00] the clicks you acquire, which means that we can understand where did we acquire, acquire the click from Then it's very hard to understand whether things work or not, and it, it is with, uh, data as it is with that Chinese Provo that the best time to to start was 20 years ago.
And the second best is, is. And then what I mean is that when you wanna become data driven or do analysis, then it's too late to think about, oh, I should have actually gone on this path of creating digital [00:11:30] touches that I then can analyze, uh, later on. I don't know if that was an answer to it or not. Li
[00:11:35] Leanne: that's great.
I mean, it is a very broad question. There's so many ways, and, and that's part of the, the beauty of this is that I wanna hear like you're, what comes to your mind first? You have all of your experiences and that that definitely gives a lot of. You know, there's things that I love. The proverb also it's, there's, it brought to mind a couple more, is that common sense isn't common [00:12:00] and that this one is my own that I made up, is that you can always do more cleaning and more marketing.
And that kind of is to say that there's always more things that you can do, more activities, more this, more that. And at some point all you're doing is those activities and you kind of gotta balance it out between everything. What I was trying to come back to was that the UTM codes and best practice. A really blind spot for more companies than [00:12:30] I realized at first.
Have you encountered, like, have you encountered that or is it just my, my biases or,
[00:12:37] Steffen: Hmm. I think it also depends on industries and what kind of have been the predominant go-to market in these industries. So we deal a lot with software companies, so like really, perhaps, perhaps more technical savvy than, than the average company.
So they. That's so like for those who don't know, like a U GM is a way to describe if you [00:13:00] acquire a click, where does this click come from? And that's very nice to have stored. If you wanna understand kind of somebody booked a demo call within that demo call that gets booked, it's nice to understand if it was a Facebook ad or a Google ad or an organic visit from Google.
Or referral from a newspaper that you were featured in or stuff like that. So I'd say like the over the overarching thing that you should start be thinking about in your company is the question, how do we produce money? How do we produce, [00:13:30] uh, sales pipeline? And then, That rapid hole is very deep and it can go into starting to use tools, tracking technologies and so forth.
But I think the first question is starting to become curious about kind of deals doesn't come out of nowhere. Like it's not like some magic things that happens a few times. It is, but most of the time it's just hardworking, like building that demand momentum little by little that that suddenly becomes
[00:13:58] Leanne: deals.
Yeah. Absolut. [00:14:00] And so, you know, you mentioned about like revenue generation and demand generation, and so I can imagine how like accurate forecasting or channel like needs, tactics, how this comes into play in your benchmarks. You know, you, you noticed a couple things. Was there anything when you were kind of looking at this that stood out as unexpected to.
[00:14:25] Steffen: So one of the things I would call out was probably kind of the, actually [00:14:30] the, the length or the time it takes per, per channel, meaning that it actually matters quite a lot from another channel. Me being, what was the place they were at before they arrived to, to your website? That was actually quite big differences in how fast these channels.
For example, review platforms had a super short time from when they arrived from a view platform to your website, meaning that the intention when you have been reading reviews and then go to a vendor is quite strong in terms of [00:15:00] buying. Whereas if you came organically from a social media, Your journey was quite long and slow, which is not unusual because it just means that, oh, you saw some something on a social media and you just decided to check out what are these guys doing?
So there's a lot less buying intent in such a visit. So it also means like the different channels has different speeds and. You probably wanna start activating the fast ones first. The trouble is quite often though, that the fast ones can [00:15:30] gets exhausted and then you need to move on onwards from them.
And the reason why they're fastest is most likely people are in market right now trying to search for a solution that could be like page search on Google. Somebody Google, I need a solution for this. Or reading reviews. Naturally, those journeys are quite fast, and those you need to cover up first, but you can also exhaust them because it is only those one, two, 3% of the market that are actively buying right now.
And there you need to go to channels [00:16:00] where the rest of the 97, 90 8% of your ideal customers are right now and try to get on their radar. That would be a much slower discipline, but the volume of what you can attract than also quite large. Yeah,
[00:16:13] Leanne: absolutely. And I think that makes a lot of sense because I don't know very many people that are just cruising G2 for, you know, like to recreationally.
Usually when they go there, they have like a reason. They're like, Hey, I, you know, I've already Googled what's a solution that does X, Y, and Z, and then [00:16:30] they go to the review site saying, okay. Google told me these two things do X, Y, and Z. Now do they suck? Like are they any good? You know, where's the, you know, they do their research and then they, and I've even uncovered options there that I hadn't initially found or considered.
But yeah, that was more rare than that was, you know, it was just more rare that that was what occurred was, but it suggested a new thing that I had never heard of. So, you know, [00:17:00] I'm of the mindset that, you know, like you said with the Chinese proverb that the best time was 20 years ago. But are there situations when, you know, kind of this type of like attribution or this type of data, data collection isn't really, really the best match or strategy to do?
[00:17:21] Steffen: Yeah, absolutely. It's, uh, so we, we can only work with what leaves behind digital touches, and that's not necessarily always [00:17:30] the best go-to-market marketing, uh, strategy like you wanna appear where your ideal customers. Hang out, so to speak. They hang out in Slack channels. Sometimes they hang out on LinkedIn, they listen to podcasts, they go to physical events, they meet in a bar and all those kind of things.
And like, like, like B2B has always worked and there's so kind of. There's one thing is you'll never catch anything, sorry. Everything with attribution and [00:18:00] some stuff are harder to measure than others. That doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't spend time on it. Like I think it makes a lot of sense for, for me to appear on this podcast because you listeners, some marketers, but it's gonna be very hard to prove that somebody listened and then went to her website.
But that's where I used my gut feeling and I. This must be the right kind of people. So if they listen to my message, then it still makes sense. So that's, you're totally right, uh, at the end that we can only a, like, we can only analyze what leaves behind a [00:18:30] digital trace. So that also means that there's certain activities you don't judge by like a very quantifiable analysis, like what we do at Dream Data.
So I will, I would typically advise people to take responsibility of building a narrative of what's working on more like qualitative levels. So that could. That your podcast is getting mentioned by somebody on LinkedIn. Then you take a screenshot and then share with your team and see, hey, we are running this podcast and people are actually starting to talk about it.
Or if the [00:19:00] salespeople here get anecdote in sales calls, Hey, I listened to Leanne on that podcast, now are decided to show up on your website. So you need to work with these qualitative samples that doesn't build massive statistics, but will appear less or like more spora. Yeah, for these kind of, these kind of activities, I think you should think about like another analogy, like if you can just see the tip of the iceberg, you know that there's a lot more happening than what you can analyze.
Does that make sense?
[00:19:28] Leanne: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, [00:19:30] I wish I could be in the room for all the conversations about me that I'm not a part of
[00:19:35] Steffen: and I'm not sure I wish I would be not,
[00:19:39] Leanne: and some, I assume they're all nice, and if they're really mean, then maybe I have some self-improvement to work on. Fingers crossed.
It's not like anything, you know, dramatic, but you know, I definitely always feel the battle of, you know, how do we record. Is it recordable and what inferences can we make? And then [00:20:00] I think, you know, just to kind of add on what you, you mentioned earlier also making sure that the salespeople or whoever's putting data in, putting good, clean data, right?
Yeah. We don't want them putting in no email@noemail.com. That doesn't help anybody. So, you know, I, I can see how those two situations are very much a part of. Now, now for fun. You know, I, I've found that most of my guests have so much to share about this [00:20:30] question, and I really wanna hear all of your insights about it.
What do you think the future of marketing is, and comparatively, what do you think it should be?
[00:20:41] Steffen: So like where do you start to, to cut the elephant? Hmm. I think the best marketing now and in the future is like a combination of left and right brain. What I mean by that is that you need to have like a very emotional, the appealing [00:21:00] brand that people, that has a narrative and a story that like, that people can relate to and they.
But in order to make sound decisions on going to market, you also need to really know cost per acquisition and how much budget can we put into different things in order to scale them without ruining our company. So, and luckily these two things go hand in hand. So if you produce really good creatives that people.
The acquisition costs are also typically lower, [00:21:30] and hopefully the cost of acquiring a customers is lower than what you make, uh, in terms of revenue when you acquire this customer. So I think that both the, the present and the future of go to market should be. Really well thought out. Branding at a cost per acquisition at a positive cost per acquisition calculation so that when you do go to market, you actually end up producing money for your company and not wasting the company's money.
[00:21:57] Leanne: Absolutely. I love that you mentioned the [00:22:00] emotional aspect of it, because that is one trend I want to see more of is that B2B marketing is more humanized and less robotic, and Yeah, people are the ones in the buying c. People aren't always buying rationally. And I think that that just gets magnified or amplified when you have the five to seven people, right?
Because there's five to seven possibly competing, possibly aligned interests. Yeah. And you [00:22:30] know, I think that, you know, appealing to their emotions. I, I, as a marketer, I'm like, oh, we should always appeal to emotions, but you know, That can be hard when it's hard to be for some people or in some ways to be emotional about.
Something like data, right? Yes. What are, what are we gonna say? Like, you'd be surprised. I mean, I, I got a little emotional, I said, you know, don't put it bad data to the crm. So I, I mean, that's fair.
[00:22:57] Steffen: I think the best quote I've heard about this, [00:23:00] uh, was a, one of the C levels at Gong who said Different is better than better.
And I think there's, there's so much knowledge condensed in that. Better means that you constantly compete on these small features or inch buy-ins, different percentages. We are a little bit faster than this or we have a little few more gigabytes over here or, but that just doesn't matter. If you are different and much more emotionally appealing than people will say, well, fuck you are features I, I'm, I love this brand.
I'm [00:23:30] choosing them. If they're personable, I have followed them six months on social media, so now I'm gonna sign a contract. But these guys still, they, that other company had one more feature or, or something like that.
[00:23:41] Leanne: Yeah. I mean, that that one extra feature might be negligible, right? Yeah, exactly. You know, you could have all the features.
It doesn't mean I have enough hours in the day to manage them, or enough manpower or prioritization. Yeah. You know, so, yeah, I mean, I'm really excited to see where the, the future of marketing goes. And I, I really very enthusiastic, [00:24:00] passionate about data driven while emotionally appealing marketing. So I, I think that, That blend between creativity, science, and strategy is really where I personally want marketing to go.
So there's, yeah, it's my, my bias. So, you know, I think that if someone were to take away some information from this episode, it's to, you know, look at really how long the journey. The length of the buying cycle and [00:24:30] to now have some benchmarks to stack against it. And then remember to themselves how many touches that takes.
Right? Because like you mentioned, it's not one session and then six months later they buy it's 31 sessions. It, it could be more, you know, it could be less. It's, that's another lever. Lever for adjusting and experimenting. Yeah,
[00:24:50] Steffen: so, so yeah, I think I would probably say two things. Like one, start having a conversation in your company about how it is we produce money, like make it a narrative that you [00:25:00] talk about.
Every month we do X, Y, Z things, and then money comes out on the other side and one. I'll follow up that conversation with, okay, what is our proof that this is true? Sometimes it's qualitatively, sometimes it's quantitatively, sometimes it's just anecdotes and if you continuously ask these questions, then you'll start to get better and better Glasses too, before understanding how do we produce money?
[00:25:22] Leanne: Absolutely. If someone wanted to follow up with like questions they had for you or you [00:25:30] know, just wanted to connect, what would be the best ways for them to do.
[00:25:33] Steffen: On 100% on, uh, on LinkedIn. They can just ask me any question. They're not happy to, happy to reply.
[00:25:40] Leanne: Great. And so if people are listening to this but not watching it, could you spell your name for them just so
[00:25:46] Steffen: I'll do that?
S T E F F E N. H E D E B R A N D T. It's a tough one in English, but, but I think people can
[00:25:56] Leanne: manage. I think they can manage too. I just wanna make sure that, you know, [00:26:00] they are able to find you and connect and learn more about Dreamdata and everything that you've got going on. So thank you so much for being my guest today.
[00:26:11] Steffen: It was a pleasure, Leanne. Thank you.
[00:26:18] Leanne: You've been listening to Markigy, the Science of Marketing Strategy. If any of the strategies we talked about today inspired you to learn more, try them. Remember, the perfect strategy doesn't exist, [00:26:30] only the one that gets done. Subscribe to our show on your favorite podcast player to make sure that you never miss an episode.
Thanks for listening. Until next time.