Customer Touchpoint Hierarchy

HockeyStack allows you to get a unified view of how your marketing and sales is performing at various levels of granularity. This can be done mainly by setting up your touchpoint hierarchy inside Defined Properties.

At HockeyStack, we see marketing like a Russian doll made up of three hierarchical levels:

1. Channels

2. Campaigns

3. Assets

To help formulate questions that you can investigate in the first place, it helps to start from a macro level, then work your way down to a micro level. In other words, starting with channels and ending with assets.

As you go deeper, each stage creates its own set of questions you can investigate while also illuminating new questions the next level can answer.

In HockeyStack, you can set your touchpoint hierarchy within the Define Properties section to make this really easy.

But let’s define each level more specifically, starting with channels.

Channels vs. campaigns vs. assets

Channels

A channel is a specific medium or platform used to deliver a campaign and message.

Think of channels like the avenues through which your marketing messages get transmitted.

Channels include digital channels like Linkedin and email, traditional channels like direct mail or TV, and in-person channels like events or trade shows.

In HockeyStack, you can break down channels further by:

• Source (LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, etc.)

• Team (inbound, outbound, partnerships, renewals, etc.)

• Subteam (demand gen, content marketing, field marketing, etc.)

• Paid vs. organic.

Campaigns

A campaign is a coordinated set of marketing activities designed to achieve a specific goal within a certain timeframe. A single campaign can run through one channel- for example, like a Linkedin campaign; or it can run across multiple channels- for example, like a demand gen campaign across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and outbound sales.

In HockeyStack, you can group campaigns by:

• Persona

• Regions

• Campaign type- like retargeting, thought leadership, direct response, competitive, and more.

Assets

And third, an asset is either a creative asset within your campaign or a creative asset that serves as a destination or touchpoint. For example, an asset could be a landing page, your website, a specific ad, an outbound email sequence, or any other specific piece of content that you distribute through a channel.

In HockeyStack you can break down assets into two groups:

1. Assets: an asset is an individual asset

2. Asset groups- an asset group is a combination of like-assets.

Target audiences and velocity

What about target audiences and velocity?

Your target audiences help you segment analysis of channels, campaigns, and assets even more. For example, you can layer a specific segment over your MTA data to gain more granular insights.

And when we say velocity, we’re referring to the volume of campaigns delivered based on your budget, not sales/pipeline velocity.

Wrapping up

In the end, marketing delivers a set of campaigns to a target audience, at a certain velocity, through a group of channels leading to an asset.

And the best way to use attribution is to start at the top- with channel analysis, then work your way down to the individual assets or groups of assets.

To measure and analyze performance at any level, use the touchpoint hierarchy inside HockeyStack to guide you.

If you have any questions, schedule a demo (or reach out to your CS manager at HockeyStack) and we’ll give you the answers you need.