The Importance of Marketing Attribution to the Executive Board

Businesses can anticipate actionable insights that will increase their traffic and revenue when marketing teams execute effectively.

FREMONT, CA: Marketing attribution refers to the methods by which marketers discover how marketing tactics and potential customer interactions contribute to their sales, traffic conversions, and revenue, among other marketing objectives. In other words, it is a method for measuring the return on investment (ROI) of the channels that connect their companies with prospective customers.

Marketing attribution attempts to comprehend prospective customers' multiple steps before purchasing for greater precision. There are numerous channels and messages involved in acquiring new customers. This includes advertisements on Facebook, Twitter, an eCommerce store, a brand's website, and emails.

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Many businesses have been misinformed into believing that conversion attribution is a data set that only affects the marketing department. There is no reason for the C-suite to examine attribution statistics; they should disregard them entirely. In reality, if the C-suite makes decisions without properly evaluating and comprehending attribution data, it is likely steering the ship in the wrong direction. This is why:

Eliminate the silos

Marketing attribution impacts digital campaigns but can also assist decision-makers in understanding the company's future. However, the key to using attribution data in this manner is to eliminate silos.

It is essential to have a unified understanding of the attribution aspects of marketing conversions. Companies are missing the connections if they only consider the digital aspect and ignore offline marketing efforts. They cannot assume that a high conversion rate indicates that a single aspect of their campaign is effective in isolation based on a high conversion rate from that aspect alone. By destroying the silos, companies can increase the efficacy of their campaigns, see the influence of one campaign on another, and gain a comprehensive view of their entire effort.

Enter The C-Suite

In most cases, day-to-day operations involve fewer top-level executives and the lever-pulling required for the marketing strategy. For instance, an executive team member may observe an increase in traffic on a particular social media channel and conclude that it merits a larger budget allocation. The issue is that they are only utilizing half of the data. If they had invested in comprehensive conversion attribution and paid attention to the big picture, they would have realized that this uptick was not an isolated incident. It was, in fact, the movement of non-digital tectonic plates that triggered the digital conversion tsunami.

Consider the communications industry as an illustration. The majority of telecom marketing campaigns combine online and offline elements. Suppose a member of the telecoms C-suite observes an increase in online activity without considering that an offline campaign was launched by mail several days prior—in that case, they will fail to recognize the connection. The increase in online traffic and all sales conversions did not necessarily begin online. The journey of the customer began at their mailbox.

The Benefits of Attribution Investment

There are many ways that attribution can be useful. It's important to ensure the marketing budget is going in the right direction, but it's also important for the big picture. Attribution data can help people in the C-suite make decisions that have nothing to do with marketing. Detailed and accurate attribution data can help decide what kind of talent needs to be hired, where the company's tech focus is, and even how the competition is doing.

Lack of investment in attribution measurement can cost a business significantly more than lost sales. This kind of information is like getting an ECG of the market. Companies can't tell how well a market is doing or where they stand in it from just half the readout.

Achieving buy-in and alignment from the C-suite requires adhering to some important best practices:

Promotion: A significant pitfall is assuming every C-suite member understands marketing analytics and how they can benefit the organization. It is crucial to have advocates on the executive team who comprehend the CMO's approach, media strategy, and the need for analytics to comprehend the relationship between all tactics as they attempt to move prospects through the five stages of influence—unawareness, awareness, comprehension, and action.

Alignment: Marketers must speak their language when interacting with the C-Suite and understand each member's unique pain points. Analytics are indispensable to the entire organization's success, not just the marketing department. A matrixed approach assists in aligning all organizational groups with a common playbook that serves as the basis for performance-based dialogue.