5 Ways to Beat Your Marketing Attribution Challenges

With our marketing landscape grown wide and complex, marketers come face-to-face with more channels, more customers, and more challenges.

Marketers need to craft campaigns that don’t just seamlessly interact with customers across multiple touchpoints but also create a consistent brand experience.

To make the modern marketers’ job easy, marketing attribution is a powerful arsenal. It can help plan effective marketing campaigns and gives you the monetary value of each marketing touchpoint in our marketing mix.

Marketing attribution has myriad benefits but it’s a tricky trade to master.

Let’s understand how you can tackle any hiccups in your marketing attribution journey.

What Challenges Do Marketers Face With Marketing Attribution?

Implementing marketing attribution doesn’t mean you just brainstorm over the right marketing attribution type, set it, and forget about it. Here are some common challenges:

• Inability to utilize the full potential of marketing attribution
• Difficulty in managing marketing attribution
• Missing out on actionable data due to data silos

These challenges can get somewhat overwhelming, which may lead to:

• Misalignment between marketing and sales
• Difficulty in understanding the customer journey
• Confusion when targeting accounts
• Ineffective reporting
• Allocation of budget to wrong campaigns

5 Ways to Improve Your Marketing Attribution

While these challenges may initially seem daunting, with the power of technology and aligned processes, you can overcome them. Here’s how.

1. Start With Aligned Goals and KPIs

On the quest to achieve better results with marketing attribution, marketing and sales warriors need to align. With effective sales and marketing alignment, friction between these teams reduces which is critical for marketing attribution to succeed.

You can get your sales and marketing on the same page by creating a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for them. It’s best to integrate your CRM and marketing automation platform efficiently to ensure that both teams have a holistic view of the customer journey and can track as well as monitor the performance of their efforts. Revisit your marketing attribution efforts together, to understand how your campaigns have performed, and based on that, set agreed-upon goals and KPIs to stay laser-focused.

2. Get Rid of Duplicate Data

Duplicates in a database can throw off your marketing attribution efforts. If you have duplicate leads or contacts, then only one of the records is associated with an opportunity, while the campaign associated with the other records isn’t given any credit. Clean data in your marketing automation platform and CRM will help your ‘smarketing’ teams with accurate segmentation and personalization.

A smart dedupe solution, like M-Clean, can run behind the scenes in real-time to merge your duplicate data automatically and help amplify the performance of your marketing campaigns.

3. Use Lead-to-Account Matching

When the right leads aren’t matched to their account, your sales productivity gets hampered. Let’s say, there’s a prospect named Jessica who fills out a form on your website, attends a webinar, and interacts with one of your email campaigns. She enters your CRM as a Lead and the lead record gets associated with related fields like Email, Company, and Lead Source. But if another prospect, let’s say, Robert, from the same company, was to enter the system from a virtual event, there wouldn’t be any association between the two leads which can cause missed opportunities because they aren’t mapped to the right account.

Although sales reps can manually confirm which account the prospects belong to, manually matching lead-to-account is time-consuming. With lead-to-account matching automation, you can get better visibility into what’s happening with an account and boost sales productivity.

With insights at the account level, you can find out whether that account is:

• Big enough to meet your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
• Part of your company’s target industries
• In the right geographical area

4. Use Opportunity Matching

B2B decision-makers consist of a lot of people and it’s possible that salespeople don’t know everyone involved in a buying decision. Also, it’s not necessary that all contacts in your list align with your buyer personas, so you need to limit the association to target roles only. For example, you wouldn’t want to associate marketing roles if your company targets only developers.

Also, with contact to opportunity matching, you can view all the campaigns associated with all the Contacts in an Account. Based on the timeline of each campaign associated with the opportunity, you can establish which campaign was the “first touch” or “last touch” that created the opportunity. This will help you make better decisions about which campaigns you need to invest in in the future.

5. Go for Account-Level Understanding

To ensure your marketing attribution efforts are in the right direction, you can look into the existing data in your MarTech stack. This will help you with an account-level understanding of acquisition cost, lifetime value, and lifecycle length. With these insights, you can understand which customer segments have the lowest acquisition cost and provide highest value to your organization so that you can direct your efforts on those accounts.

When marketing attribution is done right, it gives a whole new meaning to and an understanding of each touchpoint that contributes to your lead-to-sale strategy. And when you go beyond the basics of marketing attribution, it unlocks new levels of organizational alignment and ROI. Need we say more?

Want to level-up your marketing attribution efforts? Talk to us!