The Legends of B2B Marketing March 5, 2024 Selim Maalouf 9 min read
Ever wonder what it would look like if someone started a newsletter about B2B marketing, wrote the first issue without mentioning marketing once, then tried to bring it back to marketing in the second issue but was too tempted to keep the previous topic going?
I wonder as well.
Anyway, today I'll be talking about how businesses use data wrong...Again.
It is related to marketing, though. It's a rather touchy subject... Get it? because of multi-touch attribution models? The joke wasn't funny and you'd rather be doing literally anything else? Fine.
Sadly for marketers around the world, the massive budgets they get to spend on shiny new toys and marketing channels come with strings attached. Mainly a person on the financial team asked "where did the money go".
I spent it all, Dave. What do you want from me? An ROI report? What is that? Can I buy it from somewhere? Could you give me some money to buy it? What do you mean you already gave me enough money?
It's easy for marketers to blame the lack of resources for some of the inevitable failures that they might face in their day-to-day. However, nobody will sign a check without having some expectation of a return on that investment.
Justifying your expenses, especially for brand marketing, can be quite challenging. But thanks to people far smarter than you and I, we have found a way to tie these expenses to revenue.
By tying these expenses to the marketing channels they contribute to, we can develop tracking models that assign credit for a sale to the channel where the customer had a conversion.
If you are looking for marketing jargon, this is where the fun starts.
This model is called Last-Touch Attribution: it gives 100% of the credit to the last interaction your business had with a lead before they convert.
Makes sense. A person walking down the street sees a sign for an ice cream shop. They go in and buy an ice cream cone. The sign was the reason for the sale!
Not quite.
The sign was the reason that person found the shop. But why did the sign get them to buy ice cream? Were they thinking about ice cream already? Was it a hot summer day and they were told ice cream makes the heat more bearable? Were they in the street looking for the shop or did they stumble upon it?
Many questions that describe a series of fortunate events that reunited a lucky person with a long-lost mint chocolate chip ice cream cone (Mint chocolate chip is the best ice cream flavor, fight me).
So what is the best way to track attribution? There isn't one.
But I can describe the ones we know, and you can assess which one could be a fit for you
Single Touch vs Multi-touch Models
The easiest way to think about an attribution model is to assign 100% of conversion credit to one marketing touchpoint. These are referred to as Single-Touch Attribution models. They are not complex and easy to implement.
1- Last-Touch Attribution
As the name suggests, this model gives 100% of the credit to the last touchpoint your marketing had with a lead before they convert.
This is the default attribution model in most platforms, including Google Analytics, due to its simplicity to implement and evaluate. But unless you have a very short buying cycle and you don't have too many touchpoints, ignoring everything before the conversion touchpoint can paint the wrong picture.
2- First-Touch Attribution
This model credits the touchpoint where your prospect started their journey. This assumes that once a prospect finds out about your company, the sale is inevitable, so all consecutive touchpoints leading to the sale are irrelevant. Affiliate marketers love this model, so do internal marketing teams in B2B. But same as before, unless you have a short buying cycle, this model is too simplistic and will lead you to tunnel your focus into lead acquisition channels and ignore the rest of the customer journey.
3- Last Non-Direct Touch Attribution
This model is a bit more helpful, as it eliminates any direct interaction that occurs right before the conversion.
How many times have you seen "direct traffic" as a lead source and felt more confused, not knowing how that prospect knew about your website in the first place? Although it is better than the first two, it is still too simplistic for any complicated and longer sales cycles.
4- Linear Attribution
Your customer journey had multiple touchpoints, and each of those touchpoints played a necessary part in the conversion, so why not give them all the same weight?
Because not all touchpoints are created equal. This model does provide a more nuanced approach than single-touch models, but it does not help you highlight which touchpoints are the most impactful.
5- Time Decay Attribution
This model takes the linear approach and adjusts it under the assumption that the closer touchpoints to the conversion hold more weight than the touchpoints earlier in the journey.
If you are selling expensive B2B products or services through long sales cycles, then relationship building is a big factor in your success, and this model can help you conceptualize this.
However, this model minimizes the effects of top-of-the-funnel marketing techniques.
6- Position-Based Attribution
Also called U-shaped attribution. If you look at first-touch and last-touch attribution models and find that both bring valuable insight, then you can squish them together by assigning 40% to each of the first and the last touchpoints while spreading the remaining 20% across the rest of your touchpoints.
This is the most robust model you could use.
But what if you have more money than sense? You can hire consultants to create a custom attribution model tailor-made to your company's needs or use machine learning based on historical data to refine your model as you go.
What about the touchpoints that the software cannot measure?
Since man discovered content marketing, shovel and pickaxe vendors have positioned themselves as the gold mining experts and taught you the most efficient ways to mine for gold: by using a shovel and a pickaxe.
In the age of personal data collection and web tracking, you best believe that technology has still not found a way to track every single breath we take.
Don't get me wrong, they will at some point.
But in the year 2022, there are still things that are not possible. Not every marketing touchpoint will show up in your attribution reports, and as a result, not every marketing spend will show up in your ROI report.
This brings us to our main dilemma: Do you stop doing activities that you cannot track, in favor of those that you can?
If you answered yes, you will soon meet the captain of the Titanic, because you are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
The Dark Iceberg - How humans buy in the 21st century
Good marketers can take established strategies and apply them in their business with great success. Great marketers can take proven strategies applicable to one circumstance and adapt them to fit a new circumstance when faced with never-seen-before challenges.
But true marketing legends are those who take a step back and analyze the industry as a whole and can see gaps where others don't. Or more accurately, they look for gaps where others refuse to.
Marketing attribution vendors have long indoctrinated the digital marketing space to only consider doing activities that their software can track.
Dark Social and the Dark Funnel are two concepts that have recently become mainstream in B2B marketing communities here on LinkedIn. Pioneered a few years ago by cutting-edge marketers who stripped away the technology blinders and went back to marketing basics.
They asked a simple question: how do B2B buyers buy in the digital age?
You could easily run to your surveys and your tracking codes and pull report numbers that tell you the same old story. But they didn't.
Instead, they talked to their customers. Straight up.
What they found was so genius in its simplicity: Their customers buy from people they trust. But these customers don't trust their vendors anymore, they only trust their peers.
So what should be your strategy? Simple. You join their industry peer communities.
Impossible? No. Hard to execute? Definitely. Trackable? Probably not.
Gaining access to these communities is not something you could do overnight. You cannot pay to get in, nor fake your way in. Instead, you have to grind out activities that no CEO or CFO would agree to.
You need to slowly build your trust by elevating one of your subject matter experts to a thought leader in the industry through organic educational content, networking, and community involvement.
Where these communities live will decide what channels those activities will live in. The easiest one is LinkedIn. The most effective one is the group chat.
Consider this scenario: An industry member sees an educational post on LinkedIn from your subject matter expert. It resonates with them. They follow the profile and look forward to future content. They find your next post so compelling that they join the conversation in the comments. You invite them to listen to your podcast as you go more in-depth there. They accept your invitation. One of your episodes discusses a problem that one of their peers was having. They share your podcast episode with that peer in their group chat. That peer listens to the podcast and is blown away. They go to your website and fill out a form to reach out to you and discuss a potential sale.
Which channels were most effective in this conversion, in your opinion?
The social media educational content and the podcast.
But what did the tracking software attribute this conversion to?
Contact source: Direct Traffic
If you are suddenly feeling sick to your stomach because your attribution reports just flashed in front of your eyes, then the Red Pill I just handed you is taking effect.
Welcome to 2022, when we marketers are finally understanding that we have much to learn and even much more to unlearn.
