Amplifying Returns on Marketing Attribution

As marketers regularly launch multi-channel marketing campaigns that overlap and interact over time, understanding the effects of the individual tactics and their contribution to your company’s overall marketing performance is essential to determine your next move. (After all, one of the main reasons for using a multi-channel approach is to reach consumers at each stage of the funnel and to provide experiences that make them want to purchase.)

So, how can you ensure that all of your channel touchpoints are accounted for? The best way to make your digital marketing efforts more effective is through a term marketers like to call “marketing attribution.” But, what is marketing attribution exactly? 

What is Marketing Attribution? 

In short, marketing attribution is used to measure the exact financial impact each channel has on your overall marketing performance. And because of that, marketing attribution isn’t only recommended, but necessary to use if you want to break ground in your industry. 

In fact, 44% of marketing professionals plan to implement multi-touch attribution in the next year. That means if you don’t have any plans to make marketing attribution a priority, you may miss out on the opportunity to reach new business. 

But, what’s the catch? Is marketing attribution really that important in the grand scheme of things? We will give you a spoiler. It is. 

Why Is Marketing Attribution Important? 

Marketing attribution is important because it gives businesses a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. From paid ads to social media, marketing attribution allows your teams to hone in and improve upon different areas of marketing that need to be tweaked. This can include creative imagery, personalization efforts, or even channels that you need to utilize more. You can view these insights by using data management tools where you can even get a holistic view of digital marketing performance across a wide variety of channels. There are many different attribution models in digital marketing for measuring success, so make sure the digital marketing KPIs you choose are in line with your goals.

The Buyer’s Journey Isn’t Linear

All in all, as more and more channels begin to enter the digital scene, it’s understood that the buyer’s journey is far from linear. And, without marketing attribution, your team will practically be shooting arrows in the dark. 

So, how can you use marketing attribution to amplify your returns? Today, we are going to share three actionable steps you need to take to skyrocket your growth through marketing attribution. Let’s get started.

3 Steps to Amplify Your Returns on Marketing Attribution

With the aid of data, marketing attribution can provide insights on the factors that caused a customer to purchase your product, making it easier than ever to know how to optimize your marketing campaigns to be better for your end customer. 

Are you ready to improve both your current and future marketing campaigns? Here are the three steps you need to follow in order to make marketing attribution work for you. 

1. Start by Asking the Right Questions

If you want to grow your returns, you have to start off by asking the right questions. You should be asking yourself questions like: 

• Which marketing efforts drive the most traffic and leads? 
• What channels are most worthwhile for the business? 
• What messaging and imagery resonates the most with our customers? 
• What used to work in the past but doesn’t seem to work anymore? 
  

By starting with these base questions, you will get a better understanding of the things you do well and the things you can improve upon. Then, you can identify what metrics will have the most impact on your ROI. 

2. Identify the Right Metrics

In a world where marketers interact with customers on multiple channels, accurately tracking and attributing leads taken from one channel to a specific point in a customer lifecycle is a complex task. That’s why having a formal method to derive actionable insights from marketing attribution is critical.

Some of the most common metrics marketers tend to track include:

• Website Traffic (ex. Organic traffic, social traffic, paid search traffic, etc.)
• Social Media Engagement
• Conversion Rate
• Email Open Rate & Email Click-Through-Rate
• Last Interaction Before Purchase
• First Interaction That Led to Purchase
• Form Submission Rate
• Cost-Per-Lead
  

These metrics are just scratching the surface of possibility. It’s all about figuring out what metrics move the needle for your business and analyzing those specific metrics over a given period of time. 

So, we’ve asked the right questions and we identified the specific metric we need to analyze, now what? 

3. Double Down on What’s Working

After asking the right questions and establishing the right metrics, it’s now time to double down on what’s working. If a campaign reveals that users are more engaged with a certain marketing campaign via iPad, then it makes sense to create more campaigns that are specific to iPad users. Or, let’s say that your Instagram ads are bringing in the most sales, but your Facebook ads are tanking. You may want to pull back your budget from your Facebook ads to allocate more time and funds towards your Instagram ads. 

The whole point of having a set marketing attribution system is to help you better analyze and launch campaigns that bring in more sales for your company. It’s about working on your toes and being ready to make alterations if need be. If you only look at the metrics but never implement change, your campaigns will never reach their full potential. 

Get More Conversions with Marketing Attribution

Here’s the bottom line. By looking at your marketing attribution system, you can pinpoint the exact touchpoints that are performing/resonating well with your audience and the touchpoints that aren’t. This will allow you to make data-driven decisions based off of actionable data instead of blind guesses. (Because using data to put your business ahead will bring you ahead, not guesstimates.) 

So, what areas can your marketing team improve upon to bring your  team more qualified leads and purchasers? Unifying your marketing data in one system of record is a good place to start! Schedule time to speak with NinjaCat today to learn more about our Digital Marketing Performance Management platform.