Proving ROI is a top priority for marketing leaders, yet it continues to be one of the most difficult things to do. You know that your marketing efforts are driving revenue, but convincing your CEO isn’t so easy because many marketers are still only capable of showing first-touch attribution. You risk reporting false ROI without a multi-touch attribution strategy. Here’s how to get started.
Why Total Campaign Attribution Is Your Biggest Barrier
The biggest barrier to accurate ROI measurement is campaign attribution. Without rock-solid attribution, the rest of your measurement falls apart. If you can’t say with 100% certainty where each and every lead in your campaign originated, then you have already lost the battle. You should already have a marketing automation system in place to capture online lead activity. A fully functional automation system should be able to track the source of your online leads and record all interactions across your website. Online measurement alone is not enough to fully prove ROI. To capture all of your marketing leads, you also need offline attribution. This is accomplished using call tracking technology, which allows you to attribute every inbound phone call back to the marketing source that drove it. With the ability to capture both online and offline lead interactions, you are ready to take the next step towards multi-touch attribution.
Analyze the Sales Process at a Macro Level
As the number of people involved in the sales process continues to expand (Gartner reports an average of 7 people are involved in each B2B buying decision), you need to adapt your measurement to account for this. To get true multi-touch attribution, you need to aggregate each marketing interaction at the account level. A popular way of doing this with Salesforce Campaigns, which track activity at a lead or contact level. With the right implementation, you can aggregate campaign membership to the opportunity or account level. Once you have the ability to capture all marketing touches at the account level, you can move on to multi-touch attribution.
Implementing a Multi-Touch Attribution Strategy
With your foundation of complete campaign attribution and account-level data, you are ready to begin analyzing your ROI with a multi-touch lense. To do this you can use Salesforce reports, advanced Excel spreadsheets, or other software solutions that pull all the data together for you. The route you choose depends on how complex of an attribution model you need. Popular models include:
- Linear: All touches receive equal credit
- Time Decay: Recent touches receive the most credit
- Position Based: First and last touches each receive 40% of the credit with the remaining 20% distributed evenly to middle interactions.
These different models are only a few ways to look at multi-touch attribution. The model you choose to go with is highly dependent on what your customer journey looks like. Once you select the multi-touch attribution model most appropriate for your business, you can begin to properly attribute revenue to the marketing campaigns which ultimately had the most impact.
It’s time for marketers to move beyond first-touch attribution. Simply counting leads is no longer enough. Marketing plays a much larger role in the customer journey, and ROI measurement must adapt accordingly. Once you have a multi-touch attribution strategy in place, you can more effectively measure the ROI of your campaigns and prove the impact marketing is having on revenue.
To truly understand campaign ROI, you must account for every touchpoint throughout the customer journey. To learn more about why marketing leaders need call tracking for complete multi-touch attribution, check out this webinar, The Marketing Black Hole: Why Inbound Calls Are the Biggest Challenge for CMOs in 2016.
