Sergio Alvarez is a performance marketing expert, digital attribution leader and CEO and founder of Ai Media Group.
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It seems like everywhere we look, there’s one shiny new marketing tactic claims to solve all your sales problems. While many of the more advanced tools seem to show promise, you probably won’t see the value you should when using them all individually.
Before investing in yet another marketing method, consider whether you attribution of your current platforms. If you want to stay ahead of the competition, this is essential.
Conversion data doesn’t work together.
No matter where you market, no platform will tell you the whole truth about your efforts. In fact, a platform’s analytics will almost always be biased in its own favor. For example, social media sites will tell you that sales conversions are coming from them, while Google Ads will say the same. The analyzes are not necessarily false. They just aren’t the whole truth.
When two separate platforms tell completely different stories about a single sale, it’s easy to believe the wrong story and end up pulling the wrong levers on your marketing budget. For example, a single sale could come from a combination of efforts from both Facebook and Google, but there’s no way you can tell if you’re just looking at platform-specific attribution data. This can lead to funds being reallocated in the budget from one platform to another, when in reality you need both platforms to make the sale.
Your data is placed in silos.
Conversions aren’t the only siloed aspect of your marketing; the data too. Many marketing strategies still exist in a silo environment, reporting on the performance of individual marketing tactics, such as social media stats, video views, mobile access, and organic traffic. This is great for those individual platforms, but the silo effect becomes problematic if we don’t look at how one affects the other.
Suppose a telecom company launches a marketing campaign with two objectives: 1) to acquire new customers and expand installations, and 2) to increase customer retention. To achieve this, the company hires two separate marketing agencies. The biggest difference between the two agencies’ campaigns is the reported data. The first company reports on impressions and other soft data, while the second reports on hard data, such as installation numbers.
If the telecom company looks at these reports separately, it only sees half the picture. Without a holistic attribution platform, it won’t understand how the two campaigns interacted, nor which customers were actually impacted by both.
Businesses need one source of marketing truth.
With a holistic marketing platform, your marketing team can start with your organization’s end goal and work backwards to see the full impact of all its marketing efforts. This results in strategic, data-driven insights and growth in return on investment. A holistic attribution platform provides a clear answer to the question, “How is a customer acquired from start to sale?” It enables individual tactical performance measurement, but also goes further by bringing the right mix to the surface. This leads to smarter optimizations based on the end result as a whole, not the individual tactical result.
However, a holistic marketing platform must be well designed to deliver the right results. Any gap in such a platform will completely nullify its effectiveness. So it must take into account the unique customer base and the unique needs of your organization. That way you know exactly which marketing levers to pull, because the picture is no longer blurry.
Marketers have more tactics and platform options at their disposal than ever before, and knowing which to grab at what time can be a challenge. Having a holistic marketing platform gives you the tools to evaluate which channels are successful at each step of the customer journey. In turn, you will be able to pull the right levers and continue to reach customers through routes that have proven to be successful.
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