How Engagement Thresholds Help Tell the Marketing Impact Story

Shaunica Lai

Articulating marketing’s purpose and business value to non-marketers through relevant metrics has always been an uphill task for B2B marketers. Vanity metrics are not appreciated by stakeholders outside the marketing department because these figures only tell part of the story. Revenue and pipeline impact metrics are tried and true measures of marketing ROI, but there is often still a gap in explaining to a non-marketer how new-age marketing programs create impact. 

This is where Engagement Thresholds come in. The powerful combination of ROI metrics and Engagement Thresholds tells a more holistic story of a marketing campaign's impact on account activation and engagement and, most importantly, on revenue generation.

More than articulating a marketing campaign’s impact to gain buy-ins from non-marketers, well-defined Engagement Thresholds help marketers:

• Focus time and resources on targeted accounts that are ready to engage
• Have meaningful and relevant conversations with in-market accounts
• Generate high-quality leads for sales outreach

What is an Engagement Threshold?

 An Engagement Threshold is a level where a type and volume of engagement qualifies an account to move from one stage to another in connection with advancing in the buyer journey. For accounts with a high intent score, the threshold to move from one stage to another may be lower, and vice versa. These thresholds are not set in stone and are optimized from time to time to ensure that the criteria set provides the best value.

Some of the filters that can be applied in 6sense to set Engagement Thresholds include:

• # of website visits/unique website visits to specific pages
• # of branded/generic keyword research
• # of clicks/impressions from 6sense campaign(s)

In the next section, we’ll look at how 2X builds Engagement Thresholds for our intent-driven marketing campaigns.

Developing an Effective Sales Pipeline with Defined Engagement Thresholds

Intent-driven marketing provides prospects with a more personalized and consistent experience based on their intent stage. A well-planned campaign can help companies accelerate the pipeline movement of high-value target accounts with tailored messaging at each threshold. Here’s the basic framework we observe to identify the right accounts to target, segmentize them based on intent and in-market stages, set clear Engagement Thresholds, and move them along the funnel to build a more effective sales pipeline.

1.    Refine the target account list

First, we will overlay the target account list with 6sense’s intent data and AI to determine if the target accounts are in the market for our products. Signals that the prospects give off that indicate intent include:

• Reading our website content
• Performing research on topics related to our solutions
• Checking third-party review sites
• Searching topics related to competitors
• And more

We will identify the ideal customer profile (ICP) from the data and create segmentation based on criteria such as in-market stage and intent score.

2.    Identify campaign objectives and define what an “engaged” account looks like.

An engagement model is built based on the campaign objectives, the definition of an “engaged” account (whether it is unique website visits, keyword research, or any other criteria that indicates engagement and intent), and 6sense intent data, including the target account’s in-market stage and intent score. Here are two scenarios to describe the process of setting up an engagement model and its thresholds.

Scenario 1

An Enterprise software company felt web activity and visits would be strong indicators of engagement and intent. So, we constructed an engagement model based primarily on unique visitors to their website. It led to three Engagement Thresholds—red for the unengaged, green for the engaged, and dark green for the highly engaged.

Scenario 2

A next-gen smart home tech provider wanted to measure engagement based on the account’s in-market stage, website visits, and unique visits to the advertised product pages. Given the access to 6sense’s predictive analytics, this model was built into four stages—red for accounts in the awareness stage, yellow for accounts in the consideration stage, green for accounts in the decision stage, and dark green for accounts in the purchase stage. To move the accounts from one stage to the next, they must hit the Engagement Threshold, i.e., the predetermined number of website visits and unique visits to the advertised product pages at each stage. 

3.    Engage accounts with hyper-personalized content and creatives

Having defined Engagement Thresholds allows the segmentation of messaging and creatives. For instance, we know that the accounts in the red zone have little to no engagement with the client's solutions, so we deploy top-of-funnel thought leadership content to establish credibility and trust. Once they are in the engaged or green zone, we can introduce mid-funnel content such as case studies to move them to the highly engaged stage. 

Achieving a Well-Oiled 6sense Campaign

Intent-based marketing strategies and their corresponding Engagement Threshold criteria vary from organization to organization, but what’s important is to continuously monitor and optimize to get better quality leads and not just “set and forget.” It is an ongoing process of defining and redefining success metrics backed by data and actionable insights, with the ultimate goals of:

• Improving the buyer experience
• Shortening the sales cycle
• Optimizing the marketing budget

Outside of the typical revenue and pipeline generated/influenced metrics, what ways have you used to measure engagement and articulate impact to support storytelling to non-marketers?