Disclaimer: This blog was originally published on LinkedIn.
Attribution modeling is a powerful tool to minimize marketing waste, ensuring you’re using every dollar effectively by identifying your high-impact and underperforming channels.
Once you’ve landed on an ideal attribution model for your company, it’s time to act on the presented data to strengthen your conversions and MROI. Here’s a list of the top 10 next steps to consider:
- Allocate budget more effectively.
Use the data to identify which channels are most effective at driving conversions, and allocate more budget to these areas. Conversely, reduce spending on channels that are underperforming, and continuously monitor their performance.
- Refine marketing tactics.
Assess stages in the customer journey where certain channels have the most impact. Tailor the content and tactics on these channels to better engage the target audience at specific stages.
For instance, if your attribution data shows that email marketing plays a crucial role in the consideration stage, optimize your email campaigns to provide more informative content and personalized offers to potential customers in that stage.
- Improve customer targeting.
Use insights from the attribution model to understand the characteristics and behaviors of your most valuable customers. Refine your targeting criteria by applying these insights to future campaigns.
You might target your ads more precisely to the demographic that converts most often or design your email content to appeal more to the preferences shown by your best customers. The goal is to focus your marketing resources on the people who are most likely to bring value to your business, making each campaign more effective and efficient.
- Test and optimize.
Continuously test different aspects of your marketing campaigns (such as ad copy, design, targeting, etc.) based on the insights from the attribution model. Use A/B testing to validate any changes and optimize your marketing campaigns for better performance.
An attribution model, for example, might indicate that emails highlighting product features and the benefits of those features lead to conversions. To test this, create two email versions: one with your usual content and another with highly-emphasized product features. Send these to similar audiences and compare conversion rates to see if heavily emphasizing features drives more conversions.
- Enhance cross-channel harmony.
Identify how different channels influence each other, and optimize each channel for cross-channel marketing. Ensure that messaging and branding are consistent across channels for a cohesive customer experience. If an attribution model shows, for example, that customers often engage with a social media post before signing up for a newsletter and then make a purchase after receiving an email promotion, this indicates a journey across channels with each step contributing to the conversion.
To enhance cross-channel harmony, ensure consistency across social media posts and emails by utilizing a design theme that incorporates consistent color schemes, fonts, and visual elements to reinforce brand identity and deliver a seamless customer experience. Use social media to tease upcoming email promotions, creating anticipation. And align email content with the most engaging social media posts to reinforce the message. The idea is to create a seamless brand experience that guides customers naturally from one channel to the next, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
- Monitor and adapt.
Regularly review the performance data provided by the attribution model. Be prepared to adapt strategies as market conditions, consumer behaviors, and technologies evolve.
- Integrate with other data.
Combine insights from the attribution model with other business data, such as sales, customer service interactions, and market trends, to gain a more comprehensive view of your business’ marketing performance.
- Communicate findings and educate teams.
Share the insights from the attribution model with all relevant teams (sales, customer service, product development, etc.) to ensure everyone understands how their work contributes to the overall business goals. Educate them on the importance of the chosen attribution model in decision making.
- Set realistic KPIs.
Based on the insights from the attribution model, set realistic and measurable KPIs for future campaigns. For example, if the attribution model indicates that social media impacts early-stage customer engagement, set KPIs around engagement metrics such as shares and comments rather than just conversion rates. This approach ensures that your KPIs are aligned with the actual leading indicators of new business outcomes as revealed by your attribution analysis.
- Leverage technology.
Utilize marketing technology tools and platforms that can integrate with your attribution model for automated data collection, analysis, and reporting. For example, use Google Analytics combined with a CRM such as Salesforce. Google Analytics tracks user behavior across your website and digital campaigns, attributing actions such as page visits, form submissions, and e-commerce transactions to various marketing efforts. Most importantly, Google Analytics allows you to select the most appropriate attribution model for your company. This data can feed into Salesforce, which then records which interactions lead to conversions. Note that Google Analytics doesn’t allow for as many attribution model types as other platforms like HubSpot.
By taking these actions, your business can make data-driven decisions that enhance the effectiveness of its marketing efforts, ultimately leading to improved MROI and business growth. Executing a marketing plan without attribution modeling is like going into battle without intelligence. You can engage the enemy with all your manpower, but without knowing where your efforts are most effective, much of your firepower could be wasted on the wrong targets. Attribution modeling acts like a recon team by giving you critical insights into where your strategies are hitting the mark, allowing you to deploy your resources with tactical precision.
By Lori Turner-Wilson, RedRover CEO/Founder, Internationally Best-Selling Author of The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes
Taking Action
Attribution modeling is one of hundreds of best practices found in The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes — the playbook that middle-market B2B CEOs and marketing leaders lean on to scale. Backed by a groundbreaking research study, this book offers time-tested best practices, indispensable KPIs for benchmarking, insights on where your dollars are best spent, and, above all, the proven 12 BattlesTM Framework for generating guaranteed marketing outcomes. The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM is a battle-hardened approach to becoming an outcomes-first leader who’s ready to shake up the status quo, invest in high-payoff market research and optimization, and — yes — even torch what’s not serving your endgame. Download more than 50 templates, scripts and tools from the book on the Battle Reader Hub.
If you’d like to talk about how to build a marketing engine that delivers predictable results — whether you want to build it yourself or tag in our team to lead the way — we’d be delighted to help you get started.
