Tuesday 2¢ - Gamble so the House WinsTuesday 2¢:

We crave attribution, but is it good for the team? This Tuesday 2¢, a quick thought on marketing contribution inspired by a recent purchase.

Why is attribution so important to us marketers?

Well, there are all the good, wholesome things; we want to make good marketing investment decisions and understand what works, what we should do more of, and what we should stop.

Of course, there is also the darker side of using it to value our marketing, justify our existence, our effort, and maybe specific team performance and our people.

Ultimately, by following this accountancy-like path of attributing the spend on individual tactics, channels, or campaigns; attribution becomes personal, which could be detrimental to your team's effectiveness.

As marketing leaders, we need to hedge our marketing budget and spread it across various bets, as some of these bets will appear to win, and some will appear to lose.

I say “appear” as I think we agree that first-touch attribution is pretty much bollocks or, to put it more intelligently, of insufficient fidelity to make detailed decisions.

As I shared on our podcast recently, I heard about a marketing reporting tool on another podcast the other day, thought it was perfect for a client I am working with, Googled it, signed up for a trial, and entered my credit card number just yesterday.

The proper attribution for this should go to whatever motivated the podcast host to mention their tool.

It was not a paid promotion, but it could have been, or maybe he’s a paid influencer, or maybe he’s part of an influencer comms campaign that sent him an email this morning, or maybe he had some great service from the customer success team, or the product was amazing for him, or he knows the CEO.

Or some combination of the above, or maybe something else - who knows?

Whatever it is, he trusted the brand sufficiently to mention the product, which inspired me to buy.

Working back through this, the only attribution the vendor could see for me subscribing to the product, through their marketing data looking glass would have been my Google search, maybe I clicked on a paid ad, or it was an organic brand search.

A tiny high-five for the performance marketing team.

But maybe I am one of 200 people who heard that mention and did the same thing.

Good lord, now it’s a big high five to the performance marketing team.

A big high five that should have gone to…..

Brand?

Influencer marketing?

Customer marketing?

Customer success?

The CEO’s golf club membership?

I’m not saying that we can’t attribute some campaigns and spending to marketing performance; some tactics lend themselves to that. It’s just that some stuff is not going to appear on our radar, but we need to do it anyway.

The business needs to trust that our portfolio of bets delivers on the marketing investment.

And back to my point about attribution being “detrimental to your team's effectiveness” we need to ensure we communicate group success, be cautious about those high-fives and connecting attribution to team or personal performance.

Because when we gamble, the house wins.