Unlock the Power of Marketing Attribution: Enhance Performance and Drive Revenue

Improving Marketing’s performance and impact on revenue is freaking hard. It’s an area of marketing that almost everyone struggles with and/or avoids. Why? Because it’s a challenge to measure the performance of ALL marketing touchpoints tracked in various tools AND connect each touchpoint to sales/orders aka revenue (both won and lost). Also, some of us are afraid of what we might find out like we aren’t performing as well as we hoped. 

We know we need to find out Marketing’s impact on revenue to budget more accurately and to improve our marketing performance. Without it, we don’t know which marketing efforts are working and which are not. Thus, we can’t adjust and we’re just guessing. Sure, a high email click through rate is great but did any of those clicks impact a sale?

Enter Marketing Attribution tools. A Marketing Attribution tool is a solution that helps businesses understand how their marketing efforts and investments contribute to sales/revenue. With a strong Marketing Attribution tool, you can measure ALL of your marketing touchpoints, both online and offline, measure each touchpoint’s impact on sales aka attribution, and predict future marketing impact on sales. Sound dreamy? It is. But, it’s real and possible now.

Most of us use various disconnected marketing tools to track and measure the performance of the most common marketing touchpoints such as:

• Email opens and clicks
• SMS clicks and replies
• Website and blog visits
• Website chat conversations
• Form submissions
• Paid ads clicks
• Organic search clicks (SEO)
• Video views
• Social interactions
• Event and webinar registrations and attendance

The challenge is they are usually disconnected marketing tools so you don’t get a full view of all marketing touchpoints impacting your sales/orders. More about that below in option #2.

Let’s not forget the harder marketing touchpoints to track and measure, offline touchpoints like billboard ads, print/signage ads, radio ads, call center phone conversations, word of mouth, etc. To track offline activities, you need to ask the customer how they found your company which is often done by having your customer service representatives or salespersons ask the customer. Or, you send the customer an online survey to ask them how they found your company. Another option is to use a promo code so when a customer uses it, you know which ad drove them to your company.

If you don’t have or want a Marketing Attribution tool, what are the alternative options to improve Marketing’s performance and impact on revenue?

1. Don’t measure all marketing touchpoints and their impact on revenue. Keep guessing what’s working and what’s not working. This option will hurt your marketing performance as you won’t be doing data-driven marketing. You’ll be holding your team and company back. Not recommended.
2. Measure each touchpoint in the separate marketing tools used to send and track them. For example, if you send emails from SendGrid and texts from Twilio, measure from those two tools. However, this option lacks the full view of all marketing touchpoints impacting a customer’s journey. And, even if your chosen most marketing software comes with ROI or Marketing Attribution reporting, most of them calculate ROI differently so you end up with inconsistent metrics (see one of our past blog posts about 5 Common Marketing Attribution Models). Not recommended.
3. Build and maintain a custom solution. It usually involves a Business Intelligence tool to create the reports and dashboards, Data Warehouse and/or Customer Data Platform (CDP) to aggregate and connect the marketing touchpoints to sales data, and a lot of people time to configure and maintain it. It’s usually the most time consuming and expensive option but often the most customizable. Better than option 1 and 2 but still, not recommended.

RECOMMENDED: We recommend investing some of your Marketing team’s budget and people training and daily usage time in a Marketing Attribution tool. Marketing Attribution tools are purpose built to help marketers solve this age old challenge of how to improve Marketing’s performance and its impact on revenue. Don’t waste time trying to reinvent the wheel. And yes, none of the Marketing Attribution tools are perfect like some don’t have many out-of-the-box integration connectors. But, they get you farther faster in measuring and improving your Marketing performance than the 3 options aforementioned.

Here are a few Marketing Attribution tools we’d suggest you evaluate then pick the best one for your business needs to improve your Marketing’s performance and its impact on revenue:

One of the key items to evaluate is the Marketing Attribution tool’s integration options or connectors. First, list out your existing Marketing tools used to track marketing touchpoints like those listed above (online and offline) as well as your Sales tools used to capture sales/order data such as a CRM, Commerce, and/or ERP tool. Then, identify if the Marketing Attribution tool has out-of-the-box aka “native” integrations with your Marketing and Sales tools or at least most of them. You’ll want to ask them if the integrations are done via existing API connectors, SFTP, or manual uploads. If they say a “custom solution” is needed, it will likely have a high price tag so be sure to dig into that by asking a lot of questions.

Also, be sure to ask the Marketing Attribution vendor how they connect or as some call it, “harmonize” marketing touchpoints to sales/orders and which marketing attribution models come out-of-the-box in their tool. It’s also good to ask if you can create custom attribution models and if they have any AI data science models (if yes, which and exactly what metrics do they get you).

Conclusion

There’s no better time than now to improve Marketing’s performance and impact on revenue by getting a Marketing Attribution tool. If you already have one, we’d love to hear from you! We’d love to learn which one you chose, why, and how it’s working for you.

Need help evaluating Marketing Attribution tools and then choosing, implementing, and learning one? Feel free to Contact Us and one of our Marketing Performance Experts will be happy to help.

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