December 13, 2022 | Andrew Lawlor

When Aaron Burke started as Precision for Medicine’s executive director for marketing and sales, he had just one option for measuring marketing success.

That option, last-touch attribution, showed him the marketing asset a user engaged with immediately before becoming a prospect. But it failed to capture any other touchpoints.

For example, if a prospect’s final interaction was filling out a contact form, Burke knew. But if the prospect had downloaded a Precision for Medicine white paper or attended one of its webinars before downloading the white paper, that activity was not connected to the final action.

For Precision for Medicine, a longtime Aptaria Salesforce client which helps life science companies develop new therapeutics and diagnostics, that knowledge gap was a “big miss” for understanding the value of its marketing efforts.

“There are certain marketing activities that we do that tend to be the initial touchpoint more frequently,” Burke said. “They are the things that bring the lead in, but might not be the final step on the journey before they convert. So it’s very important to have a tool that allows you to give attribution to initial touchpoints, nurturing touchpoints, as well as conversion activities.”

Burke knew he needed a more sophisticated model for attribution. So he asked Aptaria how we could help. We have been Precision Medicine Group’s go-to Salesforce partner since 2015, helping Precision for Medicine and other divisions with Salesforce sales, marketing and CRM projects as they have grown both organically and through acquisitions.

Our team proposed customizing Salesforce’s Campaign Influence feature to implement a multi-attribution model.

We built a solution that currently tracks three distinct touchpoints per lead, but gives Burke the option of adding more touchpoints to the equation.

And the model is fully data-driven, which allows Precision for Medicine to change the campaigns involved and the weight assigned to each as market conditions change.

“It gives me a lot more insight, especially when reporting to leadership, as to the effectiveness of what marketing is doing and the ROI from individual activities,” Burke said. “It helps me make sure that we’re data-driven and that I’m being intentional in terms of where I choose to spend marketing effort and dollars based on what works for my audience and market.”

Aptaria also built dashboards to help Burke monitor his campaigns. The dashboards provide a view of how different categories of marketing are performing, how marketing efforts are performing in aggregate and what the data looks like month over month (or over different time periods).

For example, in the opportunities dashboard screenshot below (which is displaying sample data), you can see that Google Search (light blue) is producing a growing number of opportunities each month.

And in the pipeline dashboard screenshot below (also using sample data), the increasing light purple segments show that the best return on marketing investment is coming from webinars.

From just a quick glance at dashboards like the samples above, Burke gets actionable information that allows him to make informed decisions about his marketing budget.

The development process was relatively simple. Burke set out the parameters of the model he hoped Aptaria could build, and we built it to his specifications. Our demo showed Burke that he could adjust weights for different campaigns and touchpoints easily, and that he could track progress quickly.

“The team was able to grasp very quickly what it was that I wanted and why,” he said. “And then they went away and built something that worked, and they made sure that it was connected to my ability to report out on things and to also see insights. It’s been good.”

Burke lists three key benefits to the application Aptaria has built:

It allows for better planning: When his colleagues ask how long it will take for a campaign to show results, he can answer with data as evidence. For instance, the data might show that webinars take six to nine months to show an increase in business.

“A lot of the marketing that we do is really forward-thinking, and to actually have hard data on it and to be able to show it is really useful,” Burke said.

It provides a consistent approach to attribution: No model for weighting marketing touchpoints is going to be perfect — a webinar might have made a small impression on one lead, but a much bigger impression on another.

But compiling the data from various touchpoints the same way every time is still valuable for a marketing leader like Burke.

“Having a system that has a consistent and unbiased approach to marketing attribution is very useful,” he said.

The model is designed to evolve: While consistent attribution is valuable in the short- and mid-term, business conditions change over longer periods of time. And when they do, the model is flexible.

So Precision for Medicine can adjust the model — or create new models — when conditions warrant. It gives the application an element of future-proofing that Burke needed.

“As I better understand my audience and my market and those things that lead to business, the solution helps me to adjust the model to account for that,” he said. “But also by having a model that gives me more insight into data, it helps me better understand what things actually do lead to business within my particular industry and my particular audience.”

What’s next for Precision for Medicine’s multi-touch marketing tracking solution? That’s up to the company and Burke.

He said that over time, he has realized that tracking three touchpoints isn’t enough. As Precision for Medicine’s marketing has become more complex, he has seen a need for a change.

And this solution makes it easy for him to do just that.

“As we become more sophisticated as a marketing organization, there’s a need to adjust our marketing data analytics to become more sophisticated as well,” Burke said. “As we look to what we’re going to do in 2023, I almost certainly will be making adjustments to the depth of our analytics and tracking, and this tool provides me with a key foundation to be able to do that.”