How to Get More Customers through Multi-Touch Attribution
It's no surprise that today, companies need to be marketing on all digital fronts..
Social media, Google ads, affiliate placements, and more all play into the funnel that your business uses to gather leads and turn sales. The notion of variety in where people spend their time online is subject to scrutiny. Some sources believe that businesses should only focus on the platforms where their demographic is most active. In contrast, others believe that marketing efforts should be widespread in the case of attracting outliers.
Regardless if you have a product or service, the digital front has an abundance of channels to locate potential customers, but what's often lacking in the marketers' wheelhouse of expertise is a comprehensive understanding of how the varying channels all feed into the sales funnel. Where do leads come from? Which channels convert and which ones don't? Is it possible to track conversions from radio to website? This is the question that Multi-Touch Attribution seeks to answer, and it's one of the best ways for small businesses to grasp the reigns of their marketing strategy.
What is Multi-Touch Attribution?
According to LeadsRX, a leader in the digital marketing space, Multi-Touch Attribution is the collection of touch-points across all marketing channels, which are then captured as conversions in the funnel, then mapped to each individual customer journey to provide unrivaled and impartial attribution results. In my own interpretation: MTA collects all conversions from all platforms that a company engages from a marketing perspective and designs unique journeys for each of those converting users. These custom "journeys" are designed to expand from the experience they've had so far (someone on Twitter will have a very different experience than someone from Google Ads or Facebook, for example.)
Not only is Multi-Touch Attribution a great way to design unique funnels for a variety of users, but it's effectively a mindset that collectively exhausts all opportunities for marketing narrative across all of a businesses' channels. Take a company's blog posts, for example- pieces of writing designed to share updates or notable topics related to their business, with an underlying assumption that readers will further explore their business and possibly become customers or clients. SEO draws the readers to the blog post (a different topic entirely). After reading said article, that target audience now has an imprint of understanding about what your business stands for.
From there, their next immediate action needs to be closely monitored by the marketing team. Do they choose to click on the "buy now" option, or do they navigate to a different page? Despite a companies' identified customer base, there will always be outliers trickling in through marketing channels, new people who may or may not become your customers but whose behavior can be very insightful to a marketing team's data. Ask yourself this question to better understand multi-touch attribution: where do you currently advertise your business/service, and how does that channel's target market vary from another channel? What's the difference in user behavior from an ad on YouTube versus Facebook?
Understanding these differences can be fruitful for a marketing team, but the trouble with such a comprehensive evaluation has always been the same- how do we track it all?
How are multi-touch points evaluated?
Social media posts, radio advertisements, phone/SMS ads, all of these help discover potential new customers, but the process for capturing and measuring these conversions is spotty at best. After all, how are you supposed to track an advertisement for your service on the radio that led to conversion when there are no physical clicks? To answer this question, companies like LeadsRx have designed comprehensive tracking systems that all funnel into a central database, from which marketing teams can extract meaning. By using universal tracking pixels, they can delineate which type of traffic is visiting your site- its source, time spent, and much more.
This information is vital to marketing teams, as it can fuel smarter assumptions in future campaigns. The great thing about Multi-Touch Attribution is that it can be applied to campaigns for new or existing customers. Leveraging a marketing team with experience in MTA and universal pixels is likely the easiest way to get started with this strategy.
Where can customer touch points be planted?
Depending on how your sales funnel is structured, various channels could benefit from a touchpoint (invitation for conversion). There are, of course, obvious placements such as social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.), but some of the less traditional ones that could yield promising conversion results include:
- Radio
- SMS messages
- TV
- Mobile (in-app)
- Offline (events, meetings, etc.)
From a marketing mindset perspective, these are all channels that could lead to conversions and should be fully explored. Harnessing the power of Multi-Touch Attribution means gathering data from all of these channels and making informed decisions on how to best proceed with future campaigns. Multiple platforms should be explored with intent for any new business that is desperately seeking a product market fit or customer discovery to get customers. For companies with current customers, expanding to new channels (and effectively tracking their ROIs through MTAs) is a valuable way to increase business.
Where to find new customers?
The age-old debate of how businesses can find new customers is, in my opinion, based on an underlying, incorrect assumption of what customers are. The best places to discover new customers is wherever the topic of your industry is being discussed. Digital environments make this increasingly simple by categorizing everything into topic keywords- the struggle for marketers is to evaluate if the virtual room they've entered has anyone alive or has been deserted for years (the downside of evergreen content strategy, I suppose).
As an overview, begin by evaluating your target audience's needs, exploring search results that relate to that specific need, and strategically placing yourself in the customers' stream of discovery through SEO, backlinks, tags, etc. The website, social media post, or paid advertisement you create to achieve this interception is one example of a touch point. As such, it should be evaluated for effectiveness, along with all other touch points in your campaign. To learn more about how Multi-Touch Attribution works, check out this Attribution Playbook from LeadsRx, which will help break down the process of setting up and evaluating all of your advertisement conversions.
Conclusion
Getting customers is an uphill battle in a vast arena, so it pays to distribute your efforts, but you can't expect quality results if you don't properly evaluate your efforts. Multi-Touch Attribution can help you do just that.
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Aleksey Weyman
Aleksey Weyman is a web designer, music artist and creator of Millennial Moderator.
