Where digital marketing has completely changed the dynamics of marketing and advertising in the past few years, there are some serious challenges that have been brought out in the digital marketing world.
Many of these challenges are widely considered as the measurement or tracking issue rather than the marketing performance issue. In order to solve most of the significant marketing challenges relating to measurement and performance analysis, marketing attribution modeling has been proven to be very effective.
Here we are going to discuss 10 critical marketing challenges which have been solved by marketing attribution modeling. These issues have critical impacts of marketing performance management which are mainly solved using multi-touch attribution modeling.
Let’s discuss each of these important challenges one by one along with how marketing attribution modeling helps to overcome these challenges.
These 10 marketing challenges are acquired from various marketing case studies and experts and have been generalized to fit with most of the businesses and marketing.
1 – Attributing ROI to Marketing
It has always been a critical challenge for CMOs and marketers to accurately analyze the ROI of their marketing campaigns and efforts. There are two main reasons why it is such a difficult challenge.
The first is the use of a single-touch attribution model and second is the fact that marketing and sales teams are not aligned properly. This makes it extremely hard to not only justify the marketing performance in terms of revenues, but it also restricts the teams to properly allocate the budget – more on this later.
By using the multi-touch attribution modeling, you cannot only be able to analyze all the touch points and channels, but you can also analyze the proper returns from each channel and overall as well. This way, you do not only get the accurate ROI but also the segmented ROI as well.
Using multi-touch attribution, the challenge of attributing ROI to marketing, which is mainly a measurement issue rather than a performance issue, has been resolved for many organizations.
2 – Multi-Channel Campaign with a better approach
Marketers mostly keep their focus on single marketing channel for campaigns and even if their efforts are in multiple channels, they focus on each channel individually and separately. However, the actual success and data come from the multi-channel approach.
By using proper marketing attribution, the infamous single channel bias can be logically eliminated along with the implication of a better holistic approach in which all the sufficient marketing channels can be properly utilized for a successful marketing campaign based on the data analysis.
3 – Customer Journey Mapping
It is almost essential for every digital business to map an effective customer journey based on the accurate touch points and customer’s level of engagement with them, leading towards conversion. However, it is not as easy as it sounds, because of insufficient data of all the touch points and channels.
Mapping a customer journey requires sufficient data of touch points which are getting customers’ engagement and they are interacting with these certain touch points which lead the towards conversions.
This requires the data from all the touch points and channels, after which an effective customer journey can be put in place.
For this challenge, integrating the most suitable multi-touch attribution model cannot only provide accurate data for the analysis and making better decisions about mapping customer journeys but it can also help in testing various touch-points out without much of a hassle.
4 – Ability to understand customers’ journey and making better improvements
Like we mentioned earlier that mapping customer journey is essential, but it is a continuous process which requires continuous testing. You cannot just put one journey mapped in and except it to work for your benefit.
Multi-touch attribution can provide a more illuminating vantage point. By using multi-touch attribution, you get to see how each touch point is performing and you can also test the changes you are making in these touch points. The most important part of Conversion Rate Optimization is testing and marketing attribution makes it easy and more effective to analyze.
5 – Making Marketing Performance management Easier
Another significant challenge which many marketers face is the management of their marketing performance. It gets really frustrating if you cannot analyze which channels are working for which type of audience and how your campaign is performing overall.
This can restrict you to attribute your ROI as well as the overall marketing performance with the revenues or profits. Either you can rely on your gut feeling and keep spending on campaigns like you have always been or start using multi-touch attribution.
In this problem, multi-touch marketing attribution tells you which channels are performing well and which are not, so that you can improve your efforts on the weak channels or start focusing more on the effective channels.
It also helps in getting the accurate ROI of each channel by which your marketing performance management gets better.
6- Better Utilization of Marketing Budget
Commonly, marketers focus on specific channels which are either the ones which almost everyone is using or those which have been proved to be successful for them. Using this method, they put most or all the budget on those channels without properly knowing the results.
This might work for some businesses but not being able to fully measure the performance of all the channels creates a gap. It is completely possible that the channel on which most of the budget is being utilized is actually not the most converting channel for the business.
The marketer or CMO can only know about this if they use multi-touch attribution. Using the right model, they cannot only figure out the best touch points and channels for their marketing campaigns, but it will help them to allocate the budget on channels and touch points which truly do matter the most.
7 – Measuring the impact of Brand Marketing
It is one of the most challenging tasks for marketers to measure the ROI and effectiveness of brand marketing. However, we all understand that brand marketing is one of the most important parts of any business which cannot be neglected.
However, using the multi-touch attribution, it can become easier to measure the impact of brand marketing. The beauty of multi-touch attribution modeling is that it allows marketers to not only analyze and measure all the online channels, but it also helps in measuring the impact of marketing taking place via offline marketing channels – more on this in the next section.
So, using multi-touch attribution marketers can see the impact of brand marketing by analyzing the direct channels and survey results which are made to analyze the brand awareness among the audiences.
8 – Measuring Offline Channels
As mentioned above, marketers often find it hard to measure the impact of offline marketing and mostly rely on online channels which are easier to track and measure. However, a lot of marketing is done via the offline channels. So, it is wise to combine offline channels with online channels.
So, in order to analyze the offline channels and their ROI in an accurate manner, multi-touch attribution plays a crucial role. It helps in measuring the overall CLV and CPL of the users, which is essential to measure the ROI.
9 – Analyzing CLV accurately
CLV or Customer’s Lifetime Value is the key for long-term success and growth in terms of revenue. Analyzing the accurate CLV helps to measure the potential value of a customer, not only for the next transaction but for the overall course of their life as your customer.
It is definitely as difficult as it sounds, which is why it is another significant challenge for marketers. Thankfully multi-touch attribution also solves this problem for marketers and helps them to measure the actual CLV of their customers which helps in the long-term growth.
However, it demands continuous testing and analysis to crack the true CLV of the customers even with multi-touch attribution.
10 – Measuring Actual CPL
Most of the marketers decide their CPL (Cost Per Lead) based on the budget they have which apparently seems reasonable. However, it does not necessarily provide the best CPL for the campaign.
It is like, if you set the maximum CPL of $100 for your campaign and you are getting less converting leads, then it is wise to invest more on better leads down the funnel which are more converting, even if they have higher CPL.
This increases the overall CLV which benefits the business in the longer run. So, using multi-touch attribution, you can actually get the best CPL, despite the fact that it may seem a little more expensive, it would be accurate for better business growth as it will help you acquire better leads with more CLV.
Bonus – Forecasting
Another significant challenge that marketers face is the utilization of the best performing channels for future campaigns and marketing activities. The main reason for this is the insufficient data that marketers get from their past campaigns.
Using the multi-touch attribution, marketers would not only have better analysis and detailed measurement of the current marketing campaigns, but they will have the reliable data, on the basis of which they can easily predict the results of their future campaigns and plan better.
Final Words
In the digital age we live in today, marketing has become more data and analysis focused, for which having the right marketing technology is essential. For this, multi-touch attribution plays a crucial role and solves various significant challenges that most of the marketers face.
Do let us know which of these challenges do you face and how did multi-touch attribution help you if you have used it? You can drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook!
