“Attribution is fundamental to good marketing.” - Doug Bell
B2B marketers usually run multi-channel plans to drive growth for their organization. Since tracking that many leads and campaigns is overwhelming, they frequently skip over the process of measuring program-level ROI. When it comes down to it, attribution is inherently difficult.
But simply asking people how they heard about your product will never give you the context you need. Humans are unreliable narrators with unreliable memories and self-reported attribution can be incorrect. Using the right attribution tools can help you improve your ROI and secure the marketing org’s role in your business.
“Many companies are not as far off from being ready for an attribution tool as they think.” - Drew Smith
In order for attribution to be useful as a strategic and tactical tool, you need attribution models and structures to answer specific questions. If you’re trying to identify the most effective campaigns to double down on in your new budget, attribution models can help.
If you use Hubspot or Salesforce, they have attribution capabilities built in. Turning on these features is a great place to start. Hubspot is great for tracking online activities, though it can fall short for offline events or sales activity.
Salesforce is great for tracking events and sales metrics but you might run into issues with how it attributes every opportunity to associated campaigns. Neither tool is perfect, but that shouldn’t be the goal. Get started today with what you have in place.
“A proper attribution structure requires data expertise. It’s not a simple data process.” - Misha Salkinder
Marketers and Ops are beginning to understand that attribution is critical to their ability to speak to their performance when driving the buyer journey. That’s because attribution tools let you apply your cost model to your data and see where you can adjust spend to improve ROI.
The real hurdle is that there’s a skills gap in marketing and marketing ops. Once you have the attribution data, what do you do with it? The addition of AI features to attribution platforms is one way to increase data analysis and get insights quickly.
“If you can’t speak to the value that your channels provide, you’re going to struggle to remain credible.” - Doug Bell
The best marketers are using attribution tools to help them unwind bad decisions–and they’re doing it faster than you are. Attribution models give you visibility into what’s not working, so you can kill that program and move on.
World-class marketers also use attribution data to make smarter decisions about where to double down. By normalizing and standardizing the buyer journey, they can identify which accounts are worth passing on to sales. Ultimately, if you’re not willing to engage with data, your marketing plans won’t succeed.
“Revops has the ability to add context to your strategy once you have attribution.” - Drew Smith
You might not need attribution right now, but in 6 months to a year, your business will look different. Don’t be afraid to reevaluate attribution in the future as your marketing org grows.
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