Is marketing attribution really a necessity in today’s digitized marketing environment? In short, the answer to this has to be yes – simply because, without measuring and assessing the kind of ROI, visitors or traffic that each marketing effort or marketing channel gives a brand, there is no possibility of understanding what needs more attention and what needs to be the core focus for the long-term.
Although most successful marketing teams have understood the need and importance of a thorough attribution model, marketing attribution can still be challenging.
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A few reasons why marketing attribution should be a priority area for any marketer:
Predicting the Success of Various Digital Touchpoints
Most B2B buying journeys are highly digitized in today’s environment. A good attribution model can help marketers understand not just the current success of each marketing channel but also help predict future outcomes. When every lead outcome or visitor outcome is associated to a certain marketing tactic or channel, it becomes easier for marketing leaders to know what’s working and what isn’t in the larger scheme of things.
This information can further be used to channelize efforts into certain areas that show better potential based on current data and attribution ratios.
Attribution Can Help Marketers Understand What Kind of Campaigns to Run
Proper assessment and visibility into various touchpoints in the online buying journey can help marketers understand what kind of campaigns to run next. Knowing how your current campaigns draw traffic and visitors can help marketers hone in on messaging that is more likely to work for future campaigns and use it to build better ROI.
If this data is broken down well and assessed with the right methodologies, it can fuel future efforts, minimize problem areas and help marketers identify and plan long term campaigns for more quarters.
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Attribution Systems are Easy to Assess Today
With the latest martech innovations and attribution models available through platforms like Full Circle for instance, have grown and expanded and become more sophisticated over the years. As digital marketing trends evolved over the years, so did the martech that drives it, leading to cleaner, simpler, automated attribution models that usually require two fundamentals to draw value from: a proper setup with current marketing channels and martech, a team to assess and analyse the marketing data to fuel future decisions.
While most B2B teams would claim that the B2B journey is still long winded and complex when compared to B2C counterparts, others would say that while this could be a fact, the point is that these B2B customer journeys are still pretty predictable. Using the right attribution model to further nurture and drive this effort or journey can help improve marketing outreach and messaging while also enabling marketers to try and reduce the customer lifecycle.
Another point to note when it comes to understanding how sophisticated attribution models are today, for marketers who feel that identifying intent and data on anonymous visitors is actually a waste of time, tools and features from leaders like 6sense and Demandbase can actually help these marketers identify even those prospects and traffic sources who don’t wish to identify themselves through business IPs. This puts the ball back in the court of the marketer to set up systems and capabilities around their website and marketing channels to measure, assess and attribute everything to drive future success.
It’s Important to Quantify Everything in Marketing
Marketing has to be fueled by ideas and creativity to improve outcomes. This is where experienced and seasoned marketers need to step in to know where to draw the line and how to build priority areas in their marketing processes.
Without a proper attribution model, marketing costs will keep rising and marketing teams will keep undertaking a plethora of marketing activities that could actually be beneficial only in terms of vanity but not true business ROI.
To create a simpler, effective, data and ROI-driven marketing process, every marketing step, marketing effort and outreach has to be measured to see how much business value it actually delivers.
Vanity metrics are long gone, some of the best performing startups in martech and B2B technology for instance might not boast of large followers on social media but they have a strong client base and high revenue models. In the past where vanity metrics such as this mattered, in a highly competitive, feature-driven business ecosystem, everything has changed and continues to evolve.
Identifying problem areas before they lead to negative impacts is what a good and thorough attribution model can do, while also enabling marketing leaders to run marketing efforts based on actual customer preferences and needs.
Measuring everything in marketing is a must!
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