Marketers need data that can help them make informed business decisions. Knowing your audience’s needs, interests, and pain points is crucial for all your marketing campaigns. Many marketers rely on demographic data like age, gender, location, occupations, etc. However, having demographic data is not enough. Marketers need attribution reporting that can help them analyze their customer’s journey from start to finish.
According to HubSpot Research, 52% of marketers are currently using attribution reporting. Attribution reports can help you understand where your customers are coming from. And when did they first come in contact with your brand or what was the last touchpoint? This helps determine which marketing initiatives are bringing in revenue. You can focus your time, money, and resources on initiatives that are contributing to your business growth. The goal should always be to make improvements, which is why attributing revenue to your marketing campaigns will make you more successful.
Let’s first understand what marketing attribution is.
What is Marketing Attribution?
Marketing attribution is a process that helps you calculate the return on investment of your marketing efforts. It can help your team determine which marketing tactics resulted in leads and profit. With marketing attribution, you can prove how your marketing efforts impacted sales.
What is attribution reporting?
An attribution report helps you analyze the customer’s journey right from the time they first visit your website to the time they become customers. It measures the conversion path to see what made a customer convert. Marketers need to identify all the influencers that drive conversions to be successful. This report can help marketers pinpoint which effort led to conversion in the funnel. Attribution reports can help marketers make informed decisions about their marketing campaigns, and where to invest their time and money.
Why do marketers need attribution reports?
Marketers need attribution reports to help them identify which pages or marketing channels are driving more conversions. There are many ways marketers use attribution reports.
Blog Content
One scenario is where marketers need to find out how their blogs are performing. Content is an integral part of inbound marketing. Hence, marketers want to know how their blog content is contributing to lead generation. Attribution reports show information like how many times a blog post was viewed before the conversion. This information is useful for bloggers who have not been able to attribute lead generation to their blog content.
The information from these reports can help marketers analyze which types of content perform better. It can be certain topics, formats, or even any type of promotion that gets more leads. With this data, you can write more content on topics that gets more leads. This is how marketers can make informed decisions on their content marketing with attribution reports.
Channels
After content, marketers need to analyze which channels are more successful in lead generation. You can monitor how various channels are performing whether paid or unpaid. If you are getting leads from a particular channel, then you can focus more time and resources on it. For example, if paid ads are getting you more qualified leads then you keep investing and optimizing your ads. This will show you what your priorities need to be.
Landing Pages
Another area where your attribution reports are useful is your landing pages. These could be your homepage, pricing pages, or any other informational page. Take a look at which pages are contributing to conversions in your funnel. Attribution reports can help you figure out which pages are used frequently. This can give you an insight into which pages need to be optimized, promoted, and which are helping you get more conversions.
How marketing attribution impacts sales team?
How consumers buy has changed drastically. Consumers don’t just go to your website and convert. But there are multiple touchpoints involved before they make a purchase decision. For example, a user might follow you on social media then visits your website to read one of your blogs written by your marketing team. Then they decide to get in touch with your sales rep. Your attribution report should include all these different touchpoints that impact a buyer’s decision. A multi-touch attribution model can help you determine all these complex touchpoints.
Your sales team is also an important part of this entire process. Sales reps need to understand marketing attribution as it would help them make more sales. When a sales rep knows which touchpoints had a great impact on a lead, it will be much easier to communicate with them. This will also help sales reps to understand what type of content or messaging a consumer was exposed to and through which channels. It will help them to better understand their user behavior.
Here is how marketing attribution impacts your sales teams.
Improved reporting for sales and marketing teams
It is important to integrate your marketing attribution and sales reporting. This will give you a better understanding of how the combined efforts of both teams made a sale. If you calculate sales and marketing ROI separately, the numbers may be redundant and unreliable. Once you align your marketing attribution and sales team you will get an accurate report. It will also help you see how efficiently both the teams have performed to drive conversions. Both teams can make important decisions based on this data.
Integrating marketing and sales software
You can align your marketing attribution with the sales team by integrating your CRM and marketing automation software. This will ensure that all your reports are in one place. Your sales reps can have all the data handy that they might require from the marketing team. This can make it easier for them to communicate with their leads or customers. This can also be useful for the marketing team as they can understand what tactic helped close the deal. Both teams can track and monitor their performance and make improvements.
Making informed decisions
The integration between marketing and sales reporting can allow both teams to make better business decisions. Once sales teams also understand marketing attribution, they can make decisions that will help them close more deals. You can invest in marketing campaigns that aid sales. For example, if you determine that your inbound leads convert with the help of sales reps, you can invest more in inbound marketing campaigns.
Align sales and marketing teams
This joint decision making can allow both your sales and marketing teams to collaborate on different campaigns. Both departments can work as one since they are driven by the same goals. The combined efforts of both teams can help your business increase conversions.
Marketing attribution can help marketers understand their customer journey better. With touchpoints getting more and more complex, businesses must run attribution reports to help them make informed business decisions. As discussed above, attribution reports are beneficial for both sales and marketing teams as it will encourage them to work as one unit.
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