The ABC of Attribution Marketing for Online and Offline Businesses

What is Attribution Marketing?

The cutting edge and over-the-horizon concept we introduce for you this time is not just a concept but a prerequisite to business success, productivity and profitability. Attribution marketing is the art and science of logical resource allocation of your company’s marketing dollars. The choices are vast, varied and never-ending. How do you prioritize your marketing investments. More importantly, what benchmarks do you use in order to determine when to commit your hard earned resources to blogging, article marketing or press release submissions. Attribution Marketing provides a sound and evolving matrix to answer many of these questions.

Sales Method Sequence and Allocating Resources

Sales basics have to be in position. In which order do you sequence an e-brochure, e-mail, e-book, phone call after a potential customer has left behind a calling trail?  Do you have a fixed sequence or will you try and pass control to the customer?

Another consideration is how much resources in terms of finances and effort are you going to direct toward particular efforts? Through web analytics, we attribute marketing productivity to the various sales tools and allocate resources. This is, however, only one of the various methodologies used in attribution marketing to arrive at robust and reliable client recommendations.

Multiple Inputs for a Viable Sales Funnel

Various sales inputs are measured for productivity and allocated in attribution marketing. For instance, a travel company advertises summer vacation packages  in newspapers and magazines. It also sends outglossy and information packed catalogues to potential customers. Some buy these vacation packages within a week and others purchase the same summer vacation packages after 30 days. Now we can attribute the sales of those who bought the package within a week of receiving catalogues to specific factors that attribution marketing research can potentially identify.

The Attribution Challenge

The attribution challenge relates to those who bought the package after 30 days. How much do we attribute to the effect of receiving the catalogue and how much due to the effect of looking at the newspapers? This is simplistic.

Typically, travel companies call up clients on the telephone or send e-mail solicitations to opt in lists. So how much of the sales achievement is due to calling up or writing to the customer? Nowadays, most travel companies have websites and often the order is placed online. The extent to which the summer vacation travel package in question has been strategically positioned on the agency’s website  and its relative outcomes is also an area of attribution marketing research.

Allocation between these various choices or “attributes” of marketing effort is vital for a healthy sales plan. Proper allocation of the budget between catalogues, newspaper advertisements, phone calls, maintaining a good website and other forms of marketing efforts have to be performed in a timely and professional manner.

Sales Efforts Are Not Independent

Often, sales efforts supplement one another. The website is listed on the newspaper advertisement, so customers search the site out and place their order. If you remove the advertisement and expect sales through the website, it may not happen, because people are no longer aware of your company. In other words, the advertisement not only builds your brand, it generates highly targeted and qualified traffic to your website. Only those prospects who are interested in your summer vacation packages will visit your website after reading the print advertisement.

There are travel companies which have only an Internet presence. Look at the various forms in which they could promote sales: e-brochures, e-mail messages, blogs, websites, print media, phone calls and so on. Obviously, attribution marketing is vital for them. When formulating a media plan, always consider the advantages of attribution marketing. If you are using the services of an interactive advertising and marketing agency, use their services for attribution marketing. Every marketing dollar is a vital resource and should be spent wisely.