In today’s increasingly complex and fragmented marketing landscape, a growing number of consumers navigate via both online and offline channels – as well as across devices – on their journey to a purchase or other conversion. While this shift has made it easier for consumers to engage with brands, it has made it extremely difficult for marketers to understand how a given channel, creative or other tactic—or various combinations thereof—impact an ultimate conversion.
Cross-channel marketing attribution management helps ease this burden by removing any existing perceptions about the performance of a given channel, and instead enables marketers to focus on the customer. From awareness to consideration to purchase, marketing attribution looks at the entire ecosystem of touchpoints and assigns a quantifiable value to each element in the context of the whole customer experience. It clarifies how each channel is performing and which combination of tactics provides the best return toward specific marketing and business goals.
To be successful at better engaging consumers leveraging cross channel marketing attribution, remember to follow your ABCs.
Accept
The days when a single channel, one-size-fits-all marketing approach was sufficient to drive successful marketing campaigns are over. When making a decision to buy, consumers interact with brands on more channels than ever before. Although this allows marketers to access several orders of magnitude more data, harnessing that data and leveraging it to accurately measure and optimize one’s overall marketing ecosystem has become increasingly complex. Last click measurement simply isn’t accurate, since rarely can a single channel be credited for a conversion. It also does not provide any insight into the audience or which channels and messages engaged the consumer best. Only algorithmic marketing attribution provides the technology infrastructure necessary to collect and manage massive amounts of marketing interaction data and deliver actionable insights into the way your target audience engages with media.
Believe
Marketing attribution is not a leap of faith. It provides evidential knowledge of the influence that every channel and campaign has on the other, and helps identify the right mix of tactics (channel, creative, message, etc.) that produces the greatest performance. Algorithmic attribution not only enables you to integrate offline and online data to achieve a single customer view, but also allows you to layer in first, second and third-party data to gain a richer understanding of the “right” audiences to target, what products or services are most relevant to them, when they are most likely to buy and the optimal combination of marketing tactics needed to convert them to a customer.
Convey
Knowing how individual consumers interact with your brand enables you to streamline how messages are conveyed in the future. Dunkin’ Donuts, for example, is deploying omni-channel strategies to strengthen and integrate the customer experience. They still allocate significant budget to traditional print and broadcast outlets, as well as to display advertising, but their advertisement might now ask you to text a shortcode for a free cup of coffee or use their mobile barcode scanner to get a special donut. With a robust attribution platform, Dunkin’ Donuts can tailor the appropriate message down to the individual level, as well as track all of their marketing programs to see which are the most effective, enabling them to adjust their spend accordingly.
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To successfully deliver the personalized experiences consumers expect, brands must have best-in-class attribution management technologies in place to collect marketing interaction data and turn it into accurate, actionable insights.