As marketers, we know it's important to keep pace with the ever-evolving digital landscape. With increasingly sophisticated technology and consumer behaviors changing daily, understanding which marketing strategies will give us an edge over the competition is more critical than ever. Armed with a proper understanding of marketing attribution and metrics, you can gain powerful insights into customer behavior that can help you make smarter decisions about where best to invest your resources—and generate maximum ROI.
But let's face it: there are so many myths out there when it comes to attribution models and performance metrics. We recently spoke with Julia Hartwig during a webinar, VP of Marketing at Capchase, to debunk the top three myths surrounding marketing attribution and metric reporting in 2023.
Missed this session? Read the summary below or access the recording here.
Myth #1 - You need more tech tools.
Nowadays, there's a digital marketing tool for everything. For analyzing traffic, increasing conversions, tracking heat maps, showing exit-intent popups, always-on chatbots, the list goes on and on. But having too many tech tools may actually be hurting your business. Each can be useful on its own, but when trying to track attribution properly, connecting conversions to specific sources can be a struggle.
Hartwig cautions against buying too many marketing tools and instead recommends focusing on getting the foundational elements of marketing operations in order. " There are a million tools, but if your foundations in your house aren't built right, the more you add, the worse your attribution gets," says Hartwig. "If you can't understand the simple stuff, adding more to it just makes it like data soup." At the very least, she says the following tools are essential:
- Marketing Automation (Hubspot or Marketo)
- CMS (Wordpress or Webflow)
- Customer Data Platform (Segment)
- Data Visualization Tool (Tableau)
Sometimes realizing less is more and ensuring the data can be easily pulled and analyzed will put you in a better position. Especially in this economy, it's not ideal to be highly dependent on a set of tools, as managing them can be a lot of work.
Myth #2 - ChatGPT can run my marketing team.
Hartwig says NO! She's skeptical about the effectiveness of AI in solving marketing problems. "You can't AI your way out of a problem yet. AI isn't there," Hartwig says. "AI is really good at doing an A to B line thing, living within a box. But you need to understand what you're putting into it if you're going to get anything out of it. I use Jasper.ai, but if you can't tell Jasper, I need you to write me exactly this post with this as the message line, and this is the kicker and the audience and everything I want. It's really just doing the writing and not doing the ideas."
The bottom line is for now, your marketing strategy needs to be driven strategically by humans. There is a time and place for AI in marketing. It can be a helpful tool for supporting creative development and helping marketers work on search, email, and social media marketing. However, marketers should be realistic about what AI tools like ChatGPT can do. We need to apply our own experience and knowledge when developing strategies, and we can't 100% rely on it for marketing copy. Although Google has loosened it's stance on AI-generated content, they have said that AI content is unlikely to feel written by people, without some degree of human review.
So, although, ChatGPT is the life of the AI party right now, marketers should tread carefully when using it.
Myth #3 - You need to spend money to make money.
False! Hartwig says you need to spend some money. "You can't run a company without spending money, but I would spend that money on people. Humans are worth more; they're more valuable than data."
She explains that if you run a streamlined marketing team, the things that actually matter and make a difference are conducting research and having a good feedback loop when talking to customers. In addition to having a solid attribution system – you know what ads to run and what platforms give you the most bang for your buck.
This allows you to be a conservative marketer until you're ready to make big bets. Sometimes big bets in marketing can pay off, and sometimes they don't, but that's the name of the game in marketing.
To sum it up, marketing attribution and metrics can be a valuable source of insights into customer behavior to inform marketing decisions. Still, it's important to know the common misconceptions around them. So keep in mind that:
- Having too many tech tools can hurt your marketing attribution.
- AI-driven marketing is not a one-size-fits-all solution.
- Spending money on people is more valuable than spending on digital marketing tools.
Instead, focus on having a solid foundation of tools and human expertise, conducting customer research, and having a good feedback loop with your customers to run a successful marketing strategy.
To listen to the entire conversation with Julia watch the on-demand webinar here.
{{post-cta="/components"}}
