Understanding marketing attribution
The Power of Content: Understanding B2B Marketing Attribution
In the world of B2B marketing, attribution is often a hot topic. Marketers want to know - is their blog working? How many leads have come through from their blog posts? These are valid questions, but perhaps they're not the most important ones to ask.
The complexity of the customer journey
Consider this scenario. You're a prospect interested in a software company. You may have read a blog post about them a year ago. Over time, you receive an email from them, read another piece of content, attend a webinar, and eventually start talking to a salesperson at an event. At this point, can you remember if the original touch point was that blog post you read a year ago? Probably not.
This is the complex, multifaceted journey of a B2B customer. It's not always linear, and it's often hard to determine which touchpoint was the most influential in leading to a sale. Many software companies push for more attribution tools to track every interaction, but the reality is that not everything can be attributed.
The wisdom of David Ogilvy
Legendary advertiser David Ogilvy once said, "50% of your marketing budget is wasted. You just don't know which 50%." This might sound like a flaw, but it's actually a feature. It's okay not to have everything figured out because the key lies in understanding your ideal customer profile deeply.
Deeply understand your customer
If you know your customers' pains and gains, if you can agitate both, you're on the right path. This deep understanding will enable you to create insightful content, whether it's blogs, videos, or webinars.
The goal is to understand what drives your customers. Once you grasp this, you can produce content that resonates with them, builds trust, and ultimately brings them into your channels or the top of your funnel.
Marketing attribution
So, while attribution is important, it shouldn't be the sole focus of your B2B marketing strategy.
Instead, focus on deeply understanding your customers and creating content that speaks to them.
This approach will build trust and guide them towards your products or services, even if you can't pinpoint exactly which blog post or webinar led them to you.
Remember, it's not about tracking every single interaction; it's about making meaningful ones.
The Ripple Effect by Waves Connects
This is the blog summary of part of our Ripple Effect series of interviews with event marketing professionals. In this short video, Hew Leith of Grip, talks about marketing attribution and how you don't have to measure everything.
You can watch the video here or read the full transcript below.
Marketing Attribution
“At the end of the day, a lot of B2B marketers want attribution and they want to go, right, is the blog working? How many people have come through from the blog? But if you think of it from the point of view of you being a prospect, when you talk to a salesperson and you end up getting into that conversation with the software company that you want to buy from, you can't remember if you read a blog a year ago and that was the thing that got you thinking about Grip, um, and then eventually six months later you've got an email from us and then you read another bit of content.
Um, and then you went on a webinar, uh, and then you started to talking to a salesperson at an event. You can't remember the original touch point was a blog post that you read. And so a lot of the times this attribution is driven by software companies to say, we want you to buy more of our software to make sure you can attribute everything, but not everything can be.
Attributed, you know, David Ogilvy, said 50% of your marketing budget is wasted. Um, you just don't know which 50%. Um, and that's actually a feature. It's not a bug. That's, that's absolutely fine. The bottom line is if you deeply, deeply understand your ideal customer profile, you know, what their pains are. You know what the gains that they want to be are, how to, you know, really agitate both of those.
So you know about your customer and then you can write really insightful, um, content, blogs, also produce videos, webinars. If you can understand the insights behind what's driving them, they then find out about your content, they consume it, and they trust you. And so they come into your channels, or they come into the top of your funnel by really deeply trusting you as an organization.”