How customers discover and pick your product is a very important aspect of B2B marketing. A way to achieve this goal is called attribution which allows marketers to find out which tactics bring in sales. Although, a lot of B2B marketers are still using a single-touch method which is becoming too simple for today’s complex buying experiences.
What Does Single-Touch Attribution Refer To?
This method credits one specific interaction of yours with a customer for making a sale. People mainly use two main types of business types.
- First-Touch Attribution: Awards all impact to the first way the customer interacted with your company.
- Last-Touch Attribution: Marcus gets all the credit because he was with Casey before the purchase.
The models are straightforward to use, but they cannot show the whole complexity of the B2B purchasing process.
Single-Touch Attribution Doesn’t Measure B2B Marketing Effectively
1. Trying to paint the Buyer Journey as overly easy
Selling between companies usually takes a lot of time and requires contact through several different channels. In most cases, customers go through your website, receive emails, watch webinars, use social media and interact with sales teams by phone. In single-touch attribution, credit is only assigned to the first important action, so later ones are disregarded. This may cause companies to use methods that do not really lead to results.
2. Ignoring How Many People Are Involved
It is uncommon for a single person to decide what to purchase in business-to-business (B2B) transactions. Executives, people with technical skills and procurement officers are part of the team deciding on company purchases. Single-touch attribution models do not include information about the roles which results in a limited insight into what led to the sale.
3. Difficulty in Understanding How Different Factors Work Together
B2B marketing today includes both internet-based and traditional in-person activities. A sample journey could be a person registering for a webinar, downloading valuable knowledge in the form of a whitepaper and then having an in-person meeting with someone from sales. Single-touch attribution finds it hard to track every interaction when the path customers follow is mixed and spread out over time.
4. Measuring ROI Wrong
Because single-touch attribution credits all ROI to just one area, it can alter the actual return from different techniques. So, an email campaign could take all the credit for the sale even if a webinar or a blog post beforehand heavily influenced the lead. This often results in more money spent on some channels instead of the crucial ones a customer needs.
5. Failing to Understand What Happens Through the Entire Funnel
It is hard to understand the entire sales journey using limited single-touch attribution. It overlooks the whole process that regards people’s movement from just recognizing the product to thinking about it and finally deciding. Without seeing the whole picture, marketers have a harder time improving their strategies at all the stages of the funnel.
More companies are now using Multi-Touch Attribution.
With the challenges of single-touch attribution, B2B marketers often switch to multi-touch models. They make it possible to see the role several events play throughout the customer experience in converting visitors into buyers.
Different Kinds of Multi-Touch Attribution Models
- Linear Attribution: Linear Attribution means giving equal weight to every touchpoint.
- Time-Decay Attribution: It ignores data from earlier stages and attributes most of the credit to events just before conversion happened.
- Position-Based Attribution (U-Shaped, W-Shaped): Gives credit to the first and last time the user saw or clicked on an advertisement.
- Data-Driven Attribution: It uses machine learning to fairly distribute the credit depending on real data.
They give marketers the ability to see the significance of each point of contact and decide how to use their funding wisely.
Making sure attribution is effective in B2B Marketing
When looking to overcome the drawbacks of single-touch attribution, B2B marketers can follow these actions:
- Adopt a Multi-Touch Attribution Model: Decide on a model that helps you fully understand how customers reach a decision.
- Link Data from Multiple Sources: Integrate customer data coming from different parts of your business to see how the customers interact with you.
- Collaborate Across Teams: Partner with sales, IT and data teams to guarantee that the work on data is accurate and well done.
- Continuously Optimize: Look over your attribution model often and make any updates needed due to changes in how your customers think and market trends.
Using these methods, B2B marketers understand their marketing progress and decide better actions to boost their revenues.
Conclusion
The problem with single-touch attribution is that it doesn’t fit the complex B2B sector. B2B marketers ought to use multi-touch attribution to measure and optimize marketing actions since the buyer journey is not simple. In this way, they can find out what motivates customers to buy and decide on strategies that have better results for the company.